Source: http://www.transculturalexchange.org/2016-conference/presenters.htm
Timestamp: 2019-04-24 08:17:16+00:00

Document:
Julie Burros is the Chief of Arts and Culture for the city of Boston, a cabinet level position reporting directly to Mayor Martin J. Walsh. She oversees the office of Arts and Culture, which houses the Boston Cultural Council and the Boston Art Commission. Her duties include supervising the creation of a Cultural Plan for Boston and overseeing grant making, grant seeking, public art, exhibitions and selected public programs and events. Formerly, Burros was the Director of Cultural Planning at the city of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, where she directed the creation of the 2012 Chicago Cultural Plan. Burros is also an adjunct researcher at the University of International Business and Economics (UIBE), School of Public Administration in Beijing China, and an adjunct faculty member at The Theater School at DePaul University in Chicago.
Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi is a practicing artist, President and Director of the Sharjah Art Foundation, Curator of Sharjah Biennial 6 and Curator of the National Pavilion of the United Arab Emirates at the 56th Venice Biennale. She is also the Chair of the Advisory Board for the College of Art and Design at the University of Sharjah, Member of the Advisory Board of the Khoj International Artists’ Association in India and Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing. Additionally she serves on the Board of Directors for MoMA PS1 in New York, KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, the International Biennial Association in Gwangju and Ashkal Alwan in Beirut. Further, she is a Visiting Lecturer at Slade School of Fine Art in London and is currently a Scholar-in-Residence with The Institute for Comparative Modernities (ICM) at Cornell University. She has served on the juries for the Dubai International Film Festival and the Benesse Prize.
Matthew Teitelbaum is the Ann and Graham Gund Director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Prior to his appointment at the MFA, he was the Michael and Sonja Koerner Director and CEO of the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, where he spearheaded a major expansion and renovation of that museum. Prior to his directorships, Teitelbaum served as a curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; the Medndel Art Gallery, Saskatoon; and the London Regional Art Gallery in London, Ontario. In 2006, he received the honor of Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French government for his ongoing commitment and contributions to the arts; in 2008, he received the RCA medal from the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts for his outstanding support to the development of the visual arts in Canada; and in 2009, he was awarded the Canadian Centre for Diversity’s Human Relations Award and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (MOCCA) Award for arts leadership.
Level of Confidence is a face- recognition camera that has been trained with the faces of the 43 disappeared students from Ayotzinapa School in Iguala, Mexico. As you stand in front of the camera, the system uses algorithms to find which student's facial features look most like yours and gives a "level of confidence" on how accurate the match is, in percent. The piece will always fail to make a positive match, as we know that the students were likely murdered, but the commemorative side of the project is the relentless search for them and their overlap with the public's own facial features. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s interactive installations exist at the intersection of architecture and performance art. His main interest is in creating platforms for public participation, by perverting technologies such as robotics, computerized surveillance or telematic networks. Inspired by phantasmagoria, carnival and animatronics, his light and shadow works are "antimonuments for alien agency". His work was recently the subject of solo exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Fundación Telefónica in Buenos Aires and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. He was the first artist to officially represent Mexico at the Venice Biennale with a solo exhibition at Palazzo Soranzo Van Axel in 2007. He has also shown at Art Biennials and Triennials in Havana, Istanbul, Kochi, Liverpool, Montréal, Moscow, New Orleans, Seville, Seoul, Shanghai, Singapore and Sydney. Collections holding his work include the MoMA in New York, Tate in London, AGO in Toronto, CIFO in Miami, Jumex in Mexico City, DAROS in Zurich, Borusan Contemporary in Istanbul, MUAC in Mexico City, 21st Century Museum of Art in Kanazawa, MAG in Manchester, MUSAC in Leon, MONA in Hobart, ZKM in Karlsruhe, MAC in Montréal and SAM in Singapore, among others.
‘Level of Confidence’ is presented by TransCultural Exchange with permission and thanks to the kind generosity of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer.
Mischa Kuball uses the medium of light – in installations and photography – to explore architectural spaces and contribute to social and political discourses. His works have been presented in such well-known institutions as Bauhaus Dessau, the Jewish Museum (New York), Hamburger Kunsthalle and the NTT-Intercommunication Center Tokyo. He also has produced temporary installations for the Kunstsammlung NRW Düsseldorf, Neue Nationalgalerie (Berlin), ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe and Centre Pompidou-Metz. Additionally, since 2009, he has developed a series of site-specific installations, entitled public preposition, which were shown at Caserma Cornoldi (Venice), the Chinati Foundation (Marfa, Texas) and as part of the Bone14-Performance Festivals in Bern. As of 2007 he also is a Professor in the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, Associate Professor for media art at Hochschule für Gestaltung/ZKM in Karlsruhe, and since 2015 member of North Rhine- Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts in Dusseldorf. In 2016 he will be honored with the German Light Award.
Mischa Kuball’s presentation is sponsored by Emerson College.
To find the speakers by their last name, click on the letter below.
Lanfranco Aceti works as an academic, artist and curator. He is a visiting Professor at Goldsmiths, University of London’s Department of Media and Communication; a Professor of Contemporary Art and Digital Culture at Istanbul’s Sabanci University’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences; the Director of Arts Administration at Boston University and Editor in Chief of the Leonardo Electronic Almanac (published by the MIT Press and Leonardo/International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology). He has also served as the Artistic Director and Conference Chair for ISEA2011 Istanbul and works as the Gallery Director at Istanbul’s Kasa Gallery. He has a PhD from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London. His work has been published in Leonardo, Routledge and Art Inquiry. His interdisciplinary research focuses on the intersection between digital arts, visual culture and new media technologies. He has exhibited internationally and participated in numerous art fairs and biennials.
Jeremy Adams is the Executive Director of the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild in Woodstock, NY. Previously he was Executive Director at CUE Art Foundation, where he served for ten years. Before being at CUE, he was the Vice President and Director of Operations of Art4love Inc., a company that focuses on leasing the work of emerging artists to corporations and health care institutions throughout the New York region. He has also served as Assistant Director of Pamela Auchincloss Arts Management Services and managed the Pamela Auchincloss Gallery in New York City.
Azra Akšamija is an artist, architectural historian and Assistant Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Art, Culture and Technology Program. Her multi-disciplinary work investigates the potency of art and architecture to facilitate the process of transformative mediation in cultural or political conflicts, and, in so doing, provides a framework for researching, analyzing and intervening in contested socio-political realities. Her recent work focuses on the representation of Islamic identities in the West, spatial mediation of identity politics and cultural pedagogy. Her work takes on varied forms, including clothing, video, sculpture, new media and interventions in public spaces and has been published and exhibited in leading venues, including Generali Foundation Vienna, the Valencia Biennial, Liverpool Biennial, Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb, Sculpture Center, Secession in Vienna, Manifesta 7, Stroom The Hague, the Royal Academy of Arts London, Jewish Museum Berlin and Fondazione Giorgio Cini, as part of the 54th Art Biennale in Venice.
Michelle Atherton is an artist based in London. Her work objectifies cultural phenomena as a means to investigate structures, systems and indeterminate preoccupations. She is interested in the resistance of space through the image and the construction of an insubordinate aesthetic. Most recent exhibitions include at RAF Cosford and the Tatton Park Biennale in the UK, the Zeppelin Museum and Kino Babylon in Germany, Linergallari Tallinn in Estonia and Dagmar de Pooter Gallery in Antwerp. Her work has been supported through the Arts and Humanities Research Council; and she is a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University.
Sam Auinger is a sonic thinker, composer and sound artist. Together with Bruce Odland he founded O+A in 1989. Their central theme is "hearing perspective”; and they are known for producing large-scale, public space sound installations that transform city noise into harmony in real-time. In 2009 O+A started on the Sonic Commons, which questions the dominance of visual culture in our perception of the world. In 2001 he, Dietmar Offenhuber and Hannes Strobl started the artistic research project stadtmusik. Additionally from 2008 till 2012 he was professor at the University of the Arts in Berlin, running the department of Experimental Sound Design at the Master's Program Sound Studies. He currently collaborates with city planers and architects, giving lectures and is a frequent participant at international symposia, presenting on the topic of urban planning, architecture, media, the senses and sound in particular.
Maria Rebecca Ballestra is an Italian visual artist, based in Italy, living and working in nomadic conditions. Her work is focused on the reprocessing and resetting of social, political and environmental themes and on synthesizing ethno-cultural codes, investigated during journeys and several artist residency programs around the world. Her work includes elaborated trans-disciplinary projects, which emphasize communicative and social aspects set into artistic practice in site and context specific installations, relational projects and photography. Her last production Journey into Fragility is oriented towards the perception of the future in relation to climate change and multiple human interventions in the natural environment and the sense of insecurity and anxiety that characterizes this new millennium.
Amanda Bayley is Professor of Music at Bath Spa University in the UK. She is also Editor of The Cambridge Companion to Bartók (Cambridge University Press, 2001) and Recorded Music: Performance, Culture, and Technology (Cambridge University Press, 2010) for which she received the Ruth A. Solie Award from the American Musicological Society in 2011. Additionally, she is Humanities Editor for the Journal of Interdisciplinary Music Studies. Her collaborative research with Michael Finnissy and the Kreutzer Quartet (funded by the British Academy) led to an interactive DVD produced with Michael Clarke (University of Huddersfield). Her current work focuses on cross-cultural collaborations, including work with the Kronos Quartet.
Thaddeus Beal was formally educated at Yale College and Stanford Law School. He left an active legal practice in 1985 when he withdrew as a senior partner of the Boston firm, now Nixon Peabody, to attend The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He has continued to work in the legal field in many pro bono capacities, including as a hearing officer in matters relating to lawyer misconduct; but he now works primarily as an artist. He has been awarded three Massachusetts Council for the Arts Fellowships; and his works are in many collections, including The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He regularly shows in Boston. He also has served on several charitable boards, and is currently a board member of Discovering Justice, a non-profit dedicated to educating public school students about justice and community involvement, as well as TransCultural Exchange.
Erin Becker is the Norma Jean Calderwood Director of the Cambridge Art Association (CAA). Since 2012, she has increased the visibility of the Association by expanding the longtime exhibition and program schedules of the Kathryn Schultz Gallery, including establishing a youth outreach program in collaboration with Cambridge Creativity Commons and the Cambridge Youth Programs/Gately Youth Center as well as fostering collaborative relationships with such local organizations as Maud Morgan Arts, Cambridge Community Television, Lesley University College of Art and Design and the Griffin Museum of Photography. In addition to her work at CAA, she serves on the Board of Directors of the Harvard Square Business Association, the Advisory Board for Cambridge Open Studios and is a co-founder of the Art Centers Alliance, a group of roughly 25 community arts leaders. She is also a past reviewer for the Cambridge Arts Council’s LLC Grant Program and past Gala Committee Member at the Guidance Center.
Marnie Benney is the curator of the University of Maryland's Brick Garden project—a media series and collaborative virtual workspace at the intersection of two trends: the multidisciplinary interest in culture-based thinking to address pressing social challenges and the rising prevalence of social practice in the arts. She is also a freelance curator for the Sandbox Initiative — a project that explores our aesthetic relation to the natural world, Programs and Outreach Manager for SciArt Center and a contributor to Baltimore's top culture blog Bmoreart. She has collaboratively curated exhibitions such as Nature in the Dark, Locally Sourced and the Baker B-Grant Awards. She has a passion for engaging local and international communities through approachable, experimental, multisensory, contemporary art events at the intersection of art, science and technology.
Karmela Berg is an artist based in Tel Aviv. Her works, which include paintings, installations, works on paper and artist books (most notably that with the author Amos Oz and with the late poet Dalia Rabicovich) have received prizes from Japan, Italy and Sweden. She has exhibited in solo and group shows in Europe, the USA, Japan, Korea and China. In 2004, she also participated in TransCultural Exchange’s The Tile Project, Destination: The World for which she was the contact artist for the installation at Tel Aviv University. In addition, she is a consultant for the Hezla and Cabri Artist-in-Residency programs, and has curated a number of exhibits, including Israeli Art for the Beijing Museum of Natural History and the Tianjing Academy of Fine Art.
Sandeep Bhagwati is a composer, researcher, poet, theatre maker, installation artist and conductor. In his work, he likes to ask himself questions that he cannot answer, and set himself tasks that stymie him. To further foster his ignorance, he founded a research-creation lab, the matralab, where he and his team work on computer-improvisation, interactive scores, bodysuit scores and new inter-traditional music and theater forms, but also on comprovisational technique, inter-x aesthetics and world-conscious practices e.g political or environmental sound art. After studies at the Mozarteum Salzburg and Music University Munich as well as at IRCAM/Paris, and many years as a free-lance artist and festival curator, he became Professor of composition at Karlsruhe Music University in 2000 and, since 2006, a Canada Research Chair for Inter-X Art at Concordia University Montréal. His works are shown and performed worldwide in leading festivals and venues. His writings are published, in academia and beyond.
