Cass Gardiner is an Anishinaabe Algonquin filmmaker, curator, and writer from Kebaowek First Nation in what we now call Quebec, Canada. She directed the short film JANELLE NILES: INCONVENIENT, part of Citizen Minutes Season 2 JANELLE NILES: INCONVENIENT premiered at Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Film Festival in 2023 and is streaming on CBC Gem and Crave in Canada. She produced the short documentary JEWELS HUNT, which was supported by ITVS and TFI, and broadcast on PBS Independent Lens in 2020. Her documentary film THE EDIBLE INDIAN has met critical acclaim in classrooms and theaters internationally and was nominated for Best Documentary Short at the American Indian Film Festival. She is also a passionate arts activist within Indigenous communities and has worked as a film mentor across Canada.
A 2017 Curatorial Fellow at the Center for Craft, Creativity & Design in Asheville, North Carolina, her latest curatorial work, Forward Facing, was a featured show for the 2018 Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival in collaboration with Critical Distance Centre for Curators and the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective. Her writing on Indigenous art, film, and food has been published in Inuit Art Quarterly, Cherry Bombe, and Compound Butter Magazine and her work has been accepted to the Oxford Food Symposium in 2023.
Cass has held a variety of positions within documentary film institutions, namely the National Film Board of Canada, Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Film Festival, and most recently the Tribeca Film Institute, where she worked in film education and supported the IF/Then Shorts program. She is an independent contractor and film curator for the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in New York City, curating the annual Native Cinema Showcase in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She holds a BA from NYU Gallatin and an MFA in Documentary Film from Toronto Metropolitan University.
