Multi disciplinary Artist & Seeker of Restorative Truths
Victoria Anne
Jean-François
(b. 1994, Tiohtià:ke)
is a Montreal-based multidisciplinary artist working across song, storytelling, visual creation, archiving, and community-engaged practice.
Her work emerges from the tension and harmony between the worlds that shaped her: a Haitian girl raised in rhythm, memory, and collective care,
and a Western-Canadian girl who learned independence, reinvention, and the slow, necessary work
of returning to herself.
Her artistic path shifted through her research work with the Black Community Resource Centre on Where They Stood, a project that uncovered Black histories largely absent from public record. This experience revealed the distance she had lived from ancestral knowledge and ignited
a personal and collective excavation that continues
to guide her practice.
Grounded in embodiment, intimacy, and relational ways of knowing, her practice flows through photography, writing, sound, performance, and archiving. She is drawn to softness as strength, to the body as archive, and to spaces shaped by care, devotion, and chosen kinship. Her work often centers those who live at the edges of dominant narratives, honoring vulnerability, desire, and survival as forms of knowledge.
Victoria has collaborated on visual projects such as Décentrer la marge and Cultiver l’égalité with INRS, performed Porche at the Fringe Festival and documented the cultural labour of organizations including StudioZX, Black Girl Sessions, Ballroom 4 Community, and Wild Pride. Her music and storytelling have been shared across Montreal and Ontario, creating spaces for reflection, recognition,
and shared breath.
Victoria approaches art as both prayer and practice — a ritual of reclamation and presence.
Currently pursuing a degree in Art Education with an interest in the therapeutic capacity of Art, she continues to deepen her understanding of art as a teaching tool for healing, intimacy,
and transformation.
For her, the present
is a threshold, where past and future meet, and where liberation
is practiced gently, in the body.
HOW MY WORK
IS INFORMED
My identity is the foundation of everything I create. I am a Haitian femme born in Montreal raised in calgary, in a city where I didn’t see
my culture present. Those years built longing and resilience in me.
I used to equate distance with loss — loss of language, tradition, and connection. Now I understand distance creates deep hunger for grounding and preserving. It is that hunger which drives my work today.
My work is cultivated from the in-between spaces. Between my learnt languages, French
and English, and my native tongue, Creole, which I am fighting not to lose,
My work is cultivated between past, future, and present. What I’ve inherited, what I am still learning, and what I choose to preserve. The inherited histories, which my elders did not always have time to explain, also shapes my work. It is that unspoken history that I translate into song sound, text, movement, and imagery.
My heritage intuitvely leads my practice into rhythms, textures colours and breath, that wake memories often sleeping within me. Memories that practice care, honesty, and exercising
your voice.
I create to reconnect.
I create to remember.
Myself, my community, and the parts of my culture that were interrupted by migration
and circumstance.