Born in 1991, Bonfield, CAN
Lives and works in Toronto, CAN
Ashley Snook (PhD) is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist, educator, and arts administrator based in Toronto. She holds a PhD in Art and Visual Culture (studio stream) from Western University, and her work bridges creative practice, research, and teaching.
Grounded in experiences of growing up in rural Northern Ontario, Snook draws inspiration from the everyday and the mundane—small observations, local ecologies, and ordinary encounters that become portals for rethinking how we live alongside other beings. Her interdisciplinary practice explores animality, human–nonhuman relations, and ecological care, while challenging anthropocentric socio-cultural and scientific frameworks. For Snook, attending to animality, one’s own and others’, is a way to expand perception, question inherited hierarchies, and consider responsibility within complex living networks shaped by capitalism, environmental degradation, overwork, and conformity.
Her work moves between micro and macro scales, tracing relations among human and more-than-human life, and blurring distinctions between what is living and nonliving. Rooted in ecological reverence and intuitive knowledge, her process also draws from attunement to the natural world through ritual, herbalism, and reciprocal care, informing material choices and an interest in cycles of decay, renewal, and reworlding. Alongside her studio practice, she has over a decade of experience teaching and supporting learning environments, and she is committed to equity, accessibility, and community-responsive arts education.