Lara Kramer is a performer, choreographer and multidisciplinary artist of mixed Anishinaabe, Oji-Cree and settler heritage based in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. Her choreographic work, research and fieldwork over the last fourteen years have been grounded in intergenerational relations, intergenerational knowledge, and the impacts of the Indian Residential Schools of Canada. Her creations in the form of dance, performance and installation have been presented across Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Martinique, Norway, the US and the UK. Her practice includes sound, video, and visual art. Lara’s work expands on her relational practice to express and represent embodied experiences like memory, loss, and reclamation. Her works challenge the Canadian narrative of the colonial project to reconcile and use storytelling as a form of resistance. She has received multiple awards, acknowledgments, and prizes for her work both as an emerging and established artist. Lara was appointed a Human Rights Advocate through the Holocaust Memorial Centre of Montreal in 2012, following the national tour of her work Fragments, a performance piece informed by her mother’s stories and lived experience as a survivor of the Indian Residential Schools of Canada.
In 2018 Lara was presented with the prestigious Ashley Fellowship with Trent University, as well as received the Jacqueline-Lemieux Prize for recognition of artistic excellence and distinguished career achievement in dance. She has collaborated closely with Peter James and sound artist Jassem Hindi on her work Windigo, 2018 exploring the destruction and deconstruction of sculpture/objects, body and land relations, and memory as the song. In 2019, the installation and performance piece This Time Will be Different, created with Emilie Monnet and co-produced by Festival TransAmeriques denounced the status quo of the Canadian government’s discourse regarding Indigenous relations and criticized the “national reconciliation industry“
Lara Kramer is a Center de Création O Vertigo – CCOV Associate Artist since 2021.
07.03.2023
