Michaele Jordana

Who is Michaele Jordana?

Michaele Jordana, also known as Michaele Berman, is a Canadian pioneer in art and music.

Starting her career in the 1970s as a fine artist and super realist painter, her life-size airbrush paintings of slaughtered whales in Northern Canada are featured in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada and Art Bank. Her first show "Oceans of Blood" was exhibited at the Isaac's Gallery in Toronto. By depicting the giant creatures with innocence and beauty, and presenting the slaughter in a way that was at once shocking but also stylized and aesthetically compelling, she enticed audiences to look and to grapple with the issue of animal rights amidst the controversy of the seal hunts.

After living in the arctic to be near the mythical creatures she depicted in the paintings, Berman created the performance art piece "The Rites of Nuliajuk," which marked the beginning of her crossover from fine artist to musician. Collaborating with her partner Douglas Pringle and their production company Peak Productions, Berman started composing music and creating the on-stage persona of Michaele Jordana. With her band, The Poles, Jordana became a beacon in the New Wave movement, and blazed a trail for female musicians in Canada.