Erin Ashenhurst

• Words, Pictures & Other Common Oddities •

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With an interest in visual narrative, my research explores themes including: design, humour, identity, memory, and urban landscape.


Erin has taught history, culture studies, writing, and studio courses at the Wilson School of Design since 2010. Taking a student-centred approach, she promotes visual literacy, conceptual development, and above all, critical thinking. With a background in editorial art direction and interactive design, she holds a BFA in Visual Art (Simon Fraser University), a certificate in Publishing (Columbia University), and an MA in Interactive Arts and Technology (SFU). Parts of her thesis, Snap/Shot: Identity, Memory, and the Digital Mediation of Experience, were researched while an artist-in-residence at the Banff Centre.

Exploring frameworks of narrative, Erin’s interdisciplinary research focuses on themes including urban living and the built environment, celebrity, film, and memory. Her academic work has been presented at IDMAA: Digital Narrative (Vancouver, 2010), ACM SIGGRAPH Asia (Seoul, 2010), ISEA 2011 (Istanbul, 2011), The Inter-Disciplinary Network’s Monstrous Geographies I (Oxford, 2012) and Monstrous Geographies 2 (Prague, 2013), and Canadian Culinary Imaginations (Vancouver 2016). Her chapter on the depiction of the city in the television show The Real Housewives of Vancouver was published in The Fantasy of Reality, a book of critical essays.