Megan Kyak-Monteith

Megan Kyak-Monteith (b. 1997, Mittimatalik/Pond Inlet) is an emerging artist residing in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She graduated from NSCAD University in 2019 with a BFA in Interdisciplinary Studies, specializing in drawing and painting. She works as a freelance illustrator for children’s book and magazines articles and continues to paint from her home in Halifax. Her work has appeared in Inuit Art Quarterly and Inuktitut Magazine, and a series of children’s books, The Nunavummi Reading Series.

Kyak-Monteith’s work was installed at Concordia University’s FOFA Gallery as a part of GLAM Collective’s Memory Keepers I. She also was an assistant curator for Memory Keepers II at Art in the Open in Charlottetown, PEI in 2019 and participated in Memory Keepers III. Her involvement with Inuit Futures brought her to Italy for the Venice Biennale in May 2019 and to Montreal to attend the 21st Inuit Studies Conference in October 2019.

“Cataloguing personal histories as representations of distant memories is important in my work, especially focusing on how they form and re-form as they are recalled. Cultural observations in my paintings come from my childhood memories growing up in Nunavut and Nova Scotia. These depictions of memories from childhood are saturated with exaggerations of scale and atmosphere, and much like with any memory, they are never exactly accurate or what is recalled.”