Magdalena Olszanowski

Born in the 80s in communist Warsaw, Poland. Lived on a dead end street with a morgue across her flat. Taken to Canada as a child to escape from threat.

She is currently pursuing a SSHRC-funded PhD in Communication Studies at Concordia University, under the supervision of Kim Sawchuk at the Mobile Media Lab, and is a research affiliate at the Topological Media Lab. She obtained her BA honours summa cum laude from the University of Toronto and an MA in Communication and Culture from York University with a database documentary about women electronic music artists, microfemininewarfare. She has studied at the University of Amsterdam on full scholarship. A certificate in Creative Writing from the University of Toronto school of Continuing Education also hangs on her mom’s wall.

Broadly speaking, she thinks, writes and creates work on gender, memory, self-imaging, intimacy, emerging technologies, electronic music and hip-hop, expanded cinema & mobile media through a feminist queer theory lens. She has performed and exhibited in the UK, New York, Toronto and Montreal. A selection of her written work can be found in n+1, wi: journal of mobile media, dancecult: journal of electronic dance music, and Visual Communication Quarterly. Her dissertation is focused on self-imagining practices of women online in the 1990s.

By the by, she identifies as an arts-based researcher with lax hygiene and no social graces.