Dr. Jill Andrew
Dr. Jill Andrew, PhD (she/her) is an award-winning educator, community engager, journalist, and keynote speaker. Her career spans work as a child and youth worker, student equity and human rights advisor, civic leader, and longtime body justice advocate. She is co-founder and Executive Director of Body Confidence Canada, home of Body Confidence Awareness Week, recognized by two of Canada’s largest school boards, the Body Confidence Canada Awards (BCCAs) and Curvy Catwalk - Canada's first plus size fashion show to raise funds for National Eating Disorder Information Centre and Sheena's Place held in 2006.
Jill is also a member of the Toronto Metropolitan University's School of Fashion Advisory Council and in 2022 the Toronto Metropolitan University’s Viola Desmond Alumna Award for that year was named in her honour. Jill was named as one of Toronto's 52 Women Who Changed Toronto by the Museum of Toronto and later this year she will receive the Racial Justice Award from the Urban Alliance on Race Relations.
Jill has co-edited two anthologies Body Stories: In and Out and With and Through Fat and Black Sisterhoods: Paradigms and Praxis. She also penned the foreword for Fat Studies in Canada: (Re)Mapping the Field and the afterword for Fat Girls in Black Bodies: Creating Communities of Our Own. Her PhD "Put Together": Black Women's Body Stories in Toronto: (Ad)dressing Identity and the Threads that Bind explores the 'trifecta' of anti-Black racism, sexism and fat hatred experienced by Black women and their accommodation and resistance of dominant beauty ideals through fashion and dress, activism, self-valuation and social interactions with family, in schooling and the workplace, and in other institutions. Her advocacy and scholarship has also been featured in the Hot Docs Citizen Minutes documentary Body Politics.
In June 2018, Dr. Andrew made history as the first queer Black person elected to any provincial legislature in Canada, serving as a Member of Provincial Parliament in Ontario’s Legislative Assembly and as an Official Opposition 'Shadow Minister' advocating for women’s social and economic opportunities, arts, culture, and heritage until 2025. As one of the few Official Opposition parliamentarians to successfully pass legislation, Jill's Bill 61 passed unanimously proclaiming the first week of February each year as Eating Disorders Awareness Week across Ontario. This legislation wouldn't have been possible without the support of many community leaders including faculty and former students from TMU School of Fashion.
Jill is currently a lecturer at the Creative School, School of Fashion, where she and her students are inspired weekly by the principles of Design Justice and the many opportunities it affords them to design, whether objects or systems with community, care, and ethics at the center!