BIOGRAPHY
Joey DAMMIT! is a mixed media pop artist/illustrator, with a self-described obsession with the darker side of celebrity, media and religion. With a background in the world of advertising, it’s not surprising that he’s parlayed his love-hate relationship with mass media into a career that is both critically incisive and commercially successful.
DAMMIT! was born in Madeira, Portugal, and immigrated with his family to Toronto, Canada, at the age of four. In his teens, he began pursuing his two great passions—art and music. In the 1980s, he fronted several “loud hair metal” bands before ultimately realizing that his true talents lay in the visual arts. After earning a college diploma in Advertising and Graphic Design, he launched a career in advertising and marketing.
Over time, his “Mad Men” fantasy lost its allure. DAMMIT!’s fascination with the cult of personality, his interest in pop culture, and his passion for drawing and painting ultimately gave rise to the distinctive Joey DAMMIT! style—pop-surrealist paintings that blend Andy Warhol’s pop sensibilities, Robert Rauschenberg’s collage-driven aesthetic, and David Lynch’s dark, tongue-in-cheek imagery.
His subject matters runs the gamut. While he first gained recognition for incorporating celebrity icons into densely layered collages with found objects, his more recent work adopts a deceptively cleaner and more streamlined aesthetic. The collage work is still there, but often as a ghosted image beneath a veil of paint. The spot-lit icons still take centre stage, but now are usually rendered in a Frankensteinian, hybrid fashion, be that in weathered robotic limbs or amphibious facial features.
A three time winner of Toronto’s NOW magazine’s “Best Visual Artist” award, his work has earned both widespread media attention and top-tier accolades. Toronto Life magazine described his creations as “edgy and darkly funny.” MIX magazine proclaimed him “widely acknowledged as an artist of stunning, genre-wrecking work,” while Target Market magazine noted that his art is “never dull, never pretentious, and always mesmerizing.”
DAMMIT! also reveals a more serious side, one he has never hesitated to share. Open about his experiences with depression and anxiety, and a committed advocate against the stigma surrounding mental health, he became a co-founder of Touched By Fire, an annual art exhibition and gala dedicated to raising awareness of mental illness within the creative community. He has done various “Artist Talks”, on this, and other subjects in colleges and universities, including a prestiges TEDx Talk, at McMaster University, in early 2015. His first book, A Many Splintered Thing: The Art of Joey DAMMIT!, featuring full-colour drawings drawn directly from his sketchbooks, was released in early 2026.