Nina Valiquette: Travelling filmmaker

By Barbara Black

Joanna Valiquette, known to her teachers and colleagues as Nina, is an outstanding political science student. She came back Concordia after a successful career as a documentary and commercial filmmaker.

She had lived in Paris for nearly five years and attended a private design college there, then wrote a documentary on clothing design for a friend in Montreal. This led to about seven years working as a producer out of Toronto, making television commercials, music videos and documentary films.

“I specialized in location shoots, and travelled extensively — Australia, Indonesia, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Panama, Ireland, France, and across the U.S. and Canada.”

Increasingly, she felt that through her employers, she was having a negative effect on the poor places she was working in. She was in Panama producing a documentary for National Geographic when she decided that not only was this rich U.S. company behaving badly, but her own knowledge of the world was too narrow.

“I moved back to Montreal and enrolled as an independent student at Concordia to test the waters,” she said. She took a political science introductory class that summer and was hooked.

“It seemed like a degree in contemporary history, a window into the functioning of the world,” she said. It also helped that the students around her were so diverse that she wasn’t made to feel awkward as a mature student.

“The professors and department staff were so encouraging; it had an enormous amount to do with my decision to specialize in political science.”

Now she plans to pursue a master’s and a PhD in political theory at McGill.