Kathleen Bitetti has been a Boston-based artist, curator and arts/artist activist since 1989. Her activism focuses on public policy, advocacy, community building and the development of free or low cost resources and services for artists working in all genres, as well as artist-run businesses and organizations. She is the co-author of Stand Up and Be Counted, the first survey of Massachusetts’ artists on their work lives, socioeconomic status, access to healthcare, and medical and non-medical debt. She was the Executive Director of the Artists Foundation from 1992 to 2009, the Director of the Lillian Immig Gallery at Emmanuel College from 1999 to 2010 and the director of the Harbor Gallery at University of Massachusetts, Boston from 1989 to 1992. In January 2011, she joined Medicine Wheel Productions as Chief Curator. She has exhibited her work internationally, nationally and locally. Her work is in the permanent collections of the DeCordova Museum and the New Bedford Art Museum. Bitetti is currently an artist-in-residence in the City of Quincy. She was a visiting artist in 2009 at the Gozo Contemporary in Malta and a visiting artist at Dartington College of Arts (UK) in May 2010.
Dan Blask is the Program Officer for Artist Fellowships at the Massachusetts Cultural Council. For the MCC, Dan coordinates grant programs for individual artists, including grants for composers, filmmakers, and writers of fiction, nonfiction, dramatic writing and poetry. He is co-creator and writer of the ArtSake blog, focusing on practical and creative issues for artists in all disciplines.
Sarah Bliss is an artist and filmmaker with a background in religious studies. She explores relationships between body, place, language and memory, engaging personal and social history. Her collaboration Waterbody (with sculptor Rosalyn Driscoll), an immersive moving image installation, was exhibited at the Boston Sculptors Gallery in 2015; and her curatorial project The Embodied Voice, showcasing international interdisciplinary work employing voice as subject or tool, will be at the University of Massachusetts’ Hampden Gallery in the fall. Her work has been screened internationally and received awards and fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council; the Brazilian Azorean Prize of Plastic Arts; the Alchemy Film Festival, Scotland; the Cill Rialaig Project, Ireland; the Vermont Studio Center; and a commission for Boston’s 80-ft tall, multi-screen LED MCCA Marquee.
Ulli Boehmelmann is a German visual artist, based in Cologne. Her large-scale site-specific installations address the real perception of temporal and spatial distances. She searches for places and architectures with a special atmosphere, regardless of their origin, and installs projects both inside and outside of art institutions. She has had artist residencies in Germany, Japan and France and was awarded national and international grants for installation projects. Her work has been shown in Germany, France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Japan, Russia and the US.
David Bonetti was a journalistic art critic for 25 years, writing as staff critic for the Boston Phoenix, the San Francisco Examiner and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He has also written for ARTnews, Art in America, Art New England and numerous other publications. He has taught contemporary art courses at Brown University, Boston College, the University of Massachusetts in Boston and the San Francisco Art Institute. His most recent published piece is an interview/profile of the woodcut printmaker Tom Huck for the catalog of a retrospective of his work at Gallery 210 at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.
Esther Bourdages is an art historian and author. She holds a master’s degree in Art History from the Université de Montréal. Her interests lie in sculpture in the broadest sense of the word, including sound art and digital art. She organizes improvised music concerts and regularly performs internationally, notably in the US and France. Employing improvisation, she plays the turntable, manipulates vinyl records and records sound samples to create rough, non-linear sound works, punctuated by adulterated aural quotations and abstract sounds. Since 2002 she has organized A Microphone in a Noize Storm, a concert series dedicated to new music. She has been actively involved in artist-run-centers and independent structures for many years, such as Quartier Ephemere / Darling Foundry (since 1996), Agence Topo, Eastern Bloc and CKUT radio.
Larissa Buchholz is a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. She earned an MA in interdisciplinary Cultural Sciences in Germany and a PhD in Sociology at Columbia University. Her research specializes in the sociology of culture and art in a global context. Her most recent research project The Global Rules of Art, has won numerous awards and is under contract with Princeton University Press.
Jean Butler is the President and Founder of Arts Are Essential, Inc., a 501(c)3 public charity, and the Co-Director of the Senegal-America Project, a program of AAE, Inc. She has over 30 years experience with arts in education and community arts programming. She is a former school-committee member and chair, and served as chair on a variety of arts organizations, such as the West Suburban Creative Arts Council and the Acton Boxborough Arts Council. She has traveled to Senegal, West Africa over a dozen times and led 10 groups of artists and middle school students on the Senegal-America Project Trip, a cultural education exchange experience. During these trips, she has been key in helping to establish a variety of service projects that were suggested by the travelers' interests. AAE, Inc. has helped with the implementation of education and health care initiatives, cultural awareness and the exchange of ideas, arts and friendship.
María Magdalena Campos-Pons is a Cuban-born artist, based in Boston. A key figure among artists in post-revolutionary Cuba, she is also a professor at the School of The Museum of Fine Arts and co-founder of GASP ARTS Gallery Artists Studio Projects. She has exhibited internationally, including solo shows at the Museum of Modern Art, 2001 Venice Biennale, 2013 Johannesburg Biennial, First Liverpool Biennial, Dak'ART Biennial in Senegal, Guangzhou Triennial, 3rd Biennial of Bahia at San Salvador and 1991, 2011 and 2015 Havana Biennials. A 20-year retrospective of her work, Everything is Separated by Water: Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons opened in Indianapolis Museum of Arts in 2007. Currently Alchemy of the Soul: Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons is on view at Peabody Essex Museum. In 2015, she received the 100 Leading Global Thinkers 2015 Award by Foreign Policy and was list as one of the ten top best artists in 2015 by the New York Times.
Deborah Cannarella is a professional writer, editor and translator. She has written and edited a number of books and magazines, heavily illustrated with photographs and original artwork. She has helped furniture makers, textile and fashion designers, jewelry designers and many other types of artists and artisans develop books and magazine articles about their work.
Josely Carvalho is a Brazilian multi-interdisciplinary artist, living in New York and Rio de Janeiro. Over the past three decades, she has assembled a body of work in a wide range of media that gives an eloquent voice to matters of memory, identity and social justice, while consistently challenging the boundaries between artist and audience and between politics and art. She approaches smell through the construction of original fragrances (i.e. the smell of a nest), sculpture installations, smell video, photographs, artist’s books, residences and smell walks. She is the recipient of a number of grants, including from the Creative Capital Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation/Bellagio, National Endowment for the Arts and New York Foundation for the Arts, among others. She has exhibited internationally in museums and has works in several public collections. She is also the Founder of The Silkscreen Project, St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, New York City.
Jean-Marie Casbarian incorporates photography, film and video projections, sound, sculpture and performance in her artworks. Along with exhibiting her works internationally, she has received a number of awards and artist residencies, including being a Research/Studio Art Associate with Five-Colleges, Inc., a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation nominee, a LaNapoule Foundation grantee (France), a Chicago Artist's Assistance Project grantee and an associate with The Rocky Mountain Women's Institute. As an educator, she currently teaches and advises graduate students at Transart Institute, a low-residency MFA program based in Berlin and New York City, and is a faculty member with the ICP-Bard MFA program and the International Center of Photography in New York. She has also taught in the film and photography departments at Hampshire College and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Pau Cata has been working in the cultural field as a facilitator and curator for more than 10 years, including at the British Museum and at the White Cube Gallery in London. He has an MA in Critical Arts Management from London South Bank University, where he was awarded the Course Director Prize for Outstanding Achievement. He is currently the Coordinator of the artists-in-residency program at CeRCCa. As part of his job, he has developed numerous research projects in the field of artists-in-residencies in the Balkans and North Africa and has curated more than 12 exhibitions.
Pieranna Cavalchini is the Curator of Contemporary Art at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is a collection of fine and decorative art and an innovative venue for contemporary artists, musicians and scholars. Housed in a 15th-century Venetian-style palace with three stories of galleries surrounding a sun and flower-filled courtyard, the Museum provides an unusual backdrop for the viewing of art. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum's preeminent collection contains more than 2,500 paintings, sculptures, tapestries, furniture, manuscripts, rare books and decorative arts. The galleries house works by some of the most recognized artists in the world, including Titian, Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Raphael, Botticelli, Manet, Degas, Whistler and Sargent.
Judith Tolnick Champa is a hybrid independent curator/art writer. As the Founding Director of The Providence Biennial, she eagerly anticipates its debut in 2017. The Biennial is conceived as a series of curated installations and exhibitions featuring regional, national and international artists taking place across the city/state that is Providence, RI and adjacent portions of Massachusetts. It is modeled on European examples, rather than locally titled biennial exhibitions. Judith is developing the project after serving as editor-in-chief for the regional Boston magazine Art New England, which in turn followed curating and directing first at Brown University’s David Winton Bell Gallery, and later the University of Rhode Island’s former Fine Arts Center Galleries in Kingston, near Connecticut. She is a committed post-war and contemporary curator trained in Brown’s History of Art graduate program, where teaching with objects became her passion and the original impetus for embarking upon a curatorial career.
Danice Yequay Chou is a biomedical engineer (working for Biomedical Modeling, Inc., an anatomical engineering company in Boston), 3D modeler and 2D graphics artist. Her professional engineering work focuses on the creation of patient-specific anatomical models from medical imaging data for surgical planning, custom prostheses, medical device testing, and healthcare education. Through this work, she has developed experience and growing interests in image processing, 3D printing, CAD modeling and 3D scanning, and reverse engineering. She also has worked on the development of radiological phantom models for medical imaging studies and medical simulators for training surgical residents. Through her work, she has explored fabrication methods, including various additive fabrication technologies, CNC milling and silicone casting. Her more artistic endeavors involve two-dimensional drawings in ink, watercolor and digital media, as well as less constrained explorations with 3D modeling.
Jean-Yves Coffre is the Director of Camac, a creative, multi-disciplinary center offering international residency programs for visual artists, writers, musicians and scientists in Marnay-sur-Seine, outside of Paris. He is also the author of Hangzhou, un Phénix au coeur de jade, published in 2009. While at Camac, he has organized and curated renowned exhibitions displaying contemporary artists. He aims to show the importance of an art center located in a rural area by creating links between Marnay-sur-Seine's population and Camac's artists, and by demonstrating the economic impact of the program's cultural projects. In 13 years, in this village of 230 inhabitants, Camac has established a vibrant and dynamic image throughout the entire region. In collaboration with the local government, Camac will re-open the village’s bar/restaurant to offer multicultural events based on a new economic and environmental model.
Roger Colombik lives in the Texas Hill Country with his wife and artistic collaborator Jerolyn. He and Jerolyn have completed several public commissions in Texas, including works for The Miller Library in Beaumont, Austin’s 2nd St. Redevelopment Project and the San Marcos Embassy Suites/Convention Center. He has spent several years experiencing the post-Soviet/post Berlin Wall hangover that has destabilized many countries in their attempts to become civil societies, where traditions and cultural heritage often collide head-on with westernization and government malfeasance. He has completed major public projects in Armenia, the Republic of Georgia and Romania with the goal of promoting community dialogue on issues of emigration, education and communal memory. He teaches sculpture at Texas State University, San Marcos.
N.C. Christopher Couch teaches comics, graphic novels, science fiction film, animation and Native American art and culture in the Comparative Literature program at the University of Massachusetts. He is the author of books on Latin American art and comics, including The Will Eisner Companion: The Pioneering Spirit of the Father of the Graphic Novel (with Stephen Weiner), Will Eisner: A Retrospective (with Peter Myer), Faces of Eternity: Masks of the Pre-Columbian Americas, The Festival Cycle of the Aztec Codex Borbonicus and Jerry Robinson Ambassador of Comics.
Luc Courchesne is a pioneer in media art and design. From interactive portraiture to immersive experience systems, he has developed innovative approaches that have earned him such prestigious awards as the Grand Prix of the ICC Biennale 1997 in Tokyo, an Award of Distinction and several Honorary Mentions at Prix Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria, an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and participations in Wired’s Next Fest. His work is part of major public and private collections in North America, Europe and Asia, including the ZKM (Karlsruhe), the ICC (Tokyo) and the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa). He is also a founding member and current Co-Director of research at the Society for Art and Technology and Honorary Professor at Université de Montréal.
Jeanne Criscola is an interdisciplinary artist, designer and educator. She earned her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and MFA in New Media from the University of Danube Krems and Transart Institute. Her artwork reveals the content and context of information and communicates them in graphical form with the devices of human culture, technology, language and other symbols. They take the form of time-based projections, installations and works on paper and have been exhibited internationally. Her award-winning design studio also has an international clientele engaged in issues of justice, social activism, culture and conceptual engagement.
Jay Critchley is a conceptual and multi-media artist and activist whose work has been exhibited in US, Argentina, Japan, England, Spain, France, Holland, Germany and Columbia. His first museum survey was held in 2015 at the Provincetown Art Association/Museum, his videos were showcased at the Provincetown International Film Festival—including the HBO award-winning Toilet Treatments—and his work has been featured on LOGO TV and BBC/UK. He also has served as an artist residence at Harvard University, AS220 (Rhode Island), Harvestworks (NYC), Williams College (Massachusetts) Real Art Ways, (Connecticut), Milepost 5 (Oregon), Fundacion Valparaiso, Mojacar (Spain) and CAMAC, (France). Additionally, he founded the Provincetown Community Compact, which runs artist residencies; the Swim for Life AIDS/women’s health benefit, which has raised $4M; and the controversial patriotic Old Glory Condom Corporation. Previously, he taught at the Museum School, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Lauren Cross is an artist, curator and interdisciplinary scholar who earned her MFA in Visual Arts from Lesley University in 2010. She is currently a doctoral candidate in Multicultural Women’s Studies at Texas Woman’s University in Denton, Texas. She is also the Founder/Director of WoCA Projects, a non-profit art organization in Fort Worth, Texas, which highlights the works of women artists of color and artists of diverse backgrounds working in underrepresented mediums. In 2013 she was selected as one of The Fort Worth Weekly’s Visionary Award winners, and was listed as #32 in The Dallas Observer’s 100 Dallas Creatives in 2014.
