about
Catherine Rondeau is a fine art photographer, videographer and author. Born in 1971 in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, she grew up in Sherbrooke, Québec, in a predominantly French-speaking milieu. After completing an Arts and Letters program in junior college, she went on to receive a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in photography from Concordia University (1997). Her combined skills in writing and lens work allowed her to carve out a career as a freelance photo and video journalist, during which she travelled to more than 25 countries before settling down to have a family and teach video production.
In 2010, Rondeau earned a Master’s degree in Communication from the Université du Québec à Montréal. The following year, she published a revised version of her thesis on the vital role of imagination (Aux sources du merveilleux, une exploration de l'univers des contes, Presses de l’Université du Québec). Inspired by her research, she made a return to artistic creation with a shift towards the world of photomontage and surreal video.
Her work has since been presented in a dozen solo exhibitions in Quebec. She has received visual arts grants from SODEC (2016) and CALQ (2019, 2022 and 2025), and in 2021 won a first public art competition for the Saint-Bonaventure library. She has also participated in artistic residencies, notably at Glasgow's Centre for Contemporary Arts (2018) and the Centre d'art de Kamouraska (2015).
More recently, she joined Atelier Silex's Studio Cobalt and contributed to the making of Projet Osmose, a video mapping fresco that won “Coup de cœur du jury” at the Grands prix culturels de Culture Trois-Rivières in 2024. The artist is currently preparing a public art exhibition entitled Wall-to-Wall Trouts, to be presented in Saint-Alexis-des-Monts from June 18 to September 30, 2025.
Catherine Rondeau regularly gives lectures on her practice and leads creative workshops in schools. Her work can be found in several Canadian public and private collections.
artistic practice
For over a decade, Catherine Rondeau has been exploring the links between the imaginary world of fairy tales and the construction of identity through a photographic practice based on digital photomontage. Her visual language, both intimate and dreamlike, blends fiction and reality in carefully composed tableaux where reference points are deliberately blurred. She individually captures the visual elements that make up her work, then juxtaposes them on the computer to create poetic universes imbued with a gentle strangeness.
She has long focused on female and child figures, often embodied by herself or her children, but her approach has recently broadened to include more collective forms and very large-scale public art. In 2023, she contributed to the video mapping fresco Osmose, a collaborative work projected onto an outdoor wall as part of a cultural event in Trois-Rivières. This foray into public space paved the way for Wall-to-Wall Trouts (2025), a series of photographic murals imagined as a dialogue with the territory of Saint-Alexis-des-Monts and its inhabitants, in a region where fishing has historically occupied an important place - both in experience and in the collective imagination. Through these recent creations, the artist maintains her aesthetic and narrative sensibility, but deployed on a monumental scale.
Beyond the Looking Glass on display at Maison de la Culture Mercier, Montreal, 2015