(They/He/She - only if used in rotation, otherwise ‘They’// Anishinaabe, Nipissing First Nation // ireland + canada) Olivia Shortt is a weirdo, noisemaker, video artist, wannabe fashion icon, curator, and troublemaker. Shortt's work is inspired by their love of camp, drag, and gender expression and its relation to Indigeneity. Shortt was featured in the 2020 Winter edition of Musicworks Magazine.

Highlights include Shortt’s world premiere performance (Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC) of ‘For Olivia Shortt’ Pulitzer Prize Composer Raven Chacon wrote for Shortt (as part of Chacon’s series ‘For Zitkala-Ša’ as featured at The 2022 Whitney Biennial); their Lincoln Center (NYC) debut playing percussion in 2018 with the International Contemporary Ensemble (Shortt is NOT a percussionist FYI); their film debut in Atom Egoyan’s 2019 film ‘Guest of Honour’; and recording an album of Robert Lemay’s music two kilometres underground in the SnoLAB, a Neutrino laboratory in Sudbury, Canada.

Recent projects and works created over the last two years include commissions from the Blueridge Chamber Festival (Vancouver), Long Beach Opera (California), the JACK Quartet (NYC), and Din of Shadows (Toronto). Shortt is working on a new site-specific opera about museum repatriation/rematriation, ‘The Museum of the Lost and Found: gaakaazootaadiwag’.

Shortt was a finalist for the 2021 Toronto Arts Foundation Emerging Artist Award, winner of NUMUS’ 2019/2020 Emerging Curators Competition and was named and awarded one of the 2020 Buddies in Bad Times Emerging Queer Awards. They were also a 2020 cohort member of Why Not Theatre’s ThisGEN Fellowship in Sound Design, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre’s 2020 Emerging Creators Unit, Musical Stage Co.’s 2021 RBC Apprentice Program in Sound Design and Generator’s 2021 Artist-Producer Training Program. Shortt studied at the University of Toronto and Dartmouth College (USA).

In 2023-24 they will be the Artist-in-Residence at Carleton University’s Music Department and the University of Toronto Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, as well as the Indigenous Artist-in-Residence at Hamilton Arts Inc. Their favourite song is ‘House of the Rising Sun’, they love glitter, drinking coffee and hanging out with their cat Violet. www.olivia.shortt.com