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, and a digital storyteller, working with poetry, sound art, and experimental film. Her research theorizes the relationship between art and philosophy, asking about the conditions under which an artwork can be an “act of theory."   

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.   

Her film Aquaphoria (Before the Waters Rise) was awarded best Environmental film at the Montreal Women Film Festival, 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 and the Liberty Festival (Athens, Greece). Her ongoing environmental interactive documentary with Jolene Armstrong, Solastalgia has been exhibited and discussed at the Interactive Film and Media conference, 2025. Fire and Water, a digital and analogue diptych with Jolene Armstrong, was exhibited at the Electronic Literature Organization's Media Arts Festival, showcasing the costs of the digital.

Her solo work Happenings, a work of interactive literature, was on the short list for both the Chris Meade Memorial Prize and the Social Good Prize of the New Media Writing Prize (UK).   ​

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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