Bushra Junaid (she/her) is a visual artist, author, and curator working between Toronto and Newfoundland and Labrador. Born in Montreal to Jamaican and Nigerian parents and raised in St. John’s, her work explores history, cultural memory, and placemaking, with a focus on the Black diasporic histories of Atlantic Canada. Through archival research and storytelling, she brings overlooked histories and narratives into view.
Junaid has exhibited nationally and in the United States and has curated landmark exhibitions centered on Black and Caribbean diasporic experience. In 2020, she curated What Carries Us: Newfoundland and Labrador in the Black Atlantic at The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery in St. John’s. The exhibition traced the province’s historical, economic, and cultural ties to Africa and the Caribbean through the Transatlantic Slave Trade and its afterlives, bringing together contemporary artworks and rare historical materials.
During her research, she uncovered the story of a 19th-century Black sailor buried on the Labrador coast, whose remains had been held in The Rooms’ collection since the late 1980s. This discovery led her to write and illustrate The Possible Lives of W.H., Sailor (2022), a poetic, research-based children’s book that reimagines the life of this unknown figure and has sparked renewed scientific investigation into and scholarly engagement with this little-known chapter of Canadian history.
Bushra Junaid (she/her) is a visual artist, author, and curator working between Toronto and Newfoundland and Labrador. Born in Montreal to Jamaican and Nigerian parents and raised in St. John’s, her work explores history, cultural memory, and placemaking, with a focus on the Black diasporic histories of Atlantic Canada. Through archival research and storytelling, she brings overlooked histories and narratives into view.
Junaid has exhibited nationally and in the United States and has curated landmark exhibitions centered on Black and Caribbean diasporic experience. In 2020, she curated What Carries Us: Newfoundland and Labrador in the Black Atlantic at The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery in St. John’s. The exhibition traced the province’s historical, economic, and cultural ties to Africa and the Caribbean through the Transatlantic Slave Trade and its afterlives, bringing together contemporary artworks and rare historical materials.
During her research, she uncovered the story of a 19th-century Black sailor buried on the Labrador coast, whose remains had been held in The Rooms’ collection since the late 1980s. This discovery led her to write and illustrate The Possible Lives of W.H., Sailor (2022), a poetic, research-based children’s book that reimagines the life of this unknown figure and has sparked renewed scientific investigation into and scholarly engagement with this little-known chapter of Canadian history.
