Fonds 2021.04 - Joy Cohnstaedt fonds

Joy Cohnstaedt joined the Board of Heritage York in 2011 and retired in 2021. She is a Professor Emerita and Senior Scholar, and an experienced arts administrator and educator. She was a former Dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts at York University, and a former Chair of the Ontario Council on University Affairs. Prior to her appointment at York, she served as Deputy Minister of Culture, Heritage and Recreation in Manitoba and as Executive Director of the Saskatchewan Arts Board. Earlier she was employed by Saskatchewan Culture and Youth and taught visual arts in secondary schools in Regina.

Joyce Heather Elspeth (nÈe Rowe) Cohnstaedt was born in Toronto and moved with her parents, E B Rowe and Dorothy Rowe, and her older brother, from Ontario to Saskatchewan in 1943. After earning an undergraduate Fine Arts degree, she was hired by the Glenbow Foundation to excavate, among others, a Paleo-Indian bison bone bed, the Fletcher site. A diorama of this site was featured in the Royal Alberta Museum. By 1967 her interest in culture led to the first of many research trips to the Canadian arctic and sub-arctic and travel with Inuit by komatik.

First engaged as a member of the short-lived federal cultural committee in 1979, Joy was appointed to the Federal Cultural Policy Review Committee (FCPRC), popularly known as the Applebaum-HÈÅbert Committee, in 1980. During this time, she represented the Government of Canada at several General Assemblies of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. While a Manitoba Deputy Minister, Joy led the negotiation of the first Federal Economic and Regional Development Agreement on Culture and Communications and was responsible for major revisions to the heritage act and Manitoba's first piece of legislation on multiculturalism, the Manitoba Intercultural Council Act, as well as other major organization and legislative changes. Her responsibilities also included the Provincial Archives and Legislative Library, Manitoba Library Services, French Language Services, Telecommunications, and the Queens Printer.

Joy was awarded the Bora Laskin National Fellowship in Human Rights Research in support of her work in cultural and communications policy. Her university career, in the visual arts and art history, in particular Indigenous culture, and later graduate studies in culture and communication law and policy, began in 1989. Earlier academic studies included Harvard Business School, Queen's University, and the Universities of Manitoba, Newcastle Upon Tyne and Saskatchewan. Joy's research interests and publications include studies in comparative cultural policy, arts and the law, arts and cultural administration, and minorities and the arts.

Her husband, Martin Cohnstaedt, a Jewish German Holocaust survivor, and Joy helped to found "New Roots", arguably Canada's first ecological land trust. Following his death, she repatriated a portion of the family's extensive library to Germany for deposit in the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt am Main and the City Archives, and the remainder of the library and a collection of documents to the University of Manitoba Archives and Special Collections. She has donated rare books to the Toronto Reference Library and elsewhere.

When Joy retired from her tenured appointment at York University she continued to teach and supervise graduate students for another decade. She volunteered with the Canadian Textile Museum for over ten years and accepted an appointment to the Board of the Baby Point Heritage Foundation. In 2019 the Etobicoke Historical Society recognized her involvement in local heritage activities with the Jean Hibbert Memorial Award.