Marian Penner Bancroft | Photographer and Professor

Marian Penner Bancroft attended Emily Carr or the Vancouver School of Art as it was known back then, in the 70’s. For the past 30 years, she’s maintained a thriving art practice in Vancouver. And while photography has been her primary medium, she has also incorporated drawing, text, sound, sculpture and video into work that evocatively engages with the intersection of photography, social history and personal memory.

Her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally and is held in collections of the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography at the National Gallery of Canada, the Canada Council Art Bank and private collections around the world.

Along with her art practice, family life, (her daughter recently graduated from Emily Carr), and her role as a member of the Board of Directors at Artspeak Gallery, Marian has also been teaching in the Photography Department at Emily Carr since 1981 and has taught at Simon Fraser University, and the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.

2012 has proven to be a banner year for Bancroft. Along with a solo exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery, she has been awarded the prestigious 2012 Audain Prize for Visual Arts for lifetime achievement. The $30,000 prize is issued annually by the Audain Foundation and is awarded to senior artists juried by their peers to recognize their contribution to the arts community in British Columbia.

Her show at the Vancouver Art Gallery, SPIRITLANDS: t/HERE: Marian Penner Bancroft Selected Photo Works 1975-2000 features work ranging from For Dennis and Susan: Running Arms to a Civil War (1977), a powerful body of early photographs depicting the impact of leukemia on Penner Bancroft’s sister and brother in-law, to works from the 1980s and 90s that examine the representation of the family and the cultural frameworks through which landscape is perceived. The exhibition runs through September 30, 2012.

Bancroft’s most recent project involves landscapes in Europe associated with the work of composers Franz Schubert, Edward Elgar, Benjamin Britten and Johannes Brahms. Marian is represented by Republic Gallery, Vancouver, Canada.