Decameron Collective Members

Monique Tschofen is Associate Professor of English at Toronto Metropolitan University, and the Joint York-Toronto Metropolitan Graduate Program in Communications and Culture, a scholar of new media, visual culture, Canadian studies, and globalization, and a digital storyteller, working with poetry, sound art, experimental film, and AI generation. Her publications include textbooks on film and literature, literature and multimedia, and literary hypertext, as well as edited collections of essays on Canadian writers and filmmaker Atom Egoyan. Her research theorizes the relationship between art and philosophy, asking about the conditions under which an artwork can be an “act of theory," looking at Gertrude Stein, digital installation art, experimental cinema, and ekphrastic poetry.  

Fusing poetry, algorithmic generation, digital photography, animation, and sound art, with the histories of manuscript culture and book making, Monique's work tests the possibilities of digital worldbuilding and feminist collaborative co-creation by generating new works and scholarship about them.  This work has been acknowledged internationally, with Honorable Mention for the Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature (Decameron 2.0, 2022), the Digital Humanities Award (Memory Eternal, 2023), and shortlisted for the Wonderbox Digital Opening Up - New Media Writing Prize (Memory Eternal, 2023). 

Monique's solo project Careless Water | Streams of Artificial Thought (2024) was selected for juried exhibition at ICIDS (International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling) in Baranquilla, Colombia. In There Behind the Door (2024) was selected for juried exhibition at the Electronic Literature Organization's Media Arts Festival.   

In 2024-25, she is a Visiting Fellow at Massey College, University of Toronto, and creating a body of works that move her even more explicitly into feminist and environmental spaces. With the Scottish Imprint Documentary Collective, she is making environmental documentaries. Aquaphoria (Before the Waters Rise) was a 2025 nominee for the LA Independent Women Film Awards, received Honorable Mention from the Experimental Forum (LA), and was an official selection of the Toronto Short Film Festival. Her ongoing environmental interactive documentary with Jolene Armstrong, Solastalgia will be exhibited and discussed at the Interactive Film and Media conference, as will her solo work Happenings, a work of interactive literature, long listed for the New Media Writing Prize (UK), will also be discussed at IFM.  

ORCID: 0000-0001-9594-8424

Personal website: www.moniquetschofen.com

 

Monique lives and works in Toronto, in the 'Dish With One Spoon Territory’.  The Dish With One Spoon is a treaty between the Anishinaabe, Mississaugas and Haudenosaunee that bound them to share the territory and protect the land.

 

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