John Crowley is an artist, former member of the Boston's youth Mural Crew and, currently, Director of Exhibitions at Boston City Hall.
Sally Curcio is the Gallery Manager at Hampden Gallery, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; co-curator of such shows as Eye Witness and A Novel Idea at Hampden Gallery; X Marks the Spot at New York City’s DUMBO Arts Festival; and A Prize Every Time at APE Gallery in Northampton, Massachusetts. She is also co-owner of Pick My Brain Consulting. Pick My Brain Consulting is a full-service arts consulting business, which helps artists with all aspects of their careers, including setting goals, preparing gallery and portfolio submissions and designing exhibition layouts and PR materials. She has exhibited her work internationally and nationally (upcoming shows include at the Peabody Essex Museum and Fitchburg Art Museum) and is represented by Harmon Gallery in Wellfleet, Massachusetts and Fresh Paint Art Advisors in Culver City, California. Recently she received an Artist's Resource Trust Grant from the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation and the Blanche E. Colman award.
Brandy Dahrouge is the Program Manager for Visual + Digital Arts Creative Residencies at The Banff Centre. As such, she works with over 250 international artists and faculty each year, supporting a diversity of practices and research through the Visual + Digital Arts programs. She holds a decade of experience as an arts educator, artist and musician. She is the recipient of numerous awards for arts and community leadership.
Deborah Davidson is a curator, artist and educator. She is Founder and Director of Catalyst Conversations, which is devoted to the dialogue between art and science, and is also the director of the Suffolk University Gallery. Her own artwork is in many private and public collections, including Yale University, Wellesley College, the Boston Public Library, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Harvard University’s Houghton Library. Her most recent independent projects include Cannot Be Described In Words: Drawing/Daring at The Art Complex Museum. She also has had solo exhibitions at the Danforth Museum of Art, Kingston Gallery and upcoming at the Oresman Gallery at Smith College. Awards include Finalist, Brother Thomas Fellowship; Artist in Residence, Northeastern University; and a Berkshire Taconic A.R.T. grant.
Fiona Davies is a visual artist. Since 2006 she has been working in an arts/science collaboration that investigates medicalized death. She has a BSc, BA, MFA and is starting a PhD at the University of Sydney this year. She had exhibited nationally and internationally in sites important to the narratives of her investigations.
Flavia D’Avila is a PhD candidate at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland/University of St. Andrews, researching syncretic theatre and its use in devising. Originally from Brazil and has worked in Edinburgh since 2006. She trained at Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh and with the Odin Teatret/International School of Theatre Anthropology. She was a finalist for the Fantasio Piccoli Award for Theatre Direction in Trento, Italy in 2008. Previous credits include work done with Admiration Theatre in London, Charioteer Theatre in Forres and Milan, Zecora Ura in London and Rio, Tightlaced Theatre in Edinburgh, Discover 21 in Edinburgh and Las Cigarreras in Alicante. She is the Founder and Artistic Director of Fronteiras Theatre Lab. Credits with that company include Theatre Tasters, Fronteiras Explorers and La Niña Barro. In 2013-14 she was a guest member of the Cultural Policies Committee and Binational Cultural Committee of Santana do Livramento in Brazil and Rivera in Uruguay. Currently she is a member of the Directors’ program at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh.
Livia Daza-Paris is a Venezuelan-Canadian artist and researcher who incorporates performance, documentary evidence, video art and poetic narratives to integrate themes of unresolved memories, locality and non-official events to reflect her humanist approach to art creation. The dance/poetics of the Skinner Releasing Technique and the aesthetics of Grotowsky’s theatre greatly influence her work. She holds postgraduate degrees in Community Economic Development and Digital Technologies in Design Arts both from Concordia University, Canada and in Creative Practice from Transart Institute, accredited by Plymouth University, UK.
Tanya De Paor is an artist and a Lecturer in Visual Art Education at the University of Limerick, Ireland. Her research focus is in contemporary art, ecology, sustainability and art practice for and with children in a trans disciplinary context. She works on building partnerships with contemporary artists, arts organizations, galleries, museum curators, children, students and teachers within public and professional cultural platforms. She holds an MA from Belfast College of Art and Design, University of Ulster. She has won several awards, and funding grants, including an Arts Council and a Cork City Council Art Project Grant for Theatre of Trading, a multi disciplinary participatory project exploring urban spaces for encountering art and engaging with artists.
Piet Devos is a Belgian literary scholar. Having lost sight at the age of five, he has always been fascinated by perception. In his PhD thesis, he developed a sensory approach to literature. His new research project focuses on writers who interpreted their disabilities as a creative reorganization of perception. Since November 2015, he is affiliated with the Centre for Sensory Studies at Concordia University, Montreal (Canada).
Susan Diachisin is the Kelli and Allen Questrom Director of the Center for Creative Connections at the Dallas Museum of Art. The Center is an experimental learning environment for people of all ages. There, she provides vision and leadership for exhibitions and installations, community partnership projects and public programming. She also works with artists to develop installations, social practice projects and studio programs - all of which are designed to connect visitors to art and artists through interactive experiences. Additionally, for over 25 years, she has worked in all facets of the not-for-profit arts field in a variety of positions at the local, regional and national level. Throughout her career she has initiated innovative projects, ranging from helping audiences understand artists’ creative processes to envisioning educational experiences that empower visitors’ creative behavior.
Stefanie Dickens is the Commission Services Specialist at CODAworx, the global online community that celebrates design projects featuring commissioned artwork in interior and architectural spaces. Designed for use by artists, design professionals, and industry resources, CODAworx provides members with a platform to showcase their projects, collaborate with other members of the creative community and earn recognition for these collaborations. CODAworx is the hub of the commissioned art economy, and Dickens manages the RFP Toolkit to assist commissioning bodies in the selection of artists for their projects from CODAworx's membership of world-class artists and design professionals. She has a comprehensive and varied background in the non-profit arts sector and worked for ten years in Arts Administration and Management for a professional theatre company in Minnesota. She is also a professional stage actor and singer.
Massamba Diop is a Co-Founder of The Senegal-America Project and internationally recognized as one of the all time masters of the tama (talking) drum. He is an extraordinary performer, and a knowledgeable and generous teacher. He is one of the original members of the Afro-pop superstar Baaba Maal's world famous band Daande Lenol Orchestra. He has incorporated the fiery Wolof traditions of his homeland into contemporary sound. His music reflects the ancient origins of his instrument and the cosmopolitan environment of Dakar, Senegal's capital. As lead drummer in Baaba's band, he has performed at many venues, including The 2012 London Olympics, London's Royal Festival Hall, Mandela Day at Radio City Music Hall and The Nobel Peace Prize Ceremonies. He has performed and/or recorded with Peter Gabriel and Afro-Celt Sound System (England), Ernest Ranglin and Luciano (Jamaica), Anita Tarika (Madagascar), Herbie Hancock, Carlos Santana, Tony Vacca and James Brown.
Florian Dombois is an artist whose work focuses on time, models, landforms, labilities, and scientific and technical fictions. From 2003 to 2011, he was a professor at the Bern University of the Arts where he founded Y (Institute for Transdisciplinarity). In 2010 he received the German Sound Art Award and Kunsthalle Bern edited the monograph of his work Florian Dombois: What Are the Places of Danger. Works 1999-2009. Currently he is a professor at the Zurich University of the Arts. His latest books are Ästhetisches Denken (Aesthetic Thinking, co-edited with M. Fliescher, D. Mersch and J. Rintz) and two books on his work came out 2014, Florian Dombois: Zugabe (ed. by J.F. Müller) and Florian Dombois: Angeschlagene Moderne / Struck Modernism (ed. by Museum Haus Konstruktiv Zurich).
Rosalyn Driscoll is a sculptor who has investigated the experience of the body and the somatic senses for 50 years. Her current inquiry into water—as matter, metaphor and model for behavior—has led to co-creating Moving Water, a participatory art event in London in 2014; developing Waterbody, an immersive moving image installation with filmmaker Sarah Bliss, exhibited at the Boston Sculptors Gallery in 2015; and working on a long-term project exploring water within the body. She is a member of Sensory Sites, an international collective based in London that generates collaborative exhibitions, installations and research to explore multi-sensory perception and embodied experience. Her work has been exhibited internationally and received awards and fellowships from the Dartington Hall Trust, UK; New England Foundation for the Arts; Massachusetts Cultural Council; and Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico. Her work is represented by the Boston Sculptors Gallery in the US, Encounter Contemporary in London and Galerie Capazza in France.
Chartwell Dutiro is a musician-singer-songwriter-composer-teacher and the founding Artistic Director of Mhararano Mbira Academy in Dartington, UK. As a world-class mbira player, he uses the instrument as an education tool to encompass both traditional and contemporary perspectives, to challenge stereotypes and encourage creative engagement. He draws on his experience of growing up in rural, segregated Zimbabwe to build bridges between cultures and make links between contemporary Zimbabwe and life around the world. He has toured the world and recorded multiple albums with legendary Thomas Mapfumo and The Blacks Unlimited.He is a WOMAD Foundation recommended artist, often collaborating and performing with others and lecturing at different universities. He holds a Masters in Ethnomusicology from SOAS, University of London.
Dan Elias is the Director of the New Art Center (a community art center dedicated to lowering the art world’s barriers to entry), and a dynamic advocate for the arts as a birthright and component of a full life. With such previous positions as the host of the PBS television program Antiques Roadshow, the Director of Education through Cultural and Historical Organizations at Salem's Peabody Essex Museum, a gallery owner, publisher of prints & multiples, writer and speaker on arts and culture, he has forty years’ experience in the arts, much of it with people and groups from outside the traditional art world: Native People, underserved youth, Roadshow fans and community members. He is committed to helping create an art world for everyone.
Isabella Ellaheh Hughes is the Artistic Director and Co-Founder of the Honolulu Biennial Foundation, in addition to being a curator, editor and journalist focused on art from the Asian continent, Pacific and their Diasporas. A highly regarded arts and culture journalist, she has written for a variety of printed and online publications, including: ArtAsiaPacific, Brownbook, Contemporary Practices, Frieze, Harper’s Art Bazaar Arabia and Ibraaz, amongst others. A frequent contributor to and editor of books and exhibition catalogues, she is the editor of the monograph, Sama Alshaibi: Sand Rushes In (Aperture Foundation, 2015) and Barjeel Art Foundation's 5th anniversary exhibition catalogue, aide-mémoire: footnotes (Part II) (Barjeel Art Foundation, 2015).
Janeil Engelstad initiates interdisciplinary collaborations to produce multi-form proejcts that address political, social, historical and environmental concerns. Her process involves community engagement/participation, deep listening, extensive research and building coalitions between community members, arts institutions, universities, government agencies, NGOs and others. She is also the Founding Director of MAP - Make Art with Purpose. MAP initiatives include an interactive, open source website, exhibitions, public programs and project based work adressing immigration, race, education, social justice and climate change. She has produced projects for and in partnership with the Dallas Museum of Art, International Center for Photography, ArtMargins, City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and others. An affiliate artist at the Social Practice Art Research Center at the University of California Santa Cruz, she has taught at universities throughout North America and Europe; in 2006 she was a Fulbright Scholar at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, Slovakia.
Alia Farid is a Kuwaiti-Puerto Rican visual artist who works at the intersection of art and architecture to activate spaces for critical thinking and action. As an artist she has participated in such residencies as San Juan’s Beta Local, Córdoba’s Casa Árabe, London’s Serpentine Galleries and Doha’s Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art. Her most ambitious project to date was curating the Kuwait Pavilion at the 14th International Architecture Exhibition, organized by the Venice Biennale.
Dorothea Fleiss is a visual artist and the Founder and Director of the d. fleiss & east west artists association, based in Stuttgart. The purpose of the association is to establish a working basis for the cooperation between artists from eastern and western countries and to encourage and improve the cultural and artistic exchange between outstanding artists of different backgrounds. She is also the Curator of the DFEWA's two week residencies in Carei, Ardud, Mallnitz, Marrakesh, Valparaiso, New York City, Przeworsk, Budapest, Stuttgart, Paraza, Totovo Selo and Qinhuangdao. She is also the curator of the EIBAB - European International Book Art Biennale. As an artist, she has taken part in the Incheon Women Artists’ Biennale in South Korea, Biennale DakÁrt Biennale of Cuencai, Biennale of Cairo and Biennale 3000 in San Paulo. Additionally, she is a Professor at the Beijing Institute for Technology, School of Design and Arts in Beijing China.
Marie Fol is the Program Manager of TransArtists at DutchCulture, Centre for International Cooperation in Amsterdam. TransArtists is the international platform for artist mobility, offering expertise and services about artist-in-residence programs as well as other cultural opportunities for artists to stay and work elsewhere. She joined the TransArtists team in December 2010; and since then, she has been actively involved in European cooperation projects surrounding supporting artists’ mobility (ON-AiR, 2010-2012) and art and sustainability (Green Art Lab Alliance, 2013- 2015). She is also the main editor of TransArtists.org, the information platform for artists on artist- in-residence opportunities worldwide. In addition she regularly collaborates with several international cultural networks focusing on residencies, artists’ mobility and related topics. Over the past 4 years, she has contributed to the cultural mobility information network On the Move, including working on the research dossier Move On! Cultural mobility for beginners (which was first released in 2012).
