Shelley Niro

(Turtle Band of Mohawk, born 1954)

Shelley Niro (Mohawk) is a multi-media artist who creates paintings, installations, videos, sculptures, and mixed media artworks. Her work challenges stereotypical images and clichés of Indigenous peoples, and it creates new identities and images for them. It advocates for self-representation and sovereignty.

Niro is a member of the Turtle Clan of the Kanien’kehaka (Mohawk) Nation, from the Six Nations of the Grand River territory where she grew up (near Brantford, Southern Ontario, Canada). She studied at Cambrian College and Durham College, and she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree (1990) in painting and sculpture from the Ontario College of Art and a Master of Fine Arts degree (1997) from the University of Western Ontario (all in Ontario, Canada). In 2017, Niro received the Canadian Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts. In 2024, a retrospective exhibition "Shelley Niro: 500 Year Itch" travelled across Canada and to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in New York City.