Paul Couillard

Who is Paul Couillard?

Paul Couillard is a Canadian performance artist and new media artist, writer and curator.

Couillard was born August 1, 1961 in Chatham, New Brunswick. In the 1980s, he worked as a civil servant in Ottawa before seeing a performance of Gaia, Mon Amour by Los Angeles-based artist Rachel Rosenthal, which inspired him to quit his government job and begin making art. He worked as an organizer and creator in the Canadian artist-run centre network, producing many text-based and theatrical performances before moving to Toronto in 1989.

A performance tour in Japan in 1991 influenced him to abandon spoken narrative in favour of experiential and action-based works. In 1993 he and four other Toronto artists formed the Fado collective, which eventually became the artist-run centre Fado Performance Inc., incorporated in 2001. Couillard was the Performance Art Curator of Fado from its inception until 2007, producing a number of notable international performance art series based on various formal thematics, including "Time Time Time", "Public Spaces/Private Places" and "IDea". He is also a founding member of the 7a*11d collective, which presents a biannual international performance art festival.