Chantal Banda

Chantal Banda is a Canadian painter and physiologist based in her hometown of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, on the Canadian prairies. She paints the prairie landscape in large-format oil and acrylic on canvas, and her work turns on one question: how a painting can meet the body as well as the eye.

Her first career was in research. She holds a BSc (Honours) in human physiology from the University of Saskatchewan, a Master of Applied Science in biomedical engineering from Dalhousie University, and a PhD in experimental surgery from the University of Alberta, with a research focus on Type 1 diabetes. She then held an award-winning postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Saskatchewan. Her early research training included neuroscience. More recently, she coordinated a multi-centre, CIHR-funded clinical study, including its ethics submissions and REDCap data systems. As a certified yoga teacher, she brings a practitioner's understanding of breath, gaze, and attention into the studio. A lifelong creative, she found landscape painting coming to the fore during a season of homeschooling her three children.

Her third solo exhibition, Shifting Horizons (2026), hangs eighteen paintings as a single sequence that works as a regulation arc. The room opens and closes at first light. In between, it moves from the openness of a wide prairie sky, into the charge of a storm, toward attention narrowed to a single point of light, and finally into the settling of still water. A recurring motif of standing dead trees with new growth explores how art can hold and metabolize difficulty rather than simply depict it. Her work has been shown across Saskatchewan. It has also been selected for live auction by curators from the Saskatchewan Craft Council and Remai Modern, Saskatoon's contemporary art museum. A virtual walkthrough of the show will be available soon at chantalbandaart.com.

Children and families have long been part of her work. From 2020 to 2023, she founded and led Parenting ADHD, a five-module educational program that translated peer-reviewed research for parents of children with ADHD, anxiety, and learning disorders. She now hopes to bring that experience together with her art practice through research on painting and the brain. She is developing a study concept on painting and brain activity in children with epilepsy, with a possible extension to ADHD. Music has an established research base in epilepsy, but painting has barely been tested there. A second concept looks at painting, anxiety, and mental health in adults. Both ideas are at the concept stage, and she is seeking research collaborators to develop them. She also founded Calm on Canvas, an art-and-wellbeing practice.

Through this community, she hopes to connect with neuroscientists, clinicians, and fellow artists, especially in pediatric neurology, ADHD, mental health, and EEG research. She also wants to learn how others build rigorous studies around creative practice. She is an experienced grant writer and works fluently in English and French.