Born in New York in 1971, lives and works in Vancouver. Since 2001 Adad Hannah has been working on his series Stills consisting of silent videos that exist at the intersection of performance, photography, and video. Based on the 19th-century practice of tableaux vivants, Hannah's videos, photographs, and installations look at how we perform as spectators, and how our gaze can be a constructive one as we try to make sense of ourselves and the world around us.
He has exhibited extensively on six continents and his work is in important collections across Canada and abroad. In 2004 he won the Toronto Images Festival Installation/New Media Award, and the Bogdanka Poznanovic Award at Videomedeja 8. In 2009 he was awarded the Canada Council for the Arts' Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Mid-Career Artist Award.
His work has been funded by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec, the B.C Arts Council, the Vancouver Foundation/Contemporary Art Gallery, the Quebec Delegations and Canadian Embassies in Madrid, Seoul, Tokyo, and New York. He has produced works at museums around the world including the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the National Gallery of Canada, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, the LEEUM Museum (Seoul), and the Prado Museum (Madrid).
Hannah's work can be found in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Ke Center for Contemporary Art (Shanghai), the Zacheta National Gallery of Art (Warsaw), BMO Financial Group and the Royal Bank of Canada. Recently, he curated an exhibition of Phyllis Lambert's photographs at PFOAC and is currently co-curating an exhibition of works from the collection of Yosef Wosk at the Audain Art Museum.