Dakota is a transgender, intersex, queer Inuk visual artist who has ties to the Yupik community in Russia and splits her time between the Niagara Region and the Greater Toronto Area in Ontario. She works primarily in character and narrative illustration but has experience in painting and uses traditional printmaking techniques in her art.
“I always had a calling to create,” [1] says Dakota. As a child she was inspired by her great-grandmother, who made jewellery and dream catchers. Another source of inspiration for Dakota is her identity as an intersex person. “I have always felt different and isolated from my peers growing up…which is why I originally started creating art: to give myself a voice, to communicate,” she says. During high school at A.N. Myer Secondary School in Niagara Falls, ON, Dakota took arts and Indigenous studies classes, where she learned about Indigenous history, lifestyle, migration, food, and arts. This program allowed students to focus on specific subjects of interest, which for Dakota were Inuit history and Two-Spirit identities. In 2024 Dakota completed her associate’s degree in visual fine arts and graphic design as well as marketing design for businesses at Niagara College in Welland, ON. During these years, Dakota started focusing on creating thick, bold linework with minimal shading for printmaking, stencilling, mask making, and sewing. She learned how to sew from her great-grandmother and grandmother, specifically learning inward needle control and how to create durable clothing. “I always knew that my only thing I ever wanted to do in life was to create and be an artist,” she says.
Inspired by artists Agnes Nanogak Goose, Helen Kalvak, and Joe Talirunili, Dakota creates linework in her digital illustrations that can be translated to stencil, woodcut, and linocut printmaking. Her work often appears with monochromatic colours and bold patterns and lining, which are ideal for these types of printmaking. She uses neurographical techniques—a therapeutic drawing method that focuses on freeform lines and shapes that are meant to connect the conscious and unconscious mind—in her work and is inspired by animals and nature. “I’m autistic, and for me, creating has been a huge way to express myself and to communicate…I’m very emotional and abstract with my art,” she says. Connecting with the unconscious mind through meditation, nature, and art is a key component in Dakota’s practice. This comes through in the surreal and abstract nature of pieces such as Illuminated (2025), a busy collage-style acrylic paint piece featuring words and anthropomorphic characters. Narrative aspects can be seen in her digital illustration work, like the piece Summer Skin (2026), which depicts a pastel-pink part-dog, part-human figure reclining. These narrative works often feature queer characters and representations of intersex people. “I want to stay proud and represent how intersex bodies are beautiful and natural,” she says. “Many of my pieces feature scars and proportions adjacent to those who are transgender. Most of my characters are queer as well!”
In addition to creating art, Dakota does freelance work in events marketing in Toronto, where she creates posters for afterparty shows for queer artists and DJs. This work entails deciding on the colour palette, designing the event poster and social media posts, and hand lettering fonts. She also creates album covers for artists and aims to continue doing this on a larger scale. She hopes to do more design work for artists’ events, like tour merchandise design, poster design, and background visuals for live events. “I want more people to see Inuit art. I want more people to have that mixed in with their everyday,” she says. Eventually, she’d like to create music to accompany her art.