Maria Hupfield is a 2020–2022 Borderlands Fellow, whose fellowship project, Breaking Protocol, is part of the Vera List Center’s As for Protocols cycle of programs.

Breaking Protocol uses performance art and museum display strategies to embody and visualize political theory on the politics of refusal alongside Indigenous Feminist scholarship on ethical collaboration through the reassertion of Native Kinship as the decolonial center and heart of art-making in North America. Based around a series of public and private activities and activations, Hupfield will draw from current Indigenous knowledge-based research protocols that prioritize land-based knowledge, and Indigenous-led spaces within institutions and online. Working across three sites including a medicine garden, virtual living archive, and creation studio, Hupfield will hold workshops with students at ASU and TNS on land protocols in performance, develop a custom T-shirt as everyday art wearables with Tempe-based designer OXDX, collaborate on an architectural structure as social sculpture, create a performance prop that prioritizes embodied knowledge, and host roundtable discussions on accountability in Indigenous knowledge and socials with collaborators in both Tempe and New York. 

Maria Hupfield is a transdisciplinary artist working in performance and media arts. She was awarded the Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for Outstanding Achievement by a Canadian mid-career artist (2018) and a Lucas Artists Fellowship in Visual Arts, Architecture & Design, Montalvo Arts Center (2019-2020). Hupfield is a Guest Curator for the Artists of Color Council, Movement Research at Judson Church, Winter 2020, and an inaugural resident of the Surf Point Foundation Residency 2020. Her solo Nine Years Towards The Sun at the Heard Museum, Phoenix, (2019) focuses on exhibiting performance as living culture and follows her first major institutional solo exhibition in Canada, The One Who Keeps on Giving, a production of The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto. Her work has shown at the Museum of Arts and Design, BRIC, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, represented Canada at SITE Santa Fe (2016) and traveled nationally with Beat Nation: Art, Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture (2012-14); with recent performances at the National Gallery of Canada. Hupfield is an off-rez citizen of Wasauksing First Nation, Ontario, Anishinaabe Nation, and the recently appointed Canadian Research Chair in Transdisciplinary Indigenous Arts at the University of Toronto.