Maja and Reuben Fowkes are curators and art historians who focus on the theory and aesthetics of East European art from the socialist era to contemporary artistic responses to the transformations brought by globalization. Their interests in the field of art and ecology are expressed through curated exhibitions, symposia and writings, which explore notions and practices around green curating, environmental art history and the sustainability of contemporary art. In 2013 they founded the Translocal Institute for Contemporary Art, a center for transnational research into East European art and ecology in Budapest, which operates across the disciplinary boundaries of art history, contemporary art and ecological thought. They have contributed to the development of recent thinking on sustainability and contemporary art through their published writings, curated exhibitions and conferences. Since 2006 they have organized an annual Symposium on Sustainability and Contemporary Art at the Central European University in Budapest.
Yannick Franck is Belgium based sound artist, performer and curator. He is the Artistic Director of the art center Les Brasseurs in Liège, Belgium and owns the record label Idiosyncratics. Additionally he is part of the industrial-noise duo Orphan Swords and Founder of electroacoustic improvisation combo Y.E.R.M.O., which, among others, provided the sound for Pavilion of Luxembourg at the Venice Biennial in 2009.
Felice Frankel is a science photographer and research scientist at MIT’s Center for Materials Science and Engineering. She is also a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Previous positions include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Visiting Scholar at Harvard Medical School’s Department of Systems Biology, the Chancellor’s Distinguished Visiting Fellow in the Arts and Sciences at UC Irvine and Loeb Fellow at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. Additionally she has received the Lennart Nilsson Award for Scientific Photography, the Progress Award from the Photographic Society of America and grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. Working in collaboration with scientists and engineers, her images have been published in over 200 journal articles and/or covers, exhibited widely and profiled in such publications as the New York Times, Wired and LIFE Magazine.
Luigi Galimberti is Coordinator of Transnational Dialogues, an exchange and research programme for artists, curators, designers and architects across Brazil, China and Europe. He has been collaborating with the NGO European Alternatives since its foundation and was associate editor of Naked Punch Review. His research and professional interests span from cultural dialogue to the exploration of new fields of knowledge and expression in visual arts. He has presented papers or moderated discussions at the Centre Pompidou (Paris), MAXXI Museum (Rome), Bartlett School of Planning, UCL (London), SESC Pompeia (São Paulo), Organhaus (Chongqing) and, most recently, at the United Nations Alliance Of Civilization (UNAOC) Fellowship Alumni Meeting in Milan.
Marta Gracia is from Barcelona, Spain. She is the author of the research project Spanish Artist in Residence Programmes: an Overview, granted by the Catalan Arts Council in 2009, and the Founder and Director of Art Motile, the first platform for resources on Spanish artist-in-residence programs. She has a degree in Art History from the University of Barcelona and is responsible for the artistic research program at Hangar, one of Spain's principle centers for art production. She has previously worked on the design, development, coordination and evaluation of art projects, organizations and networks in Albania, Italy, Japan and Spain.
Florian Grond is an affiliate member of the Centre for Interdisciplinary in Music Media and Technology at McGill University in Montreal and a PhD candidate in the Ambient Intelligence research group at the Cognitive Interaction Technology Center of Excellence at Bielefeld University in Germany. Previously he worked at the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe (2003-2007). In 2010 he was a research trainee at the shared reality lab in the Center for Intelligent Machines and a guest researcher at the Input Devices and Music Interaction Laboratory in 2008, both at McGill University. In his artistic and his academic work he focuses on the intersection between art and science, with a special but not exclusive interest in sound. He has published about these topics in various journal articles, book chapters and conference papers; he has exhibited his work in venues across Japan, Europe and North America.
Bathsheba Grossman is a sculptor exploring art, life and geometry, seeking symmetry and balance in the tension between pure geometry and natural forms. She pioneered the use of 3D printed steel as an art medium, as well as jewelry and household objects, evangelizing this technology through the market explosion of 3D printing. She also introduced and is expert in the use of laser-etched glass for imaging protein structures and other scientific data.
Jeannette Guillemin is Interim Director of the Boston University School of Visual Arts. She also counsels art students and runs the internship program. Six years ago, she launched and continues to direct the Visual Arts Summer Institute, a youth arts program. She has a diverse background in creative writing, theatre and visual arts, and is interested in the powerful role that art plays in society. She serves on several boards, including her local arts commission and Art Street, Inc.
Susan Hapgood is an art historian and curator based in New York who recently lived in India for over three years. She is the incoming Executive Director of the International Studio & Curatorial Program, starting February 2015. She was also inaugural visiting professor of curatorial studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Founding Director of the Mumbai Art Room, and previously, Director of exhibitions for Independent Curators International, New York. She received her initial professional training in New York at the Guggenheim Museum and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and has curated major exhibitions including A Fantastic Legacy: Early Bombay Photography, Energy Plus (at the 2012 Shanghai Biennale), FluxAttitudes, Neo-Dada: Redefining Art 1958-62, Slightly Unbalanced and In Deed: Certificates of Authenticity in Art. The author of six books and numerous articles, she received a Master of Arts degree in Art History from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.
Damian Hebron is the Director of London Arts in Health Forum (LAHF) – a leading UK organization working to develop the link between the arts, creativity and wellbeing. LAHF runs events, supports artists and delivers an annual festival of arts and health, Creativity and Wellbeing Week. The organization has been instrumental in developing the National Alliance for Arts Health and Wellbeing and in establishing a new Parliamentary Group looking at the role of the arts in promoting and supporting health and wellbeing. Additionally, he is Head of Arts at Cambridge University Hospitals, has worked in the arts for over 20 years and, currently, is an Artistic Assessor for Arts Council England and a member of the Arts Alliance steering group, the national body promoting the arts in the criminal justice system. He writes for a number of publications on issues relating to public art, wellbeing and community engagement, and speaks regularly on the theme of creativity and wellbeing.
Irène Hediger is Co-Director of the Swiss artists-in-labs program at the Institute for Cultural Studies in the Arts (ICS), Zurich University of the Arts and a curator. In 2009 she initiated the intercultural Art-Science Residency Exchange with China and India, extending the artists-in-labs concept to an international level. After her studies in business administration, she got a degree in organizational development and group dynamics (DAGG) and a Master of Advanced Studies in Cultural Management at the University of Basel. She has curated numerous exhibitions and cultural events in Switzerland and internationally, including Lucid Fields at ISEA (International Symposium on Electronic Arts), Singapore in 2008 and the traveling exhibition Think Art – Act Science, in Barcelona, San Francisco, Lucerne and Salt Lake City, 2010-2012. In 2013 she curated experimenta13: Natur Stadt Kunst an exhibition in the public space of Basel. She specializes in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary creative processes and practices and in the development of inclusive and participatory outreach concepts.
Maria Hirvi-Ijäs, PhD, is a contemporary art researcher at the University of Helsinki. Her research areas are exhibition theory and the rhetoric of an artwork. Her background is in higher art education, in particular teaching and theory, but also in strategic leadership and development. She also has served as a curator at such institutions as the Museum of Contemporary Art, Kiasma in Helsinki, the Royal University College of Fine Arts in Stockholm and the Finnish National Gallery.
Peter Houk is the Director of the Glass Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Since assuming that position in 1997, he expanded the program to accommodate intermediate and advanced students as well as many special projects. His artwork ranges from intimate to large scale pieces, often placed in architectural settings. About his own work, he says, “In one way or another, all of my work is linked to painting, printmaking or drawing. My main preoccupation seems to be with the differences and similarities between natural and man-made structures”. He has designed and executed commissions internationally; and his work is held in many collections, including the Corning Museum of Glass and The Museum of American Glass at Wheaton Village.
Claudine Hubert is Co-General and Artistic Director of OBORO, a not-for-profit artist-run center based in Montreal (Canada) that supports the production and exhibition of artistic practices in visual art and new media. She has been active in the center since 2007, curating exhibitions, editing publications and developing residency and education programs. She also is active in the defense of artists’ rights and sits on the board of several arts organizations. In 2005, she contributed to the founding of an artist-run space in the small town of Saint John, New Brunswick. Photo credit: Kelly Lawson.
Oto Hudec is a multi-media artist who has worked in the USA, Europe and Korea addressing immigration, refugees and the impact of globalization on the environment. A finalist for Oskár Čepan prize, Young Visual Artist Award in Slovakia in 2012, he produced a utopic survival unit If I had a River, a life-sized model of a boat with edible plants. His installation Nomadia (Gandy Gallery) was a museum of tents from nomadic nations and protest movements. With artist Daniela Krajčová, he started Project Karavan, creating short films from a specially equipped caravan with Roma youth in Slovakia. In 2013 he produced Instrument for Listening in Dallas, a public sculpture that engaged the Latino community as a part of MAP 2013. In an ongoing project, he is focusing on women who create traditional ceramics in the Trás di Munti village on the Santiago Island of Cabeverdes and also Cabverdian immigrants in Lisbon. He is a member of the creative team for Make Art with Purpose and is represented by Gandy Gallery in Bratislava.
Henriette Huldisch is curator at the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she recently organized Rosa Barba: The Color Out of Space and Eva Kot’átková: Out of Sight. Previously, she worked at Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum for Contemporary Art - Berlin, where she curated exhibitions such as Harun Farocki: Serious Games and Anthony McCall: Five Minutes of Pure Sculpture, among others. From 2010-2014 Huldisch also served as Visiting Curator at Cornerhouse, Manchester, and from 2004-2008, she was assistant curator at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art. Among her publications are Ellen Harvey: The Museum of Failure and the 2008 Biennial Exhibition catalogue (with Shamim M. Momin), as well as numerous contributions to exhibition catalogues and publications such as Artforum. In the fall of 2009 she was a guest professor at the Malmö Art Academy, Sweden.
Iris Ping-Chi Hung is the Managing Director of Taiwan’s artist-in-residency program, Bamboo Curtain Studio and one of the members of the Taipei Picnic Club. Previously, she was the manager of the Taipei Brick House. Through live events, exhibitions and outreach to diverse communities, she works to create vibrant spaces in historical settings, while also preserving and celebrating their unique physical heritage. She also is a key leader in creating a platform for like-minded organizations in Asia to promote their work to wider audiences.
Marisa Morán Jahn is an artist of Chinese and Ecuadorian descent and the Founder of Studio REV-, a non-profit art, media and social-justice studio that combines sound research and bold ideas to impact the lives of low-wage workers, immigrants and teens. A graduate and former artist-in-residence at MIT, she has been a CEC Cultural Ambassador to Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Estonia and Russia. Her work has been featured at venues such as the White House, the Museum of Modern Art, Walker Art Center and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; she also has received grants and awards from the Tribeca Film Institute New Media Fund and Rockefeller Foundation, among others. She has been reviewed in media such as The New York Times, BBC, ArtForum, CNN, Univision, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Boing Boing, Hyperallergic, Creative Time Reports, Art in America and more.
Terry Jenoure is a visual artist, musician, writer and educator. She was born and raised in New York City into a Puerto Rican and Jamaican family. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy and Masters and Doctoral degrees in Education. She has performed, exhibited and taught worldwide. For 18 years, she was a graduate faculty member at Lesley University and, currently, is the Director of the Augusta Savage Gallery at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her book NAVIGATORS: African American Musicians, Dancers, and Visual Artists in Academe is published by SUNY Press; and she has written numerous articles on arts-based research. She is a recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New England Foundation for the Arts, and has been a consultant for the NEA, the Lila Wallace Readers Digest Fund, Ford Foundation, and Connecticut Commission for Arts and Tourism.
David Johnson is a 59 year-old blind artist-educator. He lives and works in Hitchin in the south-east of England. His art practice and education are unconventional: He spent a year at art college, during which time his eye condition (Retinitis Pigmentosa) dramatically worsened. He then changed to music studies and followed a music based career for about fifteen years before reconnecting with an art practice. This revival of interest in art was prompted by his involvement with a vibrant access to art scene in London together with his own children’s art activities.
Jean-Baptiste Joly is the Chairman of the Board of the Foundation Akademie Schloss Solitude as well as the Founding Director and Artistic Director of the Akademie. He is also an honorary professor at the Kunsthochschule Weißensee, Hochschule für Gestaltung in Berlin. Quoting Nicholas Tsoutas, Director of Sydney's Artspace, "Akademie Schloss Solitude is a pre-eminent studio residency organization that has not only challenged the very meanings of residencies, cultural exchanges and global mobility – but has challenged and set the very standards and expectations by which residency centers operate."
Caroline Jones studies modern and contemporary art with a focus on technological modes of production, distribution and reception. Trained in visual studies and art history at Harvard, she did her graduate work at the Institute of Fine Arts in New York before completing her PhD at Stanford University in 1992. Her exhibitions and/or films have been shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Hara Museum in Tokyo and MIT's List Visual Art Center, among others. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, among others. Her books include Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg's Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses; Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist (winner of Charles Eldredge Prize); Bay Area Figurative Art, 1950-1965 (awarded the silver medal from San Francisco's Commonwealth Club); and Modern Art at Harvard.
