(They/Them, Anishinaabe – Nipissing First Nation, settler ancestry – canadian & irish) Olivia Shortt is a noisemaker, video artist, curator, and troublemaker whose work is inspired by their love of camp, drag, and gender expression and its relation to Indigeneity. 

Highlights include Shortt’s world premiere performance (Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC) of ‘For Olivia Shortt’ by Pulitzer Prize composer Raven Chacon wrote for Shortt as part of Chacon’s series ‘For Zitkala-Ša’ (2022 Whitney Biennial); Shortt’s film debut in Atom Egoyan’s 2019 film ‘Guest of Honour’; and recording an album two kilometres underground in the SnoLAB (Sudbury, Canada). 

Works created over the last two years include commissions for Long Beach Opera (California), the JACK Quartet (NYC), Blueridge Chamber Festival (Vancouver), Din of Shadows (Toronto) as well as numerous video art pieces and a site-specific surrealist opera about museum repatriation, The Museum of the Lost and Found: gaakaazootaadiwag.

Shortt was one of the 2020 Buddies in Bad Times’ Emerging Queer Artists & is featured in the 2020 Winter edition of Musicworks Magazine. Shortt’s favourite review of themselves came from a four-year-old child who said, “I don’t know why I like it,” regarding a performance Shortt did of Raven Chacon’s music in July 2022.