Sophie Hackett
Sophie Hackett is the curator of photography at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.
Career
Sophie Elizabeth Hackett was born in Montreal, Quebec. She completed her BA at the University of Toronto but became interested in photography and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts, Photography at the Emily Carr Institute of Art & Design, Vancouver. After graduation, she worked for the Jane Corkin Gallery in Toronto from 1998–2000, followed by a Curatorial Internship, Photography, at the Art Gallery of Ontario , then did her Master of Arts, Humanities at the University of Chicago. In 2005-2006, she was appointed a J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles Graduate Intern in the Department of Photographs, then became Assistant Curator, Photography, at the AGO, Associate Curator and in 2016, she was appointed full Curator, Photography, taking over from Maia-Mari Sutnik and actively curating, contributing to publications, and participating on juries, both national and international. Hackett's area of specialization is vernacular photography, photography in relation to queerness; and photography in Canada from the 1960s to the 1990s.She also has served as an adjunct faculty member in Ryerson University’s Master’s degree program in Film + Photography Preservation and Collections Management, and was a 2017 fellow with the Center for Curatorial Leadership. She was a juror four times for the Grange Prize / Aimia AGO Photography Prize in 2010, 2012, 2014 and 2017. She also served as a juror for the Scotiabank Photography Award for 2020, 2021 and upcoming for 2022.
Exhibitions
Although Hackett`s first major show was in 2002 with the touring exhibition The Found and the Familiar: Snapshots in Contemporary Canadian Art at Gallery TPW, she only began to achieve critical attention with such shows as What It Means To be Seen: Photography and Queer Visibility and Fan the Flames: Queer Positions in Photography, two exhibitions which she assembled in 2014 as part of the AGO’s World Pride 2014 programming and Outsiders: American Photography and Film, 1950s–1980s, which she co-curated, in 2016. In 2018, she curated Anthropocene at the same time as the National Gallery of Canada to chronicle the irreversible impact of humans on the Earth accompanied by a film and book by Edward Burtynsky, Jennifer Baichwal, and Nicholas de Pencier, and in 2020, she curated and hung a major exhibition of Diane Arbus titled Diane Arbus: Photographs, 1956–1971 which the Globe and Mail called a tasteful, chronological display. The exhibition featured 150 photographs which the AGO acquired in 2016 along with another 300-odd photographs by Arbus, making the AGO a major center of Arbus photographs but the show was quickly closed due to the pandemic.In 2022 the AGO exhibited another Hackett show: What Matters Most: Photographs of Black Life, the Fade Resistance Collection. This group of 3500 Polaroids documenting African American family life from the 1970s to the early 2000s, was assembled by Canadian photographer, physician and educator Zun Lee and acquired by the AGO in 2018. In 2023, the show Casa Susanna opened, co-curated by Hackett with French photo historian, Isabelle Bonnet, as well as American scholar of trans history Susan Stryker and coproduced by the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Rencontres D'Arles. It offers insight into the historically significant crossdressing scene. Hackett discussed the work of Casa Suzanna on Youtube.