Diana Thorneycroft is the 2016 Manitoba Arts Award of Distinction recipient. The recognition comes with $30,000 for the artist, and is the Manitoba Arts Council’s award for the highest level of excellence and long-term achievements of an artist in Manitoba.

Known for making art that hovers on the edge of public acceptance, Thorneycroft has pursued topics that often challenged her viewing audience. She arrived on the national art scene in the early 1990s with her highly charged black and white self-portraits photographs that explored issues around sexual identity and the body in pain. In 1999 her installation Monstrance, which involved the corpses of rabbits, became a flashpoint for conversations around government funding. From 2005-2015 Thorneycroft’s interest in Canadian identity emerged as she completed four different bodies of work that investigated and subverted notions of “Canadian-ness”.

Read the full announcement on the Manitoba Arts Council website here. Congratulations, Diana!