Vanessa Richards is a Vancouver-based transdisciplinary artist, writer, and facilitator whose practice explores the relationship between creativity, community, and social transformation. Working across live art, performance, writing, music, and civic collaboration, she creates participatory experiences that invite new ways of imagining collective life.
Her live art has been presented at Tate Modern, ICA London, ICA Scotland, and VIVO Media Arts Centre. Screen appearances include Bates Motel, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, and Riverdale. Before the pandemic, she spent eleven years directing a community choir in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, where singing became a practice of belonging, care, and civic imagination.
Richards holds an MPhil in Creative Writing from Cardiff University. Her writing has been anthologized in Bluesprint: Black British Columbian Literature and Orature (Arsenal Pulp Press), edited by Wayde Compton; IC3: The Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain (Penguin); The Fire People: A Collection of British Black and Asian Poetry (Canongate); and Step into a World: A Global Anthology of the New Black Literature (John Wiley & Sons). Her ideas have also been featured in Critical Hope: How to Grapple with Complexity, Lead with Purpose, and Cultivate Transformative Social Change (Routledge) by Kari Grain and A Good War: Mobilizing Canada for the Climate Emergency (ECW Press) by Seth Klein.