Biography
Oonagh Elizabeth Fitzgerald, BFA, LLB, LLM, MBA, SJD, PhD (Fine Arts), is an international lawyer and visual and performance artist who developed Transdisciplinary International Law-Arts Research-Creation (TILARC) practice to combine international law and artistic research on current human rights, technological, and environmental issues.
In her PhD dissertation, An Artistic and Performative Decoding and Encoding of International Law for the Posthuman Cyborg Anthropocene, Oonagh explained how her TILARC practice provided an embodied way to decode and encode international law through art and performance. This practice is based on a wide-ranging (feminist, anticolonial, anticapitalist, aesthetic, philosophical, new materialist) critique of the body of international law that developed from the 1945 Charter of the United Nations. TILARC uses art and performance to imagine renewing this planetary charter to address the environmental, technological, humanitarian and human rights crises of our times. This is not a law reform project, but an imaginative and creative project aimed at engaging a broader audience in thinking and making art and performance about international justice relevant to contemporary crises.
Oonagh is a Senior Fellow with the Human Rights Research and Education Centre at the University of Ottawa, and President of the International Law Association of Canada. She teaches courses on human rights and health and human rights in Latin America in the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Social Sciences.
Oonagh served as Co-Chair of the Canadian Environmental Domestic Advisory Group under the EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement. She was Director of the International Law Research Program, Centre for International Governance Innovation. She was a senior leader in the Department of Justice Canada, serving as National Security Coordinator; Canadian Armed Forces/Department of National Defence Chief Legal Advisor; Chief Legal Counsel, Public Law Portfolio; Assistant Secretary to Cabinet, Legislation and House Planning/Counsel, Privy Council Office; Senior General Counsel and Director General, Human Resources Development Canada; General Counsel and Director, International Law and Activities Section; Senior Counsel for Regulatory Reform; and Legal Adviser, Human Rights Law Section.
Oonagh has taught at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Universidad de Seville; the Faculty of Law (Common Law) and Telfer School of Management, University of Ottawa; the Department of Law, Carleton University; the International Institute of Human Rights Law, Strasbourg; and the International Institute of Humanitarian Law, San Remo.
Oonagh has written, edited, or co-edited books and articles on topics of international and domestic human rights law. She has presented her TILARC practice at international conferences and in art expositions. Her article, “Entangled Beings: A Research Creation Reflection on Making an Art Assemblage from Waste Materials”, was recently published in LaTadeoDeArte9, n.°12, 2023. With Eldad Tsabary, Associate Dean of Fine Arts, she is co-editing a book project, Co-creating Multiplicity: Collaborative Practices in the Age of Individualism (working title).
