Born in the Canadian prairie town of Yorkton, Saskatchewan, Dana Claxton is the youngest of four children. She is a descendant of the Hunkpapa Lakota people and a member of the Wood Mountain Lakota First Nation.
D. Claxton is a self-taught photographer, videographer and filmmaker. She stated that she dreamed of moving to New York at age six to make films. Delayed in realising her dream, D. Claxton spent the early 1980s on Canada’s west coast, training with Vancouver’s Native theatre group Spirit Song. Through the training program offered by Spirit Song, she earned a certificate in arts administration. In the latter part of the decade, she moved to New York City. She describes her time there as a period of significant creative and personal growth: “I had a great time in New York… it brought together my creative interest, my intellectual and political interests, but also my spiritual practice. Everything sort of came together there for me.” (Claxton 2004) While in New York, she studied acting at the Herbert Berghof Studio and worked for Details Magazine, devoted to fashion and lifestyle.

Returning to Canada in 1990, D. Claxton became immersed in Vancouver’s art scene, particularly the artist-run Pitt Gallery, which witnessed her early performances works and her curatorial debut, with the exhibitions Neo Nativist (1991) and First Ladies (1992). While photography and filmmaking have become the hallmark of her artistic practice, her experimental performance video piece, Buffalo Bone China (1997), is often cited as the artwork that brought her to the attention of the contemporary art world. Whether it is performance art, the moving image or the photographic still, D. Claxton deploys a visual language that speaks back in resistance to colonisation and is imbued with a distinct Lakota aesthetic.
Inspired by the Vancouver School of photography, as seen in she made the monumental “tableaux photographs” her own, Claxton began experimenting with LED backlit colour transparencies. These “fireboxes”, as she refers to them, were first used for the series Made to Be Ready (2016). Since then, the firebox has become one of the distinctive features in the display of her photographic images.

In 2020 D. Claxton was awarded the prestigious Scotiabank Photography Award, Canada’s annual peer-nominated and peer-reviewed award for excellence in contemporary art and photography. She was also the recipient of the prestigious Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts (2020).
Her work is found in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Winnipeg Art Gallery, the Remai Modern, Saskatoon and the Audain Art Museum in Whistler, and international institutions such as Barcelona’s CaixaForum – Fundació la Caixa, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Seattle Art Museum, and Forge Project.
Dana Claxton currently resides in Vancouver, Canada. She is a Professor and Chair of the Art History, Visual Art and Theory Department at the University of British Columbia.