Canadian, born England, 1949

Thaddeus Holownia emigrated from Bury Saint Edmonds, England to Canada with his family at the age of five. In 1972, he received a B.A. in Communications and Fine Arts from the University of Windsor. In 1974 Holownia’s work was included in the exhibition 100 Years of Photography in Nice, France. His work was also featured in The Landscape: Eight Canadian Photographers an exhibition which toured Canada from 1990 to 1992. In 1998 the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography initiated a major exhibition of Holownia’s work, Extended Vision, which toured to the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ontario, and ended at the Centro de la Imagen in Mexico City. In 2004-2005 he participated in Broken Ground: Canadian Photographs from the New World, which toured to Prague, Berlin, and Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario. In 2006, The Rooms, Provincial Art Gallery of Newfoundland and Labrador organized a major retrospective of Holownia’s work The Terra Nova Suite. His work has been shown in museums throughout North America and Europe.

Thaddeus Holownia has been the recipient of grants and awards from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Royal Canadian Academy for the Arts, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and the Marjorie Young Bell Research Foundation. He is currently the head of the Department of Fine Arts at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick where he has been a professor since 1977. A dedicated teacher he has been a four-time recipient of the Mount Allison Paul Paré Award for Excellence and was awarded the Paul Paré Medal in 1998 for excellence in teaching, research, creative activity and community service. In 2001 he was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship, the first Canadian photographer to win this honour.

Photographic prints and bookworks by Thaddeus Holownia are in many public collections including the National Gallery of Canada, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Yale University, Columbia University, and the Musée de la Photographie, Belgium.