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Vanessa Dion Fletcher (@vdionf) is a Potawatomi and Lenape Two-Spirit artist who looks to her ancestry to inspire her practice. Vanessa has a broad practice incorporating performance, video and textiles. She often employs porcupine quills, Wampum belts and menstrual blood to reveal the complexities of what defines a body physically and culturally. In particular her work confronts the ways that Indigeneity, the queer and gendered body, and disability are rendered expendable. Quills, she states, are evocative of Land, where porcupine becomes teacher and/or co-learner. As a practice of honoring Land, quill work, then is about reciprocity and relations between human and more-than humans where language is sentient and felt, not merely coded and transcribed.

Living as a person with a learning disability, Dion Fletcher reflects on her Indigenous feminist body with a neurodiverse mind to create art using composite media. She looks for knowledge embedded in materials and techniques to offer a reprieve from colonialism and ableism of the English language. Her interest in communication comes from her lack of access to her Indigenous languages (Potawatomi and Lenape) and as a person living with a learning disability caused by issues with short-term memory. Honouring that the body and mind are not separate, she addresses the socio-political representations and implications of menstruation, reproduction and the body.

She graduated from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2016 with an MFA in performance and York University in 2009 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts. She has exhibited across Canada and the US, at Art Mur Montreal, Eastern Edge Gallery Newfoundland, The Queer Arts Festival Vancouver, Satellite Art show Miami. Her work is in the Indigenous Art Centre, Joan Flasch Artist Book collection, Vtape, Seneca College, and the Archives of American Art. Vanessa is a 2020-2021 Jackman Humanities Institute fellow at the University of Toronto.