Research areas
Dayna McLeod is a queer, middle-aging performance-based media artist and scholar. She is a Research Fellow on Ways of Undoing: Craft, Collaboration and Videographic Practice, a three-year project funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council that explores how new practices can unsettle hierarchical structures in videographic scholarship.
Dayna uses autoethnographic methods in her practice to work on and with representation that is based and centered on her lived experience. Her performance-based work often uses humour and capitalizes on exploiting the body’s social and material conditions using performance, duration, video, and installation practices. Her intersectional artistic research-creation interests are in sexual identity, gender, feminism, middle-aging, and media representations of sexuality, queer identity, and how bodies marked female are treated by mainstream culture as public property.
Dayna is part of a collaborative videographic project Ways of Doing, which fosters an ethical praxis of audiovisual research with Lucy Fife Donaldson (University of St. Andrews), Colleen Laird (University of British Columbia), and Alison Peirse (University of Leeds). Her video essays have been published in [in] Transition, ASAP/Review, Teknokultura: Journal of Digital Culture and Social Movements, and Intermédialités: History and Theory of the Arts, Literature and Technologies, and her written scholarship has been published in The Journal of Autoethnography, Theatre Research in Canada, Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, Journal of Aging Studies, Canadian Theatre Review, and Ciel Variable. Her video and performance work have been presented at the Impakt Festival in Utrecht Netherlands, the Mardi Gras Festival in Darlinghurst Australia, MIX Brasil Festival Of Sexual Diversity in São Paulo Brazil, the Modern Art Museum in Warsaw Poland, Le Centre d’art contemporain in Paris, the Tang Teaching Museum in Saratoga Springs, the PHI Centre, OFFTA, and Rendez-vous du cinéma québécois in Montreal, the Summerworks Theatre Festival in Toronto, and Performatorium, Queer City Cinema’s performance festival in Regina.
Selected publications
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Open access
Behaving badly in the archive: a videographic discussion
Donaldson, L. F., Laird, C., McLeod, D., Paranyuk, V. & Pope, D., 26 Mar 2026, (E-pub ahead of print) In: Teknokultura. Online preview, p. 1-11 11 p.Research output: Contribution to journal › Comment/debate › peer-review
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Desert Hearts: an aging queer trilogy
McLeod, D., 25 Sept 2024, In: [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies. 11, 3, 16625.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
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Open access
Thelma & Louise: Rape culture, mudflaps and vaginal horizons
McLeod, D., 31 Jan 2024, In: Teknokultura. 21, 1, p. 99-101 3 p.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
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Potbelly
McLeod, D., 16 Dec 2024, In: ASAP Review .Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
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Open access
Watch me sleep: self-surveillance and aging queer performance anxiety
McLeod, D., 28 Sept 2023, In: Intermédialités. 41, p. 1-8 8 p.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review