Dr. JoAnn Purcell is the current and founding Program Co-ordinator of the Illustration program at Seneca Polytechnic. In 2001, she proposed the award-winning Animation Arts Centre and continues to be instrumental in its growth. Dr. Purcell held the interim position of Chair of the School of Creative Arts & Animation in 2019. As a faculty member, she teaches drawing, painting, colour theory, visual culture history and oversees the student thesis/research project and guides them as they assemble works in an off-campus gallery.
Dr. Purcell was the project lead, creative concept lead and art director on seven large-scale murals for Seneca’s new cafeteria at Newnham Campus, working in partnership with First Peoples@Seneca to make visible Indigenous knowledge. Previously, she initiated Seneca’s first official Nuit Blanche project, the Seneca Zine library and the AGO live comics critical response project. Through her external connections, she brought the American Illustration Collection—a collection of over 4000 paintings, drawings and prints, making it the largest collection of American Illustration outside the library of Congress—from the Glenbow Museum in Alberta to Seneca Polytechnic.
A lifelong learner, Dr. Purcell holds a PhD in critical disability studies from York University. She also has an MA in art history from York University, a BScN from the University of Toronto and is a graduate of the Ontario College of Art. Her recent publications include “Disability Daily Drawn: A Comics Collaboration” in Graphic Medicine (U Hawaii Press, 2022) and “Comics, Caregiving and Crip Time” in Comics Picturing Girlhood (Leuven U Press, 2022). Her dissertation will be published by Wilfrid Laurier U Press. Dr. Purcell has years of experience as a visual artist, animator and visual effects artist and, previously, psychiatric nursing and executive management.