Lori Beavis is the Executive Director of Centre d’art Daphne,Tiohtià:ke’s first Indigenous artist-run centre. She is also an independent curator, art educator and art historian living and working in Tiohtià:ke/ Montreal. Identifying as Michi Saagiig (Mississauga) Anishinaabe and Irish-Welsh settler. Beavis is a citizen of Hiawatha First Nation at Rice Lake, Ontario. Her curatorial work, art practice and research, articulates narrative and memory in the context of family and cultural history, and reflects on cultural identity, art education and self-representation. She has curated solo exhibitions with artists Shelley Niro (2015, 2016, 2019); Jobena Petonoquot (2018, 2019, 2021,2022), and Barry Ace (2019). In 2023, her curated exhibition, Initawà: to hear/understand her in a certain way, with artists Hannah Claus, Eruoma Awashish, Jobena Petonoquot and Kaia’tanó:ron Dumoulin Bush will be exhibited at various Maison de culture in Tiohtià:ke from June 2022 to August 2023.
Since 2016 Beavis has been working with her home community, Hiawatha First Nation on a project investigating the quilled, birch bark makaks created by women at Rice Lake village and gifted to the Prince of Wales in 1860. In 2023 a long-term loan exhibition of the ancestral items co-curated by Beavis and Dr. Laura Peers will take place at the Peterborough Museum & Archives, Nogojiwanong/ Peterborough. Beavis serves on the Executive of the Indigenous Curatorial Collective/ Collectif des Commissaires Autochtones (ICCA) Board of Directors.