Maegan Beck (she/her)(b. 1997, Saskatchewan, Treaty 4) is a queer writer, artist, and Master of Art History graduate based in Tiohtiá:ke / Montréal on the unceded ancestral lands of the Kanien'kehà:ka. Grounded in art historical and theoretical inquiry, her research weaves threads from affect studies, phenomenology, feminist and gender studies, and archival practices. Particularly drawn to the lingering tensions of memory across bodies and gestures, her work illuminates the enduring potential of memory.

Her thesis, Transcending Beyond the ‘Detectable’: Queer Mourning, Memory, and Futurity in Eric Rhein’s Lifelines (Concordia University, 2024), explores the intergenerational reverberations of HIV and AIDS, situating living archives as speculative and collaborative tools capable of amplifying queer resistance and community. Central to this project is the (re)positioning of memories over histories, emerging as resistive modalities present in both curatorial and institutional settings—foregrounding care, temporal non-linearity, and generative disruption in activism, collective consciousness, and imagined futures.

Parallel to her academic work, Beck’s creative practice materializes in digital, tactile, and written forms. As an independent researcher, she considers materials that embody their histories. Enacting devotion as a practice of preservation, she approaches textiles as alternate, affective archives—an invocation of both ritual and repair. What textures does memory leave behind, and what persists, despite physical absence? Ruminating upon these questions, her work asks how we hold onto what is no longer here—highlighting how attention, care, and embodied knowledge make absence felt, legible, and luminous.

Her writing will appear in publications such as Needlebound, ESPACE art actuél, and BlackFlash Magazine (all forthcoming).