Ilene Sova

Ilene Sova is an artist educator who identifies as a mixed race, with a white settler and Afro-Caribbean ancestry. She also is an artist who lives with a disability. As such, she passionately identifies with the tenets of intersectional feminism and has dedicated her career to art and activism. Ilene Sova founded the Feminist Art Conference and Blank Canvases, an in-school creative arts programme for elementary school students. Sova is an Associate Professor in Contemporary Drawing and Painting in the Faculty of Art at OCADU University.
She holds an honours BFA from the University of Ottawa in Painting and an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Windsor. With extensive solo and group exhibitions in Canada and abroad, Sova’s work has most notably been shown at the Museum of Canadian Contemporary Art, the Department of Canadian Heritage, and Mutuo Centro de Arte in Barcelona. Her exhibit, Missing Women Project, garnered much attention around issues of violence against women in our local communities. Sova’s work has been featured on television, the internet, and in print media with features in Metro, Toronto Star, CBC Radio, CTV Canada AM and The Toronto Standard. Sova was invited by two Members of Parliament to bring her work to Ottawa for a national Women’s Forum on Feminism and the state of women’s rights. Sova’s work was featured in the Journal of Psychology and Counselling, the Nigerian Arts Journal, Tabula and the Italian feminist journal Woman’O’Clock. A passionate public speaker, Sova was chosen to speak at the first TEDxWomen event in Toronto, where she presented a critical analysis of the Missing Women Project and State University New York Geneseo where she gave an all University Lecture on Art and Social Change. Sova was also invited to deliver the Arthur C. Danto Memorial Keynote Lecture at the 76th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics (ASA).