Sandra Semchuk

In 2013, Sandra Semchuk worked with performance artist Skeena Reece on a piece titled Touch Me for the exhibition Witnesses: Art and Canada’s Indian Residential Schools. During this performance, Reece and Semchuk struggle with themes of forgiveness and mother-daughter relationships as Reece bathes Semchuk.

Sandra was awarded a grant from 2008-2015 from the Canada First World War Internment Fund to complete her book on Ukrainians in Canada, The Stories Were Not Told: Stories and Photographs from Canada's First Internment Camps, 1914-1920.

James Nicholas & Sandra Semchuk were married until James died suddenly and unexpectedly in 2007. James was a Cree artist from Nelson House, Manitoba. He suffered extensively in residential schools as a child. Their collaborative work focused on the multiplicity of relationships to land, cultural geography, settler and indigenous relationships and memory.

In 1998, Presentation House, Vancouver, B.C. programmed "How Far Back is Home ..." a 25-year retrospective of Semchuk's career highlighting her relationship to identity, morality and land.

Semchuk's early photographic works have been said to belong to a “broad general category of documentary”. Her photographic portrait works from this era, more specifically her 1982 series of eighty-seven photographs entitled Excerpts from a Diary, address themes of death and family whilst presenting a narrative of “self-examination and transformation” through her use of self-portraits and images containing domestic and prairie backgrounds.

Sandra Semchuk (born 1948) is a Canadian photographic artist.