Sara Jones is Co-Founder of Kind Aesthetic with Andrea Wenglowskyj, a unique creative agency that works with artists, creative entrepreneurs, and small businesses who need genuine storytelling and beautiful marketing materials that are fresh, exciting, and engage their audience. Kind Aesthetic works with clients either through the DELVE Toolkit—a unique, affordable, one-on-one consulting program for individuals who want to hone their own skills—or through their more extensive, bespoke Kind Aesthetic services that provide stunning visual and emotional representation of ideas to share with the world. DELVE also includes workshops and events to help artists and creatives to best communicate what they do in person, online and in writing. Sara is a painter who explores memory, domesticity, architecture and the sometimes fraught relationships we have with the spaces we inhabit. She has worked in the capacities of curator, graphic designer, art director, researcher and professor at such institutions as The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at The Cooper Union, Pratt Institute and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Benjamín Juárez is a professor and former Dean of the College of Fine Arts at Boston University where he has been a strong advocate for the Citizen Artist series, which highlights artists who use their craft for societal change, as well as the Keyword Initiative, the Arts Leadership Minor and other new enterprises at the CFA. Previously, he directed Centro Nacional de las Artes, Mexico’s national arts center, which includes research centers, the organization’s TV channel, more than 20 theaters and performing spaces and professional schools in music, dance, arts, theater and film. While at the Centro Nacional de las Artes, he hosted international arts conferences and launched joint programs with such prestigious organizations as The Kennedy Center and Carnegie Hall. Other positions have included Director of Cultural Activities for Universidad Anahuac del Sur, Head of Music and Dance at the National University of México and Associate Conductor of the Mexico City Philharmonic Orchestra.
Beth Kantowitz is the founder of bkprojects. bkprojects is a multifaceted platform for independent curating (for alternative spaces, public art projects, and commercial and university galleries), art consulting and producing exhibitions for Drive-by Projects, her storefront and online gallery collaboration with OH Projects. Previously she served as the cofounder and co-director of Boston’s celebrated Allston Skirt Gallery.
Shirish Kathale is a musician and artist who has performed and exhibited widely in India, including at the seventh Swarzankar Music Festival, Kal Ghoda Art Festival Mumbai, Nehru Center Mumbai and Ravindra Kala Kunj in Pune. He has also served as the Music and Art Director for the Astro-Ballet and for the short film Appa, and is an Assistant Professor of Communication Design at the MIT Institute of Design in Pune, India.
Alexandra Kennedy has been the Executive Director of The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst, Massachusetts since 2008. The Carle is the only full-scale museum in the country that collects, exhibits and celebrates picture book art from around the world. Previously, she was Vice-President, Editorial Director for the US Consumer Magazine Group at The Walt Disney Company. She began her eighteen-year career at Disney as a Founding Editor at FamilyFun magazine. She has a BA from Colgate University and a Master of Fine Arts in poetry from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Elaine A. King is a freelance art critic and curator as well as a professor of Art History/Theory, Critical Studies and Museum Studies at Carnegie Mellon University. She has an interest in how technology is affecting shifts in social values, ethics and art as well as art criticism criteria. In September 2006, Allworth Press published Ethics and the Visual Arts, which she and Gail Levin co-edited. She is currently writing a book titled The Misunderstood Patron: The National Endowment for the Arts. In 2002, she was awarded New York University’s Certificate of Fine Arts and Decorative Arts Appraisal. She has written for several publications including Sculpture, Art on Paper, Art Papers, Grapheion, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and The Washington Post. She has curated several exhibitions, including the Hungarian Graphic Arts Biennial in Gyór, the Maria Mater O’Neill exhibition at Museo of Art Puerto Rico in 2007 and the “Mattress Factory-Likeness: After Warhol’s Legacy” in 2009. She is a member of the International Association of Art Critics and has given talks and papers at venues internationally.
Georgina Kleege lectures in English and Creative Writing at the University of Berkeley, California. Her current research interests include creative non-fiction, disability, autobiography and blindness and visual art. She is the author of Sight Unseen (1999) and Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller (2006) as well as numerous scholarly articles. Georgina is a leading figure in blindness studies.
Kelly Krause is the Creative Director for the international weekly journal Nature, where she leads a world-class team of illustrators, designers and photo editors. Before joining Nature she was art director for the journal Science in Washington, DC. During her time at Science and now Nature, she has worked closely with hundreds of high profile scientists in almost every scientific discipline imaginable to create dynamic, memorable visual content – from research figures to journalistic info-graphics and illustrations, in print and digital formats.
Anabelle Lacroix is the program manager of Liquid Architecture, a sound art organization based in Melbourne, Australia. She coordinates residencies as part of Liquid Architecture's program and is currently working on developing reciprocal exchanges with partner organizations. As an independent curator, her recent research focuses on fictional strategies and historical imagination in curatorial practices through a series of temporary public art interventions in Melbourne's Docklands. Originally from France, she has worked with arts organizations internationally, and on exhibitions, screenings and residency programs at Asialink and RMIT University, Melbourne.
Tavia La Follette’s work has been the subject of articles in such publications as the Economist, Rolling Stone Magazine and The New York Times. Originally from New York City, she is a director, designer, curator and performance artist. Her work has been seen at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Arts at St. Ann’s (St. Ann’s Warehouse), the Tenement Museum, the Williamsburg Historical Society and the Cooler. She is currently the artist-in-residence at CREATE Lab and was the first artist-in-residence at The Center for Arts in Society—both operating out of Carnegie Mellon University. She founded and runs ArtUp, directing the Sites of Passage Project. ArtUp is a border crossing space for artists and companies that are concerned with exploring the contextual inter-relationships of theater, visual arts, movement, media and sound. Her work has toured all over the US, Europe, South America, Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
Christina Lammer is a research sociologist, collaborative artist and filmmaker based in Vienna. Her work combines sensory ethnography with video, performance and body art in hospitals and clinics to focus on embodied emotion and sensory interaction between patients and physicians during the course of medical treatment. In her current work Performing Surgery, she is collaborating with surgeons and examining their gestures. In Features: Vienna Face Project, she investigated the place of portraiture and the aesthetics of the smile in facial plastic and reconstructive surgery; while Surgical Wrappings explored the material culture of surgery. Works in the series CORPOrealities considered empathy, somatic perception and the role of touch and the hands in the use of such techniques as image-guided vascular surgery at the Medical University Vienna (MUV). Her most recent books are Moving Faces (Vienna, Löcker Verlag); Anatomy Lessons (edited together with Artur Zmijewski: Vienna, Löcker Verlag); Empathography (Vienna, Löcker Verlag) and CORPOrealities (Vienna, Löcker Verlag).
Siglinde Lang is a Senior Scientist at the Contemporary Arts and Cultural Production program, working in the focus area of Science and Art, a cooperation of the University of Salzburg and the Mozarteum Salzburg. In 2014 she was a visiting professor at the University of Applied Sciences in Germany. Prior to her academic career, she worked as an arts manager and consultant for several years. Experience in this practical field of arts management stirred her interest in research questions that combine artistic and cultural practices with theories of cultural meaning, production and participatory processes of communication management. She, thus, focuses on a critical and interdisciplinary examination of contemporary art and cultural production with an emphasis on the independent scene and processes of cultural mediation. Recent publications include Participatory Arts Management (transcript 2015) and Artists as Managers (VS- Verlag, 2015). She is Editor of the e-journal p|art|icipate.
Anne LaPrade Seuthe is the Curator of The Hampden and Central Galleries at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Hampden Gallery is one of two Fine Arts Center Galleries located in Residential Areas at the university. It has a reputation for being the launching pad for emerging artists working in all disciplines. Its active programming schedule runs throughout the academic year and features solo, group and thesis exhibitions that are enhanced through opening receptions, artist talks and workshops.
Helene Larsson Pousette is Curator at the Swedish History Museum and represents Sweden in the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) and the Advisory Board for the development of Mentorship programs in Serbia. Between 2009-2012 she served as the Cultural Counselor at the Embassy of Sweden in Belgrade. She also has served as curator and project manager at the Swedish Travelling Exhibitions and Historical Museums in Stockholm, creating interdisciplinary exhibitions that combine culture heritage and contemporary arts; the former Head of Events Units at the Swedish Institute; and board member of the Swedish ICOM, the ICEE–International Council for Exhibition Exchange – and The Swedish Arts Grants Committee (including IASPIS). She is a frequent lecturer, author of numerous articles and editor of the publication This is not a Report – Cultural Exchange Sweden/Serbia 2009-2012 and co-editor of The Museum as Forum and Actor.
Lee Lee is a figurative painter who has broadened her practice into the realm of social engagement. After spending time in over 50 countries, she is comfortable collaborating with a wide range of populations. Beyond exhibiting across the country, recent engagements have taken her to The Aalborg University in Copenhagen; the Ghetto Biennial in Haiti; Terra Madre in Italy; the Center for Global Justice in Mexico; the Chateau de la Napoule in France, Aragorn’s workshop in Tortola and MediaCube in South Korea. She is looking forward to working in Thailand, Borneo, Maui and Ireland in the next year; and she is laying the groundwork for work in Eastern Africa in 2016. Her local engagement revolves around increasing access to seeds in order to address urban food security issues through developing a network of seed libraries in collaboration with Slow Food Denver, the Seed Savers Exchange and Little Free Libraries.
Claudia Lefko is a life-long educator, activist and advocate for children. She founded The Iraqi Children's Art Exchange (ICAE) after her first visit to a pediatric cancer/leukemia unit in Baghdad in 2001. ICAE works with Iraqi children and artists, collaborating with individuals and institutions including the Dar al Anda Gallery in Amman, the Jordan Children's Museum and with SAVE the Children Jordan. Projects have been shown at such venues as MASS MoCA and the Delaware Art Museum. She also coordinates Baghdad Resolve: An International Collaboration to Improve Cancer Care in Iraq. Created in 2012, as a project of ICAE, Baghdad Resolve is multi-disciplinary, crossing traditional lines to borrow and integrate theory and best practice in child development, psychology, the arts, science and medicine. It includes doctors/hematologists from La Sapienza University in Rome, the Harvard medical school/Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Children's Welfare Teaching Hospital in Medical City, Baghdad.
Iola Lenzi is a Singapore researcher and curator of contemporary Southeast Asian art. A lawyer by training, she researches practices grappling with history and social issues, analyzed from within Asian cultural and historical frameworks. Her exhibitions center on the relationship between art, activism, empowerment and political voice, while her catalogues further develop ideas about the role of Southeast Asia's visual culture in the critique of power and push for social advancement. She has curated major institutional exhibitions of Southeast Asian art at ARTER/Koc Foundation in Istanbul, Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, the Goethe Institut in Hanoi and Saigon, Singapore Art Museum, Esplanade in Singapore and the James Thompson Foundation in Bangkok. She is also the Curator of the on-going Masterpieces-digital art in Southeast Asia, Samsung art projects. Additionally, she is a lecturer in the Asian Art Histories MA program at Singapore’s Lasalle-Goldsmiths College of the Arts and author of Museums of Southeast Asia.
Nina Leo is a Canadian multi-disciplinary artist. Her work examines how the contemporary terrain of fragmented, often virtual experience may affect us phenomenologically as interactions become ever more accessible, yet divested of direct multi-sensorial richness. The work explores how this otherwise redesigned intimacy may influence our identity, alter our interactions and shape our socio-political perceptions. She holds an MFA in Emerging Practices from the University of Buffalo, SUNY. Her work has been shown widely in the US, Canada and Mexico. She is currently an Assistant Professor within the Sculpture/Installation Department and Graduate Studies Faculty at Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto.
Simon Lewandowski has had a long and varied experience in the arts. From 1984 to 1996 he developed and managed the Ormond Road Print Workshop in North London as a center for artists’ editioning, small publication and art-based social activism. Since then he has worked as an artist, teacher and curator; and his own work having been shown extensively in the UK and in Italy, Germany, Sweden and Brazil. He has worked with his partner, the architect Jane Howson, on a number of art/architecture educational workshops and the design and fabrication of the WPP Portable Reading Room in 2011. In 2009 he set up and programmed the temporary project space Basement43 in London; he was recently appointed Chair of Pavilion Arts in Leeds. With Co-Director Chris Taylor he has produced and edited publications for Wild Pansy Press, curated the WPP Project Space and teaches at the School of Fine Art in Leeds.
Katt Lissard teaches at Goddard Graduate Institute in Vermont and is the Artistic Director of The Winter/Summer Institute (WSI), an HIV/AIDS theatre project based in New York and Lesotho, Africa. WSI was launched by eight colleagues from the US, UK, South Africa and Lesotho as an outgrowth of her 2005 work as a Fulbright Scholar at the National University of Lesotho. She received a second Fulbright to Lesotho in 2012 that led to her recent project Split the Village, focused on dam building. She has written about her work in Africa for American Theatre Magazine; South African Theatre Journal; and a chapter in the book Feminist Popular Education in Transnational Debates. As a theatre maker, she has received two Art Matters Individual Artist awards and is a two-time MacDowell Colony fellow and three-time resident artist at New York City’s avant-garde theater Mabou Mines.
Janna Longacre is a Professor at the Massachusetts College of Art + Design. Janna was also the curator for MassArt In Cuba, which included artwork and projects based on and inspired by Cuba from invited faculty and alumni who have been involved with the history of the island. The invited artists include Juan Pablo Cárdenas, John Cataldo, Sharon Dunn, Al Gowan, Yoav Horesh, Consuelo Issacson, Janna Longacre, Abelardo Morrell, and Adam Puryear, who showed a wide range of their personal artworks and writing from photographs and paintings to clay sculptures and excerpts from novels.
