Dr. Norman Vorano is a scholar and curator who publishes widely in the area of historical and contemporary North American Indigenous arts. Currently, he is the Queen’s National Scholar in Indigenous Art and Visual Culture with a cross-appointment to the Department of Art History and Art Conservation, and the Agnes Etherington Art Centre (AEAC) at Queen’s University. From 2005 to 2014, he was the Curator of Contemporary Inuit Art at the Canadian Museum of History, formerly the Canadian Museum of Civilization. He received his PhD from the University of Rochester and his MA and BFA from York University.

Vorano is particularly interested in questions around Indigenous modernism(s), traditional knowledge embodied in art and material culture, and the poetics and politics of museums and exhibitions. His exhibition Picturing Arctic Modernity: North Baffin Drawings From 1964, which opened at the AEAC in early 2017, is traveling on a cross-Canada tour. His 2011 catalogue and international traveling exhibition, Inuit Prints, Japanese Inspiration: Early Printmaking in the Canadian Arctic traced the global influences of mid-twentieth century printmaking in Cape Dorset. Since 2011, Vorano has been a research partner in a comparative research and publication initiative, Multiple Modernisms: Twentieth Century Artistic Modernisms in Global Perspective, which explores Indigenous modernisms from around the globe. Most recently, he is the recipient of a 2017 Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Fellowship to pursue a collaborative initiative linking Museum collections and Inuit communities in the Arctic.