Dr. Joana Joachim is an Assistant professor of Black Studies in Art History and Social Justice at Concordia University. Her research and teaching interests include Black feminist art histories, Black Canadian and diasporic art histories, critical museologies, Black Canadian studies, and Canadian slavery studies. Her ongoing SSHRC-funded project, Stillness as Black Creative Practice considers how stillness creates the opportunity for sustainable Black creative practices in a Canadian context which intermittently enforces untenable cycles of hyperproduction. Her manuscript, There/Then, Here/Now (working title), traces Black women’s networks of feeling across time and space via the visual culture of self-preservation and self-care in sites of French colonial domination. She earned her PhD in the department of Art History and Communication Studies and at the Institute for Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at McGill University working under the supervision of Dr. Charmaine A. Nelson. Dr. Joachim obtained her Master’s degree in Museology from Université de Montréal and her BFA cum laude from University of Ottawa. In 2025 she was appointed as Deputy-Director of the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art at Concordia University.

Dr. Joachim’s scholarship has appeared in books, journals and magazines including the Routledge Companion to African Diaspora Art; History, art and Blackness in Canada; RACAR; Canadian Journal of History; and C Magazine.*

*For more about Dr. Joachim’s scholarship, please view the “Writing“, “Curating“and “Speaking” pages.

Photo credit: Cassandra Cacheiro, 2020.