Elvina Piapot

Elvina Piapot is a 30 year old Cree Free-Lance Designer from the Piapot Reserve in Saskatchewan. She studied Fashion Design in Calgary at the Form & Function Design Academy before going on to Magazine Layout and Design. She was part of the production assistance team that put together the First Nations Arts Magazine "Talking Stick."

Elvina is a two time Canadian Native Arts Foundation grant recipient who graduated from the Banff Centre for the Arts as a Desktop Publishing Technician at the Centre's computer Software Training Program in April of 1995. She is currently designing a collection of clothing to be launched by the label 'Spiritwear©'.

Elvina is also an emerging writer with a passionate commitment to examining the intensities of the First Nations experience ; especially of those within her generation who struggle with living on the uneasy border between a background of the hand-to-mouth immediacy, exclusion, and often short term violent expectancies of life on the streets. The range of new opportunities that she is contributing to is for Contemporary First Nations People that are experiencing through the nature of institutions that rarely have an understanding of this struggle, thereby unwittingly perpetuating exclusion.

Her future plans are to publish her own writing and to continue a collaboration with Photographer & Director of Photography; for The Banff Centre; Richard Agecoutay that will result in the publication of a Contemporary Arts Photo study of the Powwow trail from 1986 to 1996.