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Summer faculty and guests, 2012
Deborah Aschheim, MFA, US
Myron Beasley, PhD, Brazil/US
Sarah Bennett, PhD, UK
Lynn Book, MFA, US, (2012)
Martin John Callanan, MFA, UK/Germany
Michael Bowdidge, PhD, UK
Jean Marie Casbarian, MFA, US
Cella, MFA, US
Geoff Cox, PhD, UK/Denmark
Nicolás Dumit Estevez, MFA, Dominican Republic/US
Victoria Hindley, MFA, USA/Austria
Laura González, PhD, Spain/UK
Klaus Knoll, PhD, Austria/US
Lisa Mezzacappa, MA, US
Christina Stuckert, Germany
Radhika Subramaniam, PhD, India/US
Deborah Aschheim makes installations based on invisible networks of perception and thought. Her recent work exploring the subject of memory has led her to collaborate with musicians and neuroscientists, and for the past 4 years she has collaborated intensively with musician/composer Lisa Mezzacappa. Aschheim's recent exhibitions include installations at the Armory Center in Pasadena, CA; at the Pasadena Museum of California Art; at Laumeier Sculpture Park in Saint Louis, MO; at the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, NC and at the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, PA. "Neural Architecture," her series of six evolving nervous systems for buildings (2003-6) included installations at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, and at Laguna Art Museum in Laguna Beach, and “Arborization,” her series of temporary outdoor light installations, included a major installation in central London at the headquarters of the Wellcome Trust. Aschheim holds a BA in Anthropology from Brown University and an MFA from the University of Washington. She has received fellowships from the City of Los Angeles, the Pasadena Arts Commission, the Durfee Foundation, and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. She has been artist-in-residence at Fundacion Valparaiso in Mojacar, Spain; at Headlands in Marin, California; at Hallwalls in Buffalo, NY, at the Bemis Center in Omaha, NE and at the Roswell Museum and Art Center in New Mexico. She is currently the inaugural Hellman Visiting Artist in Memory and Aging in the Department of Neurology at the University of California San Francisco medical school. She has completed permanent public art commissions for the City of Sacramento library system, and for the Los Angeles Police Department’s Communications Dispatch Center, and is completing a data-driven installation for San Jose, CA International Airport. Aschheim lives and works in Southern California. >> http://www.deborahaschheim.com/
Myron Beasley is an International Curator and Ethnographer who lectures in the areas of Critical Cultural Studies and Performance Studies. His recent work explores how traditional ritual practices of Death/Loss are mitigated, configured, and interpreted in particular sites/cities of the African Diaspora. Considering how performances of traditional ritual practices in contemporary society as more than just spiritual and mystical performative acts; rather ritual as a vehicle by which one can extrapolate (both political and religious) meaning in the contemporary world. His work has led him to fieldwork in the United States, Morocco, Brazil, and most recently Haiti where he is the co-curator of the Ghetto Biennale. His work as appeared in such international academic journals as Performance Research and Text and Performance Quarterly. He is also a performance artist who uses food as his primary medium. Myron teaches at Bates College, Maine. >> site and site.
Sarah Bennett's art practice is predominantly engaged with exploration of discursive sites and contexts, particularly our relationships with institutions and their histories in relation to discourses of power. Her practice is not bound by any particular processes or materials but is contingent upon and open to the contexts with which she works, as are the potential meanings emerging through her work, which she hopes remain fluid and open to active interpretation. Her doctoral practice involved animating the vestiges of repetitious acts, which she performed within architectural spaces, reflecting the way in which individual agency is circumscribed by the controlling mechanisms that exist within institutions, both through their spatial rationale and their regulatory frameworks. She also uses photography as an archiving tool to produce visual essays that reflect on the ways we occupy institutional sites and contexts. >> site
Michael Bowdidge
Stanya Kahn is an interdisciplinary media artist. Working primarily in video, with a practice that includes performance, writing, and photography, my work inhabits a space between fiction and document, and stems from an extensive background in live performance. Integrating improvisation with tightly scripted texts and scores, the work addresses issues such as agency, power, and the uses and failings of language. My kinetic relationship to the performative and to humor inform a hybrid media practice infused with pop vernacular, documentary tropes and experimental film/video praxis. With extensive training in theater, performance, and dance, my practice and my approach to pedagogy stem from core relationships with the body. An MFA in writing and 10 years of video production experience have deepened the interdisciplinary nature of the way I work, think, and teach. Currently I am preparing for a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Artizona State University. I recently worked in a collaborative team with artist Harry Dodge and my work has shown in numerous venues nationally and internationally including The Whitney Biennial (08); The California Biennial (10) at the Orange County Museum of Art; MoMA/NY; MOCA/LA; The Getty Center/LA, the Hammer Museum/LA; the Sundance Film Festival; the Center for Art and Media/Karlsrühe; PS1 Museum of Contemporary Art/NY; Contemporary Center for Art/Vilnius, Lithuania; MIT, Cambridge; ICA, Philadelphia; Kunstalle, Bonn, GDR; The Brooklyn Museum, NY; The Hayward Gallery, London; Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles and Elizabeth Dee Gallery/NY, among many others. >> www.vielmetter.com, www.eai.com, www.elizabethdeegallery.com
Guest Martin John Callanan is an artist and researcher exploring notions of citizenship within the globally connected world. Concerns include information, data, and knowledge. Martin John Callanan is an artist whose work spans numerous mediums and engages both emerging and commonplace technology. His work has included translating active communication data into music; freezing in time the earth’s water system; writing thousands of letters; capturing newspapers from around the world as they are published; taming wind onto the internet and broadcasting his precise physical location live for over two years. Martin's work is always decidedly deadpan and served with a dash of ennui. Some of his more well-known pieces include Letters 2004-2006 published by Book Works, the ambient audio installation Sonification of You, the meta-news aggregator I Wanted to See All the News From Today and Text Trends, which abstracts the casual manner in which we receive, scan and process information and language on a daily basis. Martin's work has been exhibited, published and screened at venues throughout Europe, Russia, North America, South America, Asia and Australia. Participating with, among others, Es Baluard Modern and Contemporary Art Museum, Moscow International Film Festival, Ars Electronic Centre, ISEA 2010, FutureEverything, Museum of Contemporary Art of Vojvodina, Riga Centre for New Media Culture, UCL Environment Institute, Science Museum (London), Tate Britain, Folly Festival of Digital Culture, Book Works, The Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture, File Prix Lux, and in several editions of the FILE Electronic Language International Festival in Brasil. Martin is currently a Teaching Fellow in Fine Art Media (Digital Media & Print) at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London and a member of Slade Centre for Electronic Media in Fine Art (SCEMFA) and Word Image research group. >> site.
