Jacqueline Bell is a curator and writer whose work engages contemporary artistic practices that foreground the politics of relationality. She is curator of Walter Phillips Gallery, where her recent exhibitions include darkness is as deep as the darkness is by Rita McKeough (2020); A materialist history of contagion by Candice Lin (2019); Guidelines by Carmen Papalia with Heather Kai Smith (2019); THE CAVE by Young Joon Kwak with Marvin Astorga, Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan, Adrian Stimson,and Kim Ye (2018); If the river ran upwards with Silvina Babich, Alana Bartol, Diane Borsato, Carolina Caycedo, Genevieve Robertson, T’uy’t’tanat-Cease Wyss, and Anne Riley (2018); Everything I Say is True by Kite (2017); and Improvise Everything with Diane Borsato, Raven Chacon, Dylan Miner, Pauline Oliveros, and Amanda White (2016), co-curated with Justin Waddell.
Her writing has been published by Canadian Art, C Magazine, FIELD: A Journal of Socially-Engaged Criticism, PUBLIC, and X-TRA: Contemporary Art Quarterly. Recently, her interview, Thinking through the River: A Conversation with Carolina Caycedo and Genevieve Robertson, was published in Outdoor School: Contemporary Environmental Art, edited by Amish Morrell and Diane Borsato (Douglas & McIntyre, 2021). Her exhibitions and projects have been reviewed or featured in Akimbo, Art in America, BOMB Magazine, Canadian Art, C Magazine, and The Globe and Mail, among others. She holds an MA in Art and Curatorial Practices in the Public Sphere from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and was a participant in the inaugural cohort of Banff Centre’s Cultural Leadership program (2017-2018).