Critical Distance DIRECTORY Zoë Heyn-Jones

Zoë Heyn-Jones is a researcher-artist and cultural worker who grew up on Saugeen Ojibway land in Ontario, Canada and on Tz’utujil/Kaqchikel Maya land in Guatemala. Zoë uses artistic research and curatorial practice as tools for communal abundance, and convenes groups in order to weather the collapse of capitalism together.

Zoë was one of two inaugural SSHRC postdoctoral fellows (2021-23) at the Centre for Sustainable Curating in the department of Visual Arts at Western University where she co-founded (with Dr. Amanda White) the Creative Food Research Collaboratory. Zoë is one half of Dupla Molcajete, a collaboration (with Beatriz Paz Jiménez) that serves to create a space for experimentation at the nexus of art, food, and culture from Mesoamerican and hemispheric perspectives, with a current focus on edible insects. She also is part of the Materia Abierta collective that runs, among other projects, an annual independent summer school on art, theory and technology in Mexico City.

Zoë held an Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Alberta (2023-25) for her research project “Composting Research-Creation: Organic Waste Management and/as Art for the Climate Emergency” for which she received the Dorothy J. Killam Postdoctoral Fellowship Prize. This research led Heyn-Jones to curate the ongoing series of encounters on decomposition and regeneration, “descomponer / regenerar,” in Mexico City supported by the Canada Council for the Arts.

Zoë works with agroecology and food systems, convivial cooking and eating, compost and waste, vernacular architecture and embodied practices of solidarity in the service of decomposition and regeneration. She lives and works in Tenochtitlan/Mexico City and Tkaronto/Toronto.