Daina Augaitis


Daina Augaitis is a Canadian curator whose work focuses on contemporary art. From 1996-2017, she was the chief curator and associate director of the Vancouver Art Gallery in British Columbia, Canada.

Work

Augaitis has created exhibitions showcasing the work of Canadian artists including Rebecca Belmore, Douglas Coupland, Stan Douglas, Brian Jungen, Ian Wallace and Paul Wong and international artists Antoni Muntadas, Song Dong and Yang Fudong. In 2014, her exhibition Douglas Coupland: everywhere is anywhere is anything is everything presented the first retrospective of Coupland's visual art. She was awarded the Hnatyshyn Foundation Visual Arts Award in 2014 for curatorial excellence in contemporary art, with that exhibition garnering special mention. Augaitis' 2012 retrospective Muntadas: Entre/Between was exhibited at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, the Gulbenkian Museum, and Jeu de Paume. Augaitis has been a proponent of First Nations art at the Vancouver Art Gallery, organizing exhibitions of both contemporary and historic First Nations art, including Raven Travelling: two centuries of Haida art and Edenshaw . Her catalogues and essays on these exhibitions have made significant contributions to the scholarship on Canadian indigenous art. During her more than 30-year career, Augaitis has held curatorial positions at the Banff Centre for the Arts, the Walter Phillips Gallery, Western Front, Convertible Showroom, and Franklin Furnace.

Awards