View Vanessa's CV (PDF format)
Born in Montreal in 1972, Vanessa spent the first 17 years of her life in the city of Montreal. From an early age, she displayed a need to exist as a creative being. In elementary school she and an unsupervised core group of other kids orchestrated snow sculpture competitions, mass graffiti interventions, and annual self-choreographed dance shows. Disinterested in academia, Vanessa excelled instead at break dancing in the back of classrooms and at standing up for the kids who got picked on. In high school, Vanessa became extremely active in theatre, showing talent and passion, and participating in every play that the school produced. She craved a creative academic environment.
At the age of 18, Vanessa moved to Seville, Spain to waitress for nine months at the 1992 World's Fair before embarking on a year's voyage through Pakistan, India, Nepal and Thailand. During this time she began to draw every day, prefiguring the lifelong pursuit visual arts was to become. She moved back to Montreal and applied with success to the Rhode Island School of Design. There, she majored in painting, while working primarily with alternative materials to paint. She drew with sands, earth, and spices and painted with handmade, natural pigments. Realizing that her paintings always seemed to incorporate sculptural elements, and having found an affinity for working with sand (glass's raw material), she convinced the painting department to allow her to study hot glass as well. Unable to double major, she only got a taste for glass for one year before she and twelve other students were accepted into the European Honours Program in Rome. She left for Europe early to work for three months as an intern at the Pont-Aven School of Art in Brittany, France. Then she made her way to Italy where she worked, and finished her Fine Arts degree.
After graduation she moved to Lisbon, Portugal where she waitressed again, for nine months at the 1998 World's Fair. She then headed down south with a couple of girlfriends. They hitchhiked their way into Africa. Starting in the south of Spain and into Morocco, they made their way, on a military convoy, through the land mines of southern Morocco into Mauritania. Their voyage continued down into the Casamance of Senegal where they stayed for a couple of months. Vanessa then continued solo, traveling for another three months through Mali, Burkina Faso and Ghana. During her travels in Africa she drew prolifically and made it her personal mission to find local fiber artists from different regions who could teach her traditional dying techniques such as bogolon, indigo and batik. She lived inside a baobab tree, sometimes under the stars and on the beach, but she mostly stayed in villages with the locals, and often as the only foreigner around.
In 1999, Vanessa moved back to Montreal in order to pursue art full-time. She discovered Montreal's vibrant and committed community of hot glass artists, who encouraged her to re-enter the glass world. She bought a torch and taught herself how to flame work. Vanessa has been creating art and exhibiting as a full-time professional artist since 2001. She is a recipient of several grants and scholarships. In 2001, she received a young entrepreneurs grant to pursue glass blowing and product development. In 2002, she was awarded a scholarship to attend a three-week flame-working course at Penland School for Crafts. That same year, Vanessa accepted a career development grant from Le Conseil des Arts et Lettres du Quebec. In 2003 she was selected to participate in the Mentor-Art program funded by Les Fonds Jeunesse du Quebec. In the fall of 2004, Vanessa entered the glass program at Espace Verre through Le Cegep du Vieux-Montreal.
Though trained in 2D, Vanessa continues to experiment with many materials, pushing the boundaries of traditional techniques by claiming the preeminence of playfulness as intrinsic to her process. She has shown her work in group shows throughout Quebec and Ontario, in Europe, America and the Middle East. Vanessa currently lives and creates art in Montreal.