David Macy is the Resident Director at the MacDowell Colony, a pioneering force and contemporary leader in the field of artists’ residency programs. Before joining MacDowell in 1994, Macy was the program and facilities manager at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program in Woodside, California. For twenty years he has been committed to creating ideal working and social conditions for creative artists of all disciplines. Macy currently serves on the boards of the Alliance of Artists Communities and Monadnock Arts Alive.
Luke Mannarino is an artist and curator. His artistic practice includes video, photography and installation. Live performance is the foundation for all of his work. He was invited to be a resident artist in the Regali Artist Residency in Sicily program in 2014. He is the Co-Editor of the Accordian 'zine and has curated several group exhibitions in Dirty Allston and Words Don't Describe, among others as well as collaborated on several performance events in the Boston area.
Benoît Maubrey was born of French parents in Washington DC. In 1979 he moved to West Berlin and after the collapse of the former East Germany, he moved to the state of Brandenburg where he and his partner Susken Rosenthal founded the non-profit arts organization Kunstpflug e.V. His performance and installation work has been presented in many international art festivals. Since 1990 he has lived and worked in the village of Baitz in Germany.
Cybele Maylone is the Executive Director of UrbanGlass, an organization that supports the use of glass as a creative medium. In 2013, the organization reopened its facility in Ft Greene after a 2+ year renovation and now operates a state-of-the-art 17,000 square foot studio, along with a robust workshop program, magazine, gallery and store. Prior to joining UrbanGlass, she held positions at various New York City cultural organizations, including apexart, the New Museum of Contemporary Art and the American Museum of Natural History.
Matthew Mazzotta is a conceptual artist who creates public interventions that range from opening up new social spaces inside the built environment to addressing more pressing environmental issues, but always with a focus on community and public participation. His work evolves from an interest in exploring the relationship between people and their environments, as well as between each other. His practice manifests as participatory public interventions that aim at bringing criticality and a sense of openness to the places where we live. The work triggers social situations that open space for dialogues around issues of 'becoming', understanding that there is much more to us than our surroundings give us credit to 'be'. The objects, situations and spaces he creates as community projects and participatory interventions ask us to relate to ourselves and each other in unfamiliar ways in hopes of finding new perspectives on how we see ourselves in this world.
TC McCormack is an artist based in London. His multidisciplinary practice is a creative and discursive site, considering a constellation of preoccupations, ranging from the shifting identity of materiality, the absence of human agency, the phenomenon of resistance space to language's ability to delineate the relational affinities of forms. His work takes a variety of outcomes, often combining film, assemblage, publications, events and curation. His work has been shown at Platform in Istanbul, the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, the Goethe Institute in New York, FACT in Liverpool, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, Ormeau Baths Gallery in Belfast and LoBe in Berlin. He is a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK.
Gaël McGill is faculty and Director of Molecular Visualization at the Center for Molecular and Cellular Dynamics at Harvard Medical School, where his teaching and research focuses on visualization design methods in science education. He is also Founder and CEO of Digizyme, Inc., a firm dedicated to the visualization and communication of science. He also co-authored and served as the Digital Director for E.O. Wilson’s Life on Earth iBooks biology textbook, created the scientific visualization online community portal Clarafi.com (originally molecularmovies.com), the Molecular Maya (mMaya) software toolkit and has contributed to leading Maya and ZBrush textbooks for Wiley/SYBEX Publishing. In addition, he is a board member of the Vesalius Trust and an advisor to several biotechnology and device companies.
Paolo Mele was born in 1981 and is the Founder and Director of Ramdom, an art organization based in the heel of Italy. He organized two editions of Default, an international master class on Arts, Cities and Regeneration; and he recently launched the Investigation on the Extreme Land project. He is also a PhD student in Communication and New Technologies at IULM University in Milan and a Visiting Researcher at the New School for Public Engagement in New York City. He has collaborated with several international organizations such as the New Art Exchange in Nottingham, Fondazione Veronesi and Fondazione Chivasso in Italy and the World Bank in Washington, DC, among others. From 2008 to 2012 he worked for the Biennial of Young Artists from Europe and Mediterranean in Bjcem as a project manager.
Nadia Mierau is an artist and a scientist. She relocated from Russia to the US in the late 1990s. In 2001 she has founded the fine art reproduction company LIGiclee.com, located in Freeport, NY, which specializes in fine art reproduction, high resolution art scanning and giclee printing. Now the company provides all-in-one artist services to artists, galleries and photographers, including framing, artistic embellishment, graphic design, web design, online promotion, sales, self-publishing and business consultations. In 2005, realizing that artists need assistance in promoting their original work and giclee prints on the internet, she started a web design branch of the business Artwebspace.com. For this branch, she developed a powerful data base driven dynamic system that allows artists to have an expensive looking professional art portfolio/online gallery/storefront at a very affordable price.
Snezana Milanovic is faculty at Massachusetts General Hospital’s Department of Psychiatry, Director for Metabolomics Research, MGH CTNI, Director of Global Developmental Psychiatry, MGH Global Psychiatry Division and attending at the Depression Clinical and Research Program. Her research focuses on the mother- fetal model, defining biological markers predictive of psychiatric illness and measuring the influence of the complex in utero environment on the neonatal brain’s development and subsequent risk of psychiatric diseases. She is devoted to the development of novel translational research models and methodology, delivering excellent clinical care and teaching in parallel to expanding knowledge on conducting clinical trials and drug development. Through clinical work, national and international research collaborations, she seeks to improve the care of one of the most vulnerable of patients, mothers and unborn children, with the goal to develop cell/molecular diagnostic tests.
David Munson is a 3D designer with a heavy architecture accent. He has been on the leading wave of understanding and applying new digital technologies to better visualize and communicate design solutions since the advent of the PC. Today he is a leading expert in crafting realistic color 3D printed models along with creating custom 3D visualizations. Combining both efforts in smooth workflows enables the best results in both virtual and physical forms. He envisions future architectural and planning proposals and acts as quality control for 3D printed projects of all types by making sure the design of the data to be 3D printed is what it needs to be. Interestingly, some projects look to the past and 3D printed historical documentation and archaeological replication give us new takes on what has come before.
Sara Murdock is a third year Culture and Performance PhD student in the World Arts and Cultures/Dance Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. She received an MA in Organizational Leadership from Seattle University in 2010. She has facilitated movement workshops for professional dancers and community members in Ohio, Boston, Seattle, Los Angeles, Seoul, Hong Kong, Chiang Mai and Kuala Lumpur. Her dance background includes competitive Latin and ballroom dance, Contact Improvisation, Blues dance and extensive contemporary modern dance performance. She has also presented at conferences throughout the US and at the University of Malaya. She is particularly interested in issues of accessibility, such as Western-based aesthetic hierarchies that reinforce cultural boundaries. She is currently researching and facilitating intercultural exchange through the World at Aratani and World Music and Movement Festivals.
Rebecca Noone is a Canadian artist and a PhD student at the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto. Her performance-based interventions and active archiving situations interrogate the banal futilities and the muted hopes implicit in our everyday encounters and interactions with information, systems and technologies. In her work, she has asked theoretical physicists how they cope with the mundane, compiled maps of hand-drawn directions collected from helpful passers-by, archived detritus in demolition-slated homes, built interactive library cataloguing systems and bartered the periodic table of elements at art shows. She has contributed to spaces and exhibitions in Canada, the US and Europe.
Dietmar Offenhuber is an Assistant Professor at Northeastern University interested in how data shapes the realities and governance of urban landscapes and infrastructures. He holds a PhD from MIT. He was the key researcher at the Ars Electronica Futurelab and the Austrian Ludwig Boltzmann Institute as well as a Professor in the Interface Cultures program at the Art University Linz. He has recently published three books on the subjects of data-driven urbanism and infrastructure legibility. His artistic work has been exhibited internationally in venues including the Centre Pompidou, Sundance, the Hong Kong International Film Festival, ZKM Karlsruhe, Secession Vienna and the Seoul International Media Art Biennale.
Sean O'Reilly is the Founder and President of 3D Printsmith LLC in Brighton, Massachusetts, an engineering contract and consulting company for 3D Scanning, 3D printing and additive manufacturing solutions. He is also a plastics engineer with over 20 years of experience in materials and process development for industries, including aerospace and energy engineering. Prior to founding 3D Printsmith LLC, he worked in Project Engineering for QinetiQ N.A., Foster-Miller Inc. and Fiber Innovations Inc. He enjoys helping clients explore 3D scanning and additive manufacturing for artistic, engineering, medical and industrial applications. He has presented on 3D scanning and 3D printing to the Society of Manufacturing Engineers at the Texas Conference in 2011 and the Boston Consultants Network (CNET). He was a Keynote speaker at the Emerald Physicians Group Conference VivaPalooza in Hyannis, Massachusetts in 2012 and is a guest lecturer on 3D printing at MIT for the Medical Design Group.
Bojana Panevska is artist, researcher and writer based in Amsterdam, where she graduated from the Audio-Visual Department at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy. She later received an MFA from the Sandberg Institute. For the past ten years, she has been developing the interdisciplinary project entitled “12 steps towards enlightenment.” Segments of it have been exhibited and published widely. In addition, since 2009, she has served as a project manager for international collaborations and a workshop facilitator at TransArtists, a leading web resource for artists around the world.
Heejung Park is the Manager of MMCA Residency Changdong in South Korea. MMCA Residency Changdong is an artist-in-residency program - open to international and Korean artists. It is run by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA). Its aim is to encourage and support artistic creativity and to make contemporary Korean art known throughout the world.
Snezana Petrovic received her MFA from the University of California, Irvine. She is 2D, 3D and 4D artist, independent curator, gallery director and educator. Her work and curated exhibitions have been presented throughout Southern California and, internationally, in Singapore, Amsterdam, Belgrade and Prague at venues such as the Stedelijk Museum, Cvijeta Zuzoric Museum and, in Los Angeles, at The Museum of Contemporary Art. She also is a recipient of a UC Regents and National Endowment for the Arts grant. Her most recent appointment is as the LRC gallery Director and Curator, located in the larger Los Angeles area, where she holds a position as a Professor of Arts at the Crafton Hills College.
Ethan Pierce works at the intersection of art, education and entrepreneurship, focusing on developing and testing new institutional models for creative practices. During the fall of 2013, he launched the BBP Gallerie, an independent arts organization and publishing company that focuses on facilitating and presenting critically engaged and socially focused creative works, and a platform for collective projects and discourse. Past curatorial projects include The Dusky Flush, in collaboration with a group of queer artists and scholars including Catherine Lord and Departure at the Harvard Monday Gallery. Most recently, Pierce has been focusing on here, without, a collaborative inquiry project focusing on Israel – Palestine. The project has manifested as a yearlong artist residency, an international conference at Harvard and an exhibition at the Sackler Museum. In his studio practice, he consistently returns to the historical and archival, aiming to highlight missing or under-represented narratives through para-fiction, image appropriation and curatorial projects.
Johan Pousette is the Director of IASPIS, the international program of the Swedish Arts Grants Committee. He also founded the Baltic Art Center, a unique international artist-in-production residency and exhibition program. He served as the Director there until 2007, when he became Curator for Contemporary Art at Swedish Traveling Exhibitions. In 2009 he was one of the two curators of GIBCA, the Göteborg International Biennial of Contemporary Art, and, in 2010, the Art Director of the October Salon in Belgrade. From 2011, he was the Contemporary Art Manager at the Swedish Exhibition Agency. Additionally, he has served as an adviser to the Nordic Ministers of Culture on residencies, appointed by the Swedish government. His curatorial experience is rich, having worked with artists such as Alfredo Jaar, Fiona Tan, William Kentridge, Rosa Barba, Ana Torfs, Amar Kanwar, and many others.
Rudi Punzo creates artworks that combine sculpture, sound, video projections and performance into multi-sensory experiences. Animating recycled and discarded materials with renewable energy sources – most notably, solar energy - the sculptural elements in his works are transformed through his interactions with them, their own kinetic movements and the amplification and sampling of the sounds these elements create. He has exhibited his works in numerous galleries and museums, including the Haslla Museum in South Korea and the Kuandu Museum in Taiwan; and he has performed his works at such venues as Electro-Mechanica in Russia and FAD in Brazil. He also has presented his compositions and artworks at experimental music festivals and artist-in-residency programs through Europe, Russia, North and South America and Asia; and since 2009 he has collaborated with TransCultural Exchange as the master of its website.
Hamdy Reda is a visual artist and curator, living and working in Cairo. Alongside his artistic career, he is the founder, Managing Director and Curator of one of Egypt’s most well-known art spaces artellewa, a residency for domestic and international artists. Artellewa is a haven for the formation and activation of dialogue between artists and communities. His own work is as a painter and experimental photographer. He is well recognized in the North African and Middle Eastern region for his collaborative projects with other artists from Egypt and abroad. The recipient of various artistic awards, he seeks to further the creative dialogue within the public sphere while simultaneously informing his personal practice.
