Nicole Marchesseau’s artistic and research practices explore process, method, materiality, and madness. Her multimedia collaborations have been featured in North America and overseas. Along with Gabrielle Gillespie, she was awarded the 4Talent Award for Innovation at the Scottish Mental Health Arts and Film Festival for the film Under My Skin: A Swarm of Bees, also featured at the Rendezvous with Madness Festival in Toronto, and in Terrace, British Columbia at the Shutter 2 Think Festival. Her more recent short film Pandemic Spaceship (2021) has also screened internationally. Nicole has performed with Jandek, her band Tuna Mind Melt, as well as with musicians and artists involved in the Creative Music scene. She is honoured to have played in a performance of  “In a Large Open Space,” a piece by her late mentor Jim Tenney at the Telus Centre for the Performing Arts as part of Nuit Blanche. 

Nicole’s research has included liminality in the DIY music scene in Toronto, musical surrealism, and Jandek. Publications include “Hmmronk, Skrrrrape, Schttttokkke: Automatism in Music?” in the Italian journal Gli Spazi Della Musica (2018); “Red, White, and Grey: Un-defining Popular Music in Canada” in  The Spaces and Places of Canadian Popular Culture (Canadian Scholars Press, 2019); and “Jandek’s Inert Unveiling” in the anthology Please Allow Me to Introduce Myself (Ashgate, 2013). She has lectured on a wide range of topics, from Outsider Music to Op Magazine as an example of pre-web social networking to the impact of Canadian content legislation on the music industry in Canada. 

Nicole is currently working towards a PhD in social anthropology at York University. She also holds a PhD from York in Musicology/Ethnomusicology, and has taught at the Department of Communication Studies and Multimedia at McMaster University in Hamilton, The Department of Music Research and Composition at the Don Wright Faculty of Music at Western University, and at York University in Toronto. Nicole lives in Guelph with her human and fur family.