Jean Marie Casbarian is an interdisciplinary installation artist who incorporates photography, film and video projections, sound, sculpture and performance into her artworks. She received her MFA from Milton Avery School of Art at Bard College in New York in the year 2000. Along with a nomination for the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Jean Marie has received a number of awards and artist residencies including The LaNapoule Foundation Grant in LaNapoule, France, the Chicago Artist's Assistance Project Grant, and a yearlong Associateship with The Rocky Mountain Women's Institute. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Jean Marie is Chair of the Studio Arts Program at Transart Institute, a low-residency MFA program based in Berlin and New York City where she also teaches and mentors graduate students. She has been a faculty member with both the ICP-Bard MFA program and General Studies Program at the International Center of Photography in New York City and has taught in the film and photography departments at Hampshire College, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the City Colleges of Chicago. Currently, Jean Marie resides in Western Massachusetts where she holds an appointment as artist and research associate at Five Colleges, Inc. in Amherst, Massachusetts. >> site
Cella is an artist working mainly in post-documentary photography, video, experimental film and with architectural projections. Her practice explores otherness, liminality and identity. It is driven by curiosity, loss, dislocation, longing, and questions of cultural identity, exploring the possibilities for living in liminality, and ideas about the location of "home" in terms of nostalgia and memory. Many projects share an attention to the built environment, specifically temporary architecture and ideas about the use of space. Selected exhibitions include the Museum of Modern Art, Salzburg, the Art Complex Museum, Boston and the Kitchen in New York. She holds an MFA in New Media and Cultural Studies from Vermont College. She was most recently Artist in Residence at Lingnan University Hong Kong. >> site
Geoff Cox is currently a Researcher in Digital Aesthetics in the Department of Information and Media Studies at Aarhus University (DK). He is also an occasional artist, writer, and Associate Curator of Online Projects, Arnolfini, Bristol (UK), and Reader in Art and Technology, University of Plymouth (UK) where he is part of KURATOR/Art and Social Technologies Research group. He is an editor for the DATA Browser book series (published by Autonomedia), and co-edited 'Economising Culture' (2004), 'Engineering Culture' (2005) and 'Creating Insecurity' (2009). His research interests lie in the areas of software studies, network culture and a reappraisal of the concept of the 'public'. >> site
Nicolás Estevéz is an interdisciplinary artist working mostly in performance art, and public interventions. His projects have been exhibited extensively in the US as well as internationally at venues such as Madrid Abierto/ARCO, Havana Biennial, El Museo del Barrio, Bronx Museum of the Arts, P.S.1/MoMA, among many others. Recent work includes "For Art's Sake", a series of secular pilgrimages to seven museums in the New York City metropolitan area. In 2007, he published "Pleased to Meet You" a trilingual publication that was part of a town-wide public intervention presented for IDENSITAT 07. Other publications include "Induced Labor", produced for a solo exhibition at Dean Project in 2008, and part of a public intervention presented at the Prague Quadrennial with Franklin Furnace in 2007 in the Czech Republic. In 2007 Estevez was awarded an alumni commission to present a town-wide project as part of The MacDowell Colony Centennial. His work has been reviewed in The New York Times, NYArts Magazine, The Boston Globe, Art Nexus, Flash Art, Cuban Arts, and in major publications in Mexico, Spain and the Dominican Republic. In September of 2008 Estevez exhibited the "Passerby Museum", an ongoing public installation/intervention in collaboration with Mexican artist María Alós, at the Claremont Museum of Art in LA. Born in Santiago de los Treinta Caballeros, Dominican Republic, he lives and work in the South Bronx. >> site
Laura Gonzalez is a visual artist and a research lecturer