Elysha Rei (Gould) is an Australian visual artist and arts manager, currently residing in rural North Eastern Thailand. Since completing a Bachelor of Visual Arts in 2008 at the University of Southern Queensland Australia, she has been steadily building a career in the arts through making and exhibiting art, producing community events, professional-development mentoring, curating exhibitions and managing cultural spaces. From 2011- 2013 she co-founded and directed the artist-run-initiative Made Creative Space Toowoomba, which successfully nurtured and developed artists and cultural initiatives within regional Australia. In 2012 she managed the publically funded arts and cultural center Dogwood Crossing Miles in rural Queensland; and since 2014 she has been developing and managing the new residency program in Thailand Sam Rit Residency, while continuing to exhibit her work as an artist. She is currently completing her MBA at Durakijt Pundit University in Bangkok.
Andy Riess is currently Assistant Director for Outreach for the Fulbright Scholar Program and is in charge of advertising, catalogs, webinars and other externally- focused functions. Additionally, he represents the Fulbright Scholar Program at numerous venues each year. A veteran of the United States Army Security Agency, he has also studied at the Frei Universität - Berlin, Moscow State University and the Graduate School of Business, New York University. He has worked in the worlds of academia, for-profit, and not-for-profit in the United States and abroad. For 18 years, he was in charge of Fulbright Scholar programs in the Former Soviet Union, Western Europe and Asia for the Council for International Exchange of Scholars in Washington, D.C. He was named, early in 2008, to head recruitment efforts for American scholars for the Fulbright Scholar Program at CIES.
Don Ritter is a Canadian artist and writer who has been active internationally in the field of digital media art since 1986. His large interactive installations enable audiences to control their experiences through body motion, position or voice. His recent writings examine the relationships between aesthetics, ethics and digital media. His work has been presented at festivals, museums and galleries throughout North America, Europe and Asia. He has degrees in fine arts, psychology, electronics, engineering and visual studies (MIT). He has held full-time professorships in art and design at Concordia University in Montreal, Pratt Institute in New York City, Hanyang University in Seoul and currently at City University of Hong Kong in the School of Creative Media.
Jules Rochielle is the primary researcher, program developer and Co-Creator of the virtual presence of the NuLawLab at Northeastern University School of Law. She also is the Project Director of Social Design Collective (LLC) and Founder of Social Practices Art Network (SPAN). Previously, she was the artistic producer and an original founding member of the award winning Miscellaneous Productions in Vancouver, BC. As a scholar and an artist, she has held residencies at DLUX Media Arts in Sydney, the Grand Central Art Center at USC Fullerton-Santa Ana, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) and the Knowles West Media Center in Bristol. Recently, she also was selected to participate in Creative Times’ Living as Form, the online Social Practice Archive. Her design firm, the Social Design Collective LLC, is comprised of architects, artists, educators, media professionals and urban planners interested in community-inclusive design practices.
Brent D. Ryan is Associate Professor of Urban Design and Public Policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His research focuses on emerging urban design paradigms, particularly in postindustrial cities and design’s engagement with pluralism. His first book Design After Decline: How America rebuilds shrinking cities was published in 2012. He has worked as an urban designer and planner in New York City, Boston and Chicago, and has previously taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he was also Co-Director of the City Design Center. He holds degrees from Yale University, Columbia University and MIT.
Mitch Ryerson is an artist, designer, and craftsman specializing in wood structures and furniture. He began his career building wooden boats in Maine, and then attended Boston University’s Program in Artisanry, receiving his BAA in Furniture Design in 1982. His work has been exhibited extensively and is in numerous private and public collections, including the Fuller Craft Museum, the Mint Museum, the Boston Public Library and Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. His many commissions for Boston-area parks and schools are enjoyed by thousands of children and adults each year. He is also a teacher. He has served as an instructor at the Haystack Mountain School and the Penland School of Crafts, among others and, currently, is an adjunct professor of furniture design at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.
Ellie Schimelman is the Director of the Cross Cultural Collaborative in Ghana. She has more than 30 years of experience working in Ghana as a teacher, researcher and, since 2001, facilitator of programs at the Cross Cultural Collaborative. A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design with a degree in Art Education, she has devoted her adult life to working with creative people in cross-cultural collaborations. She is also member of the International Arts Therapy Association and has started a branch in Ghana.
Ellen Schön is an adjunct faculty member in Fine Arts and a Clay Studio Supervisor at the Lesley University College of Art and Design, where she has taught ceramics and 3D courses since 2002. She holds an MFA in Ceramics from Boston University’s Program in Artisanry. She has exhibited in numerous shows in the US and is a recipient of The Artist Foundation Fellowship from the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities.
Michael Schonhoff is a recipient of the 2008 Lighton International Artists Exchange Program (LIAEP) award. LIAEP an initiative that provides support for visual artists and arts professionals to travel to international residencies and artist communities, and for foreign visual artists to travel to and work in the United States. He also is the Assistant Curator, Community Outreach and Exhibition Management at the H&R Block Artspace at the Kansas City Art Institute; Exhibition Director at LIAEP; and Co-Founder of Kunstraum KC, an artists’ studio initiative located in Kansas City, Missouri that was inspired by his 2008 studio residency at takt kunstprojektraum in Berlin, Germany. As an artist, his work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions locally, nationally and internationally and is included in numerous public and private collections.
Suzanne Schultz has served as the manager of many Boston area galleries, including the Wentworth Gallery in Burlington and the Equator Gallery on Newbury Street. In 2007 she founded Canvas Fine Arts. As the Director of the firm, she works as an artist consultant and dealer, now representing over 50 artists, finding them magazine commissions, corporate clients and alternative venues for showing and selling their work. In addition, she co-hosts BNN TV’s It’s all about Arts and contributes to the New York art paper Revolt, Artchaser and The Boston City Paper.
Margaret Shiu's vision is to promote art and culture as vital components for global understanding and local sustainability by sharing, connecting and co-creating new practices. She is the Founder and Director of Taiwan's Bamboo Curtain Studio, which just celebrated its 20th anniversary. Bamboo Curtain Studio promotes public and private support for international exchange. It is both a residency program and an international cultural exchange research and facilitation hub. The Studio focuses on serving talents by providing artists with time and space for creative incubation. Its mission is "Local Action: Global Connection". Margaret also serves as a regional representative of TransCultural Exchange in Boston. She also works closely with the Taiwan Ministry of Culture and Taipei city government on cultural policies for support of creative talents.
Kira Simon-Kennedy is the Co-Founder of China Residencies, a directory and regional network of artist residencies in China. She is also a French and Mandarin translator for contemporary art publications and an independent film producer focused on projects centering around music and human rights in China, Iceland, France, Mali and Mississippi. She is currently a part of the inaugural Arts & Culture Social Impact Strategy program at Penn's School of Social Policy & Practice.
Irene Smalls is the award-winning author of 15 books for children published by Little Brown, Simon and Schuster and Scholastic Press. She holds an MBA from Cornell University. A noted author and speaker, she has twice presented her stories at the White House in Washington, DC. Her books have been showcased at New York’s Book Expo the book fair in Frankfurt, Germany and the world’s largest children’s book fair in Bologna, Italy. She has presented to over 200,000 children in her 20-year career as an author/storyteller.
Doris Sommer is the Ira Jewell Williams, Jr., Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and a Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She is widely published and also Director of the Cultural Agents, whose mission is to promote the arts and humanities as social resources. Cultural Agents fosters creativity and scholarship that measurably contribute to the education and development of communities worldwide. Identifying creative agents of change, reflecting on best practices and inspiring their replication, Cultural Agents show that creativity sustains healthy democracies by developing the moral imagination and resourcefulness in citizens.
Caitlin Strokosch is the Executive Director of the Alliance of Artists Communities and has served the organization since 2002. Prior to joining the Alliance, she managed several nonprofit professional music ensembles in Chicago. She is a frequent public speaker and has served as a grants panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts, the Joyce Foundation and Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. She serves on the Grantmakers in the Arts steering committee, within the Support for Individual Artists program, as an Advisor to Girls Rock! Rhode Island. She also serves on the advisory board of Outpost Journal. She holds a Master’s in Musicology from Roosevelt University, where her research focused on music as a tool for building communities of resistance and social dissent.
Nita Sturiale is an art and technology pioneer. She directed the award-winning Invisible Ideas project on the Boston Common – the first Flash-enabled, GPS-triggered interactive art walk. She is included in Stephen Wilson's book Information Arts (MIT Press, 2001) and is a Professor and Department Chair in the Studio for Interrelated Media at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston. She currently teaches courses in event production, interdisciplinary practice and immersive media. Her own artwork moves between social practice, performance, art and science and psycho-geography. She has taught courses combining art, technology and science at several institutions, including Carnegie Mellon and Harvard University. In 2014, she launched the Regali Artists Residency in Sicily project – a two-week collaboration with five American and five European artists in the town of Favara.
Moez Surani is a poet, whose writing has been published internationally, including in Harper’s Magazine, The Walrus, Best Canadian Poetry 2013 and Best Canadian Poetry 2014. He has attended artists’ residencies in Finland, Italy, Switzerland and Taiwan. Among the awards his work has won is the Chalmers Arts Fellowship, which supported a research stint to India and East Africa. When his first collection of poetry, Reticent Bodies, was published, one critic assessed the book’s impact: "Reticent Bodies is that rare book that has the power to be a lynchpin, a hinge in the history of Canadian poetry.” In 2012, he published a second collection, Floating Life, which was described as suffused with “stunning, simple images.” Recently, he has been working on collaborations and on interdisciplinary art and performance art pieces.
Trishla Talera is the Director of TIFA Working Studios, a platform dedicated to exploring alternate avenues of art education in India. As the Director, she focuses on introducing student mentorship programs and residencies for young artists and designers to promote contemporary art and collaboration. A fiber artist from the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD), she is also the artistic director at Varsha Talera (a luxury bridalwear brand dedicated to the revival of Indian textile crafts), the chair of education at Young Indians (Yi CII) Pune and a shaper at Global Shapers Community Pune, an initiative by the World Economic Forum.
Sarah Tanguy is a curator at the Art in Embassies, U.S. Department of State. Established in 1963, AIE is an international program of exhibitions, collections and exchanges at over 200 U.S. diplomatic venues. As the primary arm of the U.S. government dedicated to international collaborative projects, AIE is seeking new partnerships between U.S. artists and their host countries to expand its mission of cultural diplomacy. She is also an independent curator as well as a critic, including a frequent contributor to Sculpture magazine.
Chris Taylor is an artist, curator and publisher working in the areas of contemporary printmaking, artists’ books and curation. He established the Wild Pansy Press in 1995 and has since published and edited over 50 artists’ books. He is also the Director of the Leeds-based International Contemporary Artists’ Book Fair, now in its 18th year. Since 1999, he has worked in collaboration with artist Craig Wood (Taylor & Wood) exploring a series of concepts that address issues of authorship, creativity, interactivity and dissemination through the unlikely medium of repeat pattern wallpapers. Works are included in many collections including MoMA in New York, the National Gallery of Canada, Chicago Institute of Art, Art Gallery of Ontario, Tate Gallery and V&A, Pompidou Centre and Whitworth Art Gallery. He is a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at the University of Leeds.
Tamar Tembeck is an art historian, curator and lecturer. She received her PhD from the Department of Art History and Communications Studies at McGill University and is professionally trained in physical theatre and dance. Over the past decade, her artistic and academic research has addressed a broad range of visual and performative practices tied to the field of medicine. Amongst them, she curated Auto/Pathographies, a group exhibition shown at the Kunstpavillon in Innsbruck and at OBORO in Montreal, documented in a catalogue published in 2014. Since 2012, she has been working on diverse topics pertaining to media and democracy within Media@McGill, an interdisciplinary research hub at McGill University.
Andrew Tetzlaff is an artist, curator and academic based in Melbourne, Australia. He is the Coordinator of the RMIT University’s international artist-in- residence program and the Project Space / Spare Room gallery, a University art space dedicated to practice-based research and cutting-edge projects. His artistic and curatorial work is focused on the notion of emptiness, specifically in ways it manifests in spatial and sonic practices. He has exhibited work across Australia, Austria, Korea and Japan. Professionally he is a lecturer at RMIT’s School of Art, a director at the not-for-profit artist-run space BLINDSIDE and has acted as a consultant/assessor for the City of Melbourne, Asialink, the Inhabit project at the Abbortsford Convent and various Melbourne galleries. He received a MFA from RMIT University and he is currently pursuing his PhD at RMIT.
Chaw Ei Thein was born in Burma in 1969 and graduated from law school an LLB in 1994. Highly regarded as a visual, conceptual and performance artist, her international career has been highly profiled and widely covered in the international arts press as she portrays the contradictions and conflictions of her socio-political environment. Her feminist approach to art is both gracious and candid and has earned her accolades and recognition as one of the most important contemporary artists to emerge from Burma. She has lectured and exhibited extensively, and participated in international performance art festivals. Her numerous achievements include exhibiting the installation September Sweetness (in collaboration with artist Richard Streitmatter Tran) at the 2008 Singapore Biennial and presenting The Burmese Performance Art Scene: Challenges Faced by Burmese Artists at the Asia House Gallery in London in 2007. She was awarded an Asian Cultural Council fellowship in 2009-2010 and an Art Omi award in 2012.
Hannah Thompson is a partially blind academic and blogger. She lectures in French Language and Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London in the UK. She has published widely on nineteenth-century French culture and is currently writing a book on representations of blindness in French literature. She is particularly interested in the fraught relationship between French visual culture and Disability Studies, she is the author of the popular Blind Spot blog.
