Paloma Dawkins is a Canadian/Mexican artist and award winning video game director. Dawkins’
games explore the intersections of mythology, technology, and ecology, using speculative
storytelling to question the structures that govern our existence. Dawkins’ hand drawn animation
evoke a spirit within them that brings inanimate things to life, players are encouraged to engage in
deep ecological listening reminding us that everything has agency and offers us potential for
kinship. In this way, her games are places where we can suspend our disbelief and imagine an
inclusive and shared ecological future. Dawkins’ has animated and directed games with the
National Film Board of Canada, Victoria & Albert Museum, Factory International and has won a
Canadian Screen Academy award. She has received grants from Canada Council for the Arts,
CALQ, Canada Media Fund and is currently pursuing an MFA in Critical Ecological Practices at
Emily Carr University of Art and Design.
“I situate myself as a second-generation immigrant, a white-passing person of color with a maternal
lineage traced to Nahuatl-speaking peoples of the Valley of Mexico and a settler lineage from
Britain. I move with the privilege of passing as white while remaining tethered to Indigenous and
immigrant histories. My practice emerges from these intersections, seeking relational ways of
creating and sharing art. I believe it is essential to imagine ecological futures that recognize both
our capacities and our responsibilities to tend to the garden of the earth. Through this lens, my
work blends the boundaries between nature and technology, engaging with themes such as
biopolitics, migration, the entanglement of virtual and ancestral memory, paradoxes of digital
existence, environmental collapse, and the endurance of mythic narratives.”