I study art as a political vector in modern institutions, employing qualitative methods to: analyze art; engage with artists and culture workers; explore the circulation of art through exhibitions, institutions, and platforms; and assess how the sector is shaped by organizations.

Cultural Diplomacy 
My work on cultural diplomacy aims to understand how visual art is used by states and other actors to advance relationships in the international arena, often supporting foreign policy objectives. In my monograph Trading on Art: Cultural Diplomacy and Free Trade in North America, I argue that visual art was vital to naturalizing the concept of North American economic integration following the free trade deals implemented near the end of the twentieth century.

My research also highlights museums as significant actors in cultural diplomacy, revealing that these institutions have long histories of global engagement that are often overshadowed by recent developments such as the rise of satellite museums and global museum brands. Contributions include a special issue of the Journal of Curatorial Studies on “Curating Cultural Diplomacy,” the open access report The Global Engagement of Museums in Canada, an article on cultural exchanges between Canada and Brazil, and the edited collection Museum Diplomacy: How Cultural Institutions Shape Global Engagement.

Building off of my work on museums, I have also explored other substate actors in cultural diplomacy, most recently in an article assessing Québec’s mobilization of culture through a comparative analysis of federal and provincial cultural policy.

I seek to connect my work to policymakers and in 2017 I provided testimony to the Standing Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade. In my remarks, I argued for the importance of non-state actors in cultural diplomacy and outlined the complex terrain the committee needed to consider, including overlapping actors, institutions, and policies.

Practitioner Media Lab
My research on cultural diplomacy is based at the Practitioner Media Lab (PML), which I lead in the Faculty of Information & Media Studies. Established in 2021, the PML is funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation’s John R. Evans Leaders Fund and the Ontario Research Fund. The lab provides a platform for co-produced research on cultural diplomacy with cultural sector practitioners, including artists, curators, arts administrators, policymakers, and community partners. To date, the lab has undertaken projects on museum diplomacy and migration museums. The lab also hosts events on cultural diplomacy, including: Advocating for Creativity (2023), La montaña: Zapatistas’ diplomacies (2024), and Queer Diplomacies (2025). 

North American Cultural Diplomacy Initiative
A great deal of my work is undertaken with the North American Cultural Diplomacy Initiative (NACDI), a research network I co-founded in 2017. This is a multi-disciplinary partnership of academics, policymakers and practitioners in the field of cultural diplomacy from North America and beyond. Our objective is to advance research that provides greater understanding of how cultural diplomacy functions to connect North America globally; not merely as part of the “soft power” tool-kit of nation states, but as a multi-directional and potentially activist practice that encompasses a broad range of non-state actors.

Contemporary Art
My work on contemporary art includes research-creation, curatorial projects and scholarly outputs. I have written about the work of Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge, General Idea, as well as on topics including video art and free trade, and decolonial aesthetics.

Cultural Organizations
I have an ongoing major project examining the Independent Artists’ Union, a tenacious group of Ontario artists who set out in the 1980s to organize the province’s artists into a new collective agency. This work has led to research-creation outputs including Persistent Odds (2024), a project for the exhibition Educating Our Desire, as well as the manuscript-in-progress Making Art Work: The Independent Artists’ Union and the Demand for a Living Wage (co-authored with Greig de Peuter). I have also undertaken research on UNESCO, exploring how the organization’s work to coordinate museum activities internationally shaped Canadian cultural policies and institutions.