Josephine Turalba is an interdisciplinary artist born in Manila, the Philippines, where she lives and works, currently as Dean of the Philippine Women’s University School of Fine Arts and Design. She holds an MFA in New Media from Transart Institute and Donau Universität Krems. In her practice, she incorporates video, photography, sculpture, performance and sound installations to reflect on the politics of violence and dynamics of infliction and trauma, depicting spaces where empathy translates into healing. Her projects have been shown at the Arter Space in Istanbul in 2012; the JOGJA International Mini Print Festival in Indonesia, VII Tashkent Biennale of Contemporary Art in Uzbekistan and 2nd Kathmandu International Arts Festival in Nepal in 2013; Santorini Biennale in Greece, Pier-2 Art Center in Taiwan, La Cinematheque Francaise in France and Werkstatt der Kulturen in Germany in 2012; Yuchengco Museum in Manila, South Hill Park Bracknel in the UK and Kunst-im-Tunnel in Germany in 2011; 12th International Cairo Biennale in Egypt in 2010; Malta Contemporary Art Center in 2009; and Lopez Museum in the Philippines in 2007 and 1992.
Tony Vacca is the Co-Founder of The Senegal-America Project and Founder of World Rhythms. He is an innovative American-born percussionist with over 30 years performance experience and whose music incorporates giant West African xylophones, and over 20 Paiste gongs. He features local, regional and internationally known performers showcasing the global nature of music. He has taken 16 plus study trips to West Africa. His Senegal-America Project brings musicians from Senegal together with the World Rhythms performers. Tours include concerts, collaborative recordings, Jazz and World Music festivals and programs in schools. He has recorded and performed with a range of musicians, including pop icon Sting, Senegalese Afro-pop superstar Baaba Maal, Jazz and World Music innovator Don Cherry, genre-defiant Yusef Lateef, Senegalese master drummer Massamba Diop, Gambian twentieth-century griot Foday Musa Suso, Abiodun Oyewole of The Last Poets and Italian folk drummer Alessandra Belloni. His music reflects all of these influences.
Matej Vakula is a multi-media artist, educator, theorist, programmer, and a DIY enthusiast with a specialty in data visualization and urban issues. His work explores the impact of culture, technology and location on personal experience and social interrelationship. He is creating new methods of artistic research to produce models as places where multiple publics meet and interact, proposing new cultures or cultural experiences. He is observing roles of public knowledge in culture and technology, alongside with methods of how information is turned into knowledge and action, using art as a vehicle for this exploration. He has exhibited throughout Europe and the USA and, previously, was a faculty member at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava. In 2012 was nominated for the prestigious Young Visual Artists Award in Slovakia. In 2013 he exhibited at the 6th Prague Biennial and was selected by the International Association of Art Critics as one of Slovakia’s best artists.
Laurent Van Kote studied economics, political science and dance in France, Canada and the US (with Merce Cunningham). After a career as as a dancer, choreographer and artistic director, he joined the French Ministry of Culture. Initially he was responsible for music and dance as a Regional Directorate for Arts and Culture (DRAC), and then as the National Director of Dance in the central administration (DGCA). Currently he is in charge of presenting the French policy for performing arts internationally and monitoring the implementation of policies for organizations abroad as the Conseiller en ingénierie culturel à l'international.
Angel Velasco-Shaw is a media artist, educator, curator and cultural organizer living in Manila and New York City. Her documentaries have been screened in American, European and Asian film festivals, museums, galleries and schools. She is currently the Director of the Institute for Heritage, Culture and the Arts at the Philippine Women’s University School of Fine Arts and Design. She has also taught at Hunter College, New York University and the Pratt Institute. Additionally, she has served as Project Director, Participating Artist and Curator for such multidisciplinary, cross-cultural exchange projects as Markets of Resistance, Woman as (Mythical) Hero and Vestiges of War 1899-1999: The Philippine-American War and Its Aftermath. Publications include: Vestiges of War: The Philippine-American War and the Aftermath of An Imperial Dream: 1899-1999 and Silent Stories. Her grants and artist-in-residencies include the Asian Cultural Council, Arts Network Asia, Philippine National Commission for Culture and the Arts, Banff Centre for the Arts, Arts International Travel Pilot Grant, NYSCA Individual Artists and Jerome Foundation.
Ingo Vetter is a visual artist working with sculpture, photography and installations. He exhibits internationally and often collaborates with other artists, resulting in long-term engagements like the Detroit Tree of Heaven Woodshop (since 2005). An interest in city development and concepts of public space have also lead to research projects like Shrinking Cities (2002-2008) and consultancies like his current commission for a constantly moving public park in Kiruna, a mining city in the very north of Sweden (2011 – approx. 2025). Since 2011 he has served as a professor for sculpture at the University of the Arts Bremen with a specific focus on artistic materials and production in globalization. His previous appointments were as a Professor at Umeä Academy of Fine Arts, Sweden (2006-2011), Visiting Professor at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, MI (2008) and Assistant Professor at the Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus in Germany (2005-2006).
Cécile Vulliemin is currently working as a project leader for the art/science programs for swissnex Boston. She has worked in multiple Swiss cultural institutions, including contemporary art centers, performing arts festivals and film festivals. She also has experience volunteering as a Communications Manager for various organizations, including Swisselectronicmusic, an association that promotes connections among the Swiss electronic culture scene. Currently she continues to volunteer as Exhibition Coordinator for Hors Pistes, an association that initiates creative residences that encourage the transmission of handicrafts between designers and craftsmen by proposing a reworking of traditional production's methods.
Lisa Wade is an American-born conceptual artist, living in Italy for many years and working with sociopolitical content using video, installation and painting. She earned a BFA in Studio Art at Wheaton College and an MFA in Painting at American University, during which time she also studied in Rome. Since 2000, she has shown her paintings, installations and videos throughout North America, Italy and Russia. She also Co-Directed the Regali Artist Residency in Sicily and managed the logistics for the project at FARM Cultural Park in Favara.
Mihoko Wakabayashi was born in Yokohama, Japan and graduated from Doshisha University in Kyoto. She learned weaving by working with children who struggled in the Japanese school system, and was trained as a certified SAORI. When she moved to Worcester in 2000, she opened the first SAORI weaving studio in Massachusetts. She also is a teaching artist at VSA and has taught weaving to many people with physical or mental challenges. Additionally she has conduced many workshops at a variety of institutions. She leads the SAORI movement in US by training instructors, translating works and organizing conferences. Every other year she also organizes a two-week tour of Japan. In 2010 she co-organized the hanging of SAORI tapestries from around the world in an outdoor installation, and has shown her own work at local craft shows, fiber festivals and art shows.
Vanessa Warne is an Associate Professor in the Department of English, Film and Theatre at the University of Manitoba, where she holds a cross-appointment with the University’s Interdisciplinary Disability Studies MA Program. Her current research is on blindness, literacy and the development of a print culture for blind readers in nineteenth-century Britain. She also volunteers in the heritage community, promoting museum accessibility and advocating for the role of museums in post-secondary learning and social justice education.
Gabriel Warren is a sculptor who attempts to position himself at the intersection of two fault lines - that between art and science on one hand, and between humanity and the natural world on the other. He uses natural ice forms as a visual, intellectual and metaphorical point of departure for his explorations in sheet metal, stone, glass, illumination and more. He also has been sent on four polar expeditions, two to Antarctica and two to the Artic. In 1999 he became the first sculptor from any country to be sent to The Ice – Antarctica by the National Science Foundation. Also, in 2001 he engineered a companion trip to the high Arctic with the Canadian Coast Guard. In 2006, the NSF deployed him for a second time to Antarctica, and in 2014 he was sent to the Greenland Ice Cap with GEUS, the Geological Survey of Greenland and Denmark.
Claire Anna Watson is a curator, artist and writer based in Melbourne, Australia. She is Chair of BLINDSIDE and Curator at Bundoora Homestead Art Centre. Previously, she was the curator at Hatch Contemporary Art Space and Visual Arts Program Coordinator at Asialink, managing their visual arts residency program. She has developed major curatorial projects including the Asialink/BLINDSIDE exhibition Vertigo, which toured Indonesia, South Korea and Taiwan; and the award-winning project Home—Reframing Craft and Domesticity. She has been a guest speaker and workshop facilitator at a number of museums, including the Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei; Galerie Soemardja in Indonesia; and the POSCO Art Museum in Seoul. She also co- edited and co-wrote the Asialink publications Every 23 Days: 20 years Touring Asia and Abundant Australia—Highlights of the 11th Venice Architecture Biennale. She has exhibited her multi-disciplinary arts practice and undertaken residencies in Australia, Portugal, Turkey and Finland. She serves on the advisory panel for Arts Victoria.
Crispin Weinberg is President of Biomedical Modeling Inc. (BMI), an anatomical engineering company in Boston. BMI is best known for donating the models used to plan the successful separation of conjoined twins from Guatemala at UCLA by Dr. Henry Kawamoto. BMI was also chosen by the Egyptian Museum of Antiquities to reconstruct a model of King Tutankhamun’s face based on CT scans of his mummy. Additionally, BMI has worked with several artists, including Matthew Day Jackson, Kiki Smith, Noel Grunwaldt, Candice Ivy and Richard Duca. Prior to joining BMI, he was Chief Scientific Officer of Angio-Oncology Sciences Inc. and a Co-Founder and Director of the GraftArtery Program at Organogenesis Inc., one the first tissue engineering companies. He holds an SB in mathematics and an SM in physics from the University of Chicago, and a PhD in Neurobiology from Harvard University. In 2010 he received Hero Award from the Brookline Community Foundation.
Andrea Wenglowskyj is Co-Founder of Kind Aesthetic with Sara Jones, a unique creative agency that works with artists, creative entrepreneurs, and small businesses who need genuine storytelling and beautiful marketing materials that are fresh, exciting, and engage their audience. Kind Aesthetic works with clients either through the DELVE Toolkit—a unique, affordable, one-on-one consulting program for individuals who want to hone their own skills—or through their more extensive, bespoke Kind Aesthetic services that provide stunning visual and emotional representation of ideas to share with the world. DELVE also includes workshops and events to help artists and creatives to best communicate what they do in person, online and in writing. Andrea is a photographer who is inspired and motivated by her Ukrainian heritage, using it to propel her research and travels, and as a subject in her work. She has worked with Storefront for Art and Architecture, the UBS Art Collection, Superfront BK, and is a Fulbright grant recipient, in addition to being a researcher, writer, and curator.
Alexis Williams is a Canadian sci-artist with a love for biology and natural history. She is the Director of the Ayatana Artistic Research Program, dedicated to facilitating hands on scientific research and experimentation by visiting international artists. She has designed Ayatana to offer workshops that focus on encounters with the natural world with the support of local scientists, naturalists and experts in the field, lab, farm, sea and sky.
Gregory Williams is an assistant professor in the Department of History of Art & Architecture at Boston University. He has written for art periodicals, including Artforum, frieze, and Texte zur Kunst, and has authored catalogue essays for major exhibitions of Rosemarie Trockel (at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, 2005, and at the Kunstmuseum Basel, 2010) and Martin Kippenberger (at the Tate Modern in London, 2006). His book, Permission to Laugh: Humor and Politics in Contemporary German Art, appeared in 2012 with the University of Chicago Press. Most recently, he published “Ground Control: Painting in the Work of Cosima von Bonin” in Art Journal (Winter 2012). He teaches lecture courses and seminars at the undergraduate and graduate levels in modern and contemporary art and critical theory.
Moira Williams is a founding member of the walking cooperative Walk Exchange. She also has spoken at the Elastic City Walks Festival, Dorsky Curatorial Programs, Open Engagement Conference for Art and Social Practice and been interviewed by C Magazine in Canada. Her work has been seen in Adrienne Outlaw's FLEX IT! My Body. My Temple; Jennifer Monson's iLAND; Thomas Hirschhorn's Gramsci House; Walk21 in Munich; No Longer Empty's This Side of Paradise at the DUMBO Arts Festival, Kitchen, MoMA PSI; and the Ghetto Biennial in Haiti. She was recently awarded an Emergency Grant from the Contemporary Arts Foundation and selected as an On Our Radar Artist to Watch by Creative Capital. Additionally she is a MAP FUND nominee, a Laundromat Project Fellow and artist-in-residence at 601 Tully House in Syracuse. This summer she will be an artist-in-residence at The Luminary in St. Louis as well as co-facilitator of FLOAT.
Emily Worden is a Boston based entrepreneur, consultant and writer. She is also the Owner and Founder of the custom handbag business ethreads.com. In 2013, she started consulting for businesses to help them with marketing, copy editing and developing a strategic brand. In addition she is the author of Make. Sell. Repeat. The Ultimate Business Guide for Artists, Crafters, and Makers.
Howard Yezerski is the Co-Director of the Miller Yezerski Gallery, one of the leading contemporary art galleries in Boston. The gallery's primary focus is on contemporary photography, painting, and sculpture with a mixture of mid-career and emerging artists.
Tiffany Shea York joined the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston in 2000 to manage the Artist-in-Residence program as well as all contemporary exhibitions, related materials, and public programs. Since then she has worked with over 70 artists from around the world and helped to realize nearly 40 exhibitions, artist’s projects, and performances. Before coming to the Gardner, she worked as a studio jeweler and co-founded and directed Boston’s White Elephant Gallery, which exhibited work of up-and-coming artists in all media.

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