Christine Fitzgerald is an Ottawa-based visual artist whose work combines historical photographic processes with contemporary technologies. By integrating current and obsolete methods, she expands photography’s expressive possibilities, creating visually distinctive images that explore our relationship to the natural world.
Fitzgerald is the City of Ottawa’s 2023 Karsh Award Laureate, a quadrennial prize recognizing excellence in photography. She was named International Fine Art Photographer of the Year in the International Photography Competition by the Lucie Foundation in New York City (2016) and was inducted into the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 2024.
A graduate of the School of the Photographic Arts: Ottawa, Acadia University, and Dalhousie University, Fitzgerald has completed residencies at the Ottawa School of Art, the Geological Survey of Canada, Algonquin Provincial Park, the Canadian Museum of Nature, and the Natural History Museum in England. In 2017, she was selected as a visual artist on the landmark Canada C3 Expedition on Canada’s 150th anniversary to the country’s three coasts. Inspired by her experience on the St. Lawrence River, she created a nationally and internationally exhibited body of work later acquired by Library and Archives Canada.
Her photographs have been shown in exhibitions in Canada and abroad, including at the Beaty Biodiversity Museum in Vancouver, the Canada Council for the Arts’ Âjagemô Hall Gallery, the Karsh-Masson Gallery in Ottawa, the Galerie Lacerte in Montréal, the Canadian Embassy in Washington, and the Haus am Dom Cultural Center in Frankfurt.
Fitzgerald’s work is held in private collections worldwide and in major public collections, including Global Affairs Canada, Library and Archives Canada, the City of Ottawa, Queen’s University, and the Government of Ontario. Her inaugural photobook, Requiem (Magenta Foundation and University of Toronto Press, 2025), is held in the permanent collections of leading Canadian institutions, including the National Gallery of Canada.