ABSTRACT
Shelley Niro’s cinematic work, an audiovisual conduit into which she melds her multimedia interests in all forms of creative expression-from dance and music to painting, photography, and artisan craftsmanship-spans over twenty years. It is celebrated and has received numerous prestigious art awards, not only for its innovative expression but for its statements on the complex interweave of the personal and political in contemporary Indigenous experiences.1 As Lawrence Abbott writes in his well-cited “Interviews with Loretta Todd, Shelley Niro and Patricia Deadman” (1998), “the interplay of the personal and the political, the mixing of the minutiae of daily life with the broader forces that impact that life is one of the underlying structures of Niro’s work” (349). Niro’s work is strongly inspired by a need to personally talk back and through political marginalization and traumahistorical and contemporary.
