Andrea von Wichert

Andrea von Wichert is a Treaty One performer/writer/visual artist. A self-identified clown who explores abjection as identity, she often muses in her work on the failure to meet culturally defined expectations on a consistent and chronic basis. As a person with an invisible disability, she is grateful for the support of Arts AccessAbility Network Manitoba and SICK+TWISTED Theatre Co.

An accomplished painter and drawer, she has recently turned her hand to printmaking, which forms the core of a new body of two-dimensional work numbering in the hundreds, some of which was shown at Martha Street Studio (2017) as part of the “Making Our Mark” print residency sponsored by AANM and the Manitoba Printmakers Association. Her performance TRIGGER WARNING: Satan and an accompanying video installation was presented at Video Pool New Media Arts Centre (2020) and the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba(2022) as part of CRIPTYCH, a group exhibition of participants in Video Pool’s Diversity through Access to technology and Art Residency. She has worked as a scenic artist, painter, and props builder for 30 years, and is currently the Head Scenic Artist at Manitoba Theatre for Young People. 

Known as a fearless performer and thought-provoking writer and orator, she has performed spoken word internationally and has collaborated with orchestral musicians and composers, witchdoctors and various eccentric weirdoes. She has produced independent internationally screened short films and live theatre. Her creative non-fiction has been published in Prairie Fire Magazine, and in anthologies designed to rile the patriarchy. She has spent time studying towards a Master of Arts at the department of English, Film and Theatre at the University of Manitoba. In 2021 she received a BankAbility Award from Cahoots Theatre Company, recognising excellence among disabled theatre practitioners in Canada. Her latest performance work TRIGGER WARNING: Cassandra premiered in fall 2021 as part of SICK+TWISTED Theatre Company’s regular season and is the fourth installment of the TRIGGER WARNING series of performance lectures (also including Sex, Contagion, and Satan) examining the relationship between individual bio-destiny and the cultural constructs of mental illness.

She has worked as a creative coach with Creative Manitoba’s online mentorship program, as dramaturge supporting Angela Chalmer’s development of her augmented reality theatrical work, You Are Her(e) as part of Young Lungs Dance Exchange’s Research Series Artists-in-Residency program and directed a workshop reading of Adam Schwartz’s You Probably Wouldn’t Get it Anyway. 

Andrea is grateful to Victor Enns for asking her to be part of LookShow and to Murray Toews for all his support in this project.