Byron Peters
B.F.A. (U.B.C.), M.F.A. (C.C.A.)
Byron Peters is an artist and writer who works with film, networked technologies, sculpture, text, drawing, and sound installation. As an educator, he foregrounds student creativity, the radical imagination, cultural memory, interconnectedness, and the material/social conditions of communities towards ongoing projects of decolonization.
Often through long-term collaborations, his artistic work and research engages with collective labour practices, digitality and racial capitalism, and histories of science and mathematics. Exhibition venues include The Darling Foundry, Montreal; Para Site, Hong Kong; ICA Miami; The White Building, London; The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, New York; The Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, and more locally at Centre A, VIVO, The New Media Gallery, Access, and Artspeak. He has given talks at institutions such as The New School, New York; The Centre for the Study of Contemporary Art at UCL; The Victoria and Albert Museum; and The London School of Economics. His films have screened at Images Festival, True/False, DOXA, International Film Festival Rotterdam, and others. Byron is a recipient of a Giverny Fellowship from the Terra Foundation for American Art and has written for Fillip, SFMoMA Open Space, and others.
As a mentor, activist, and facilitator of workshops and filmmaking intensives, Byron has worked in association with The Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity Coalition, The SFU School for Contemporary Arts, Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Cinelab, Out on Screen & The Vancouver Queer Film Festival, PLEA Community Services, The Surrey School District, and The Cinematheque. Since 2018, Byron collaborated with the late activist and community television producer Sid Chow Tan towards archive-based films that weave together questions of racial justice, mathematics, mythologies, and histories of Chinatown and the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver.
He received an MFA from California College of the Arts, and also teaches in the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at The University of British Columbia.