Daze Jefferies (she/her) is a white settler artist, writer, and educator based in Ktaqmkuk (Newfoundland). Thinking with water and the histories it holds, her multidisciplinary research-creation practice is informed by queer kinship, subterfuge, and resistance at the coastal margins. She works with sculpture, textiles, sound, video, illustration, photography, animation, poetry, and theory to explore queer, trans, and sex worker embodiments, counter-histories, and intergenerational relationships. Acknowledging the tenacity of queer, trans, and sex worker foremothers, she seeks intimate connections within and against the historical record, re-storying archives to offer alternative practices of recognition across time.
Her work has been exhibited and performed at The Rooms, Eastern Edge Artist-Run-Centre, Struts Gallery, Owens Art Gallery, Galerie de l’UQAM, and the Art Gallery of Guelph, with upcoming solo exhibitions at Grenfell Art Gallery and the Craft Council of Newfoundland and Labrador Gallery in 2026. She is the author of water/wept (Anstruther, 2023) and ullagone (antiphony, 2025), as well as co-author of Autoethnography and Feminist Theory at the Water’s Edge: Unsettled Islands (Palgrave, 2018) and stay here stay how stay (The Rooms, 2024). Her work has also been published in the Journal of Folklore Research, PRISM International, The Ex-Puritan, filling Station, Riddle Fence, The Dalhousie Review, Arc, and the League of Canadian Poets’ Visual Poetry Chapbook, as well as anthologized in Future Possible: An Art History of Newfoundland and Labrador and Hustling Verse: An Anthology of Sex Workers' Poetry.
She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2023 VANL-CARFAC Emerging Artist Award and the 2024 Riddle Fence Poetry Prize. Her work has been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council, the City of St. John’s, and the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador.
