Michel Huneault

Michel Huneault is a documentary photographer and visual artist. His work focuses on development issues, trauma, migration and complex geographical realities, including the impacts of climate change. His artistic practice combines still images, oral histories, video and immersive elements, giving his projects both a humanistic and aesthetic dimension. Her works inform while questioning the act of documentation and representation.

Michel Huneault holds a master's degree from the University of California at Berkeley, where he was a Rotary Peace Fellow, studying the role of collective memory in the aftermath of major trauma. Before devoting himself to photography in 2008, he worked for over a decade in international development.

In 2015, his work on the Lac-Mégantic tragedy was awarded the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize, and published the following year under the title La longue nuit de Mégantic by the Dutch publisher Schilt. In 2016, the Travers Fellowship enabled him to further his research into migration issues across five countries, in collaboration with their diasporas in Canada and their families in their countries of origin. In 2018, he adapted Roxham - his visual and sound project about the passages of asylum seekers from the United States to Canada - into a virtual reality experience with the National Film Board of Canada. In spring-summer 2020, he was commissioned by the McCord Museum to document the impacts of Covid-19 in Montreal.