Monique Tschofen is Associate Professor of English at Toronto Metropolitan University, and the Joint York-Toronto Metropolitan Graduate Program in Communications and Culture, a scholar of new media, visual culture, Canadian studies, and globalization, and a digital storyteller, working with poetry, sound art, and experimental film. Her publications include work on critical making and feminist research creation.
More recently, she was a founding member of the feminist Decameron Collective, a group of nine interdisciplinary scholar-creators from across Canada, whose interdisciplinary, public-facing projects emerge from a practice of collaborative research co-creation anchored in care ethics. Investigations of past and present moments experiment with creative digital humanities and research creation methodologies. With the members of the Collective, Monique has produced and exhibited two digital storyworlds and co-created a body of over twenty sound and video works, chapbooks and artbooks, as well as hosted workshops, conference presentations, and written manifestos and scholarly papers about the implications of this collaborative, living archive. This work has been acknowledged internationally, with Honorable Mention for the Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature (Decameron 2.0, 2022), the Digital Humanities Award (Memory Eternal, 2023), and shortlisted for the Wonderbox Digital Opening Up - New Media Writing Prize (Memory Eternal, 2023). The Collective's capstone exhibition with new work in Augmented Reality using handmade artbooks and lightboxes is called Metamorphoses: Love Letters to Futures (2025).
Monique's works with Jolene Armstrong include an installation Fire and Water (2025), and an interactive documentary called Solastalgia (2025). Their new works will cross sculptural forms with field sound recording.
Monique's solo digital projects have also been exhibited internationally. Careless Water (2024) was selected for juried exhibition at ICIDS (International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling) in Baranquilla, Colombia. In There Behind the Door (2024) was selected for juried exhibition at the Electronic Literature Organization's Media Arts Festival in Florida. Her experimental interactive work Happenings: A Tragico-Lyrical Philosophical Essay was shortlisted for both the Chris Meade Memorial Main Prize and the Social Good Prize in the 2024 New Media Writing Prize (UK), and was selected runner up for the Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature (2025).
In 2024-25, she was a Visiting Fellow at Massey College, University of Toronto, and began creating a body of works that move her even more explicitly into feminist and environmental spaces. Aquaphoria (Before the Waters Rise), awarded best environmental documentary of the Montreal Women Film Festival 2025, was also a nominee for the LA Independent Women Film Awards, a semi-finalist for the Calgary Indie Film Awards (2025), received Honorable Mention in the Experimental Forum (Los Angeles) (2025), and was an official selection of the Toronto Short Film Festival, the Liberty Festival (Athens), the Sofia International Film Festival (Bulgaria), and the EcoCINE International Environmental and Human Rights Film Festival (Brasil).
News: Publication in Imaginations: A Cross-Cultural Journal of Image Studies
Exhibition: Our VR world Memory Eternal on exhibition at the RUBIX 10th Anniversary www.torontomu.ca/the-catalyst/events/rubix-10/
Shortlist - Memory Eternal for International Literary Prize
Contact: monique (dot) tschofen (at) torontomu (dot) ca
News: Aquaphoria (before the waters rise) wins Best Environmental Film at Montreal Women Film Festival
News: Aquaphoria (before the waters rise)
Screening at Toronto Short Film Festival March 13, 2025