Curatorial Dreaming workshops guide critical reflection, support curatorial and pedagogical innovations, and promote ethical collaboration. Each workshop is tailored for its unique setting – the exhibition space, collections, history, and implicated communities. While in-person meetings are preferable, I also conduct virtual workshops over Zoom.

Workshops address curatorial and institutional challenges faced by museums and galleries, such as how to: centre marginalized communities; foster cross-cultural education and empathy; honour unknown (or “previously known”) creators; address absences and erasures; present difficult or hurtful artifacts, images, and language in an ethical and sensitive manner; and enact institutional transparency.

Workshop participants are guided to think reflexively about their work and institutional contexts. They practice making conscious curatorial choices as well as understanding how their choices may be shaped by their positionality.   

Addressing and redressing colonial and imperial inheritances is a major challenge –and opportunity – that establishment museums face. Curatorial Dreaming workshops help museum professionals find small and large meaningful acts of repair.

Workshops challenge academics to translate complex ideas and theory into concrete plans for sensory rich, experiential, public exhibitions. Participants practice accessible writing and building stories with specific collections, art, and documents. They plan meaningful and ethical processes of co-curatorship and collaboration, reflect on strategies for communicating with varied publics and communities, and reflect on challenges associated with different exhibitionary sites. The process is creative and reflexive; participants learn from experience, collaboration, and observation, and they are introduced to inspirational critical curatorial strategies.

For museum practitioners, a Curatorial Dreaming workshop is an opportunity to create without financial, bureaucratic, political, institutional, or infrastructure constraints. Workshops promote informal collaboration across siloed departments, as well as opportunities for dialogue and mutual learning with implicated communities.

See testimonials below:

Drawing by Gabrielle Dorion

  • “I would recommend this process to anyone who wants to make her research findings come alive.”

    Darlene Clover, Faculty of Leadership Studies, University of Victoria

  • “The Curatorial Dreaming activity infused our day — and summer— with a creative push that is so valuable. The “constraints” given created a fertile and infinite bed of ideas.“

    Tour Guide, Jewish Museum Montreal

  • “Your workshops were very inspiring — we had to re-think our initial project and adapt it to contemporary times and conditions.”

    Graduate Student, Polish Studies, Karkow

  • “This was a fantastic experience. Workshop participants were offered an open, dynamic and creative space to explore new concepts and strategies around curating complex material.”

    Bryce Lease, Senior Lecturer in Drama & Theatre, University of London

  • “This workshop was great! Dr. Butler’s interdisciplinary approach to curation and art criticism really broadened my thinking for my assignments. Her non-hierarchal approach to the workshops and activities really fostered a sense of comfort and mutual respect."

    Loren Lerner, Professor, Art History, Concordia University

  • “Shelley’s time with our museum staff was revelatory! We were surprised to find out how even our untraditional programming and walking tours could be explored through the process of curatorial dreaming"

    Zev Moses, Executive Director, Museum of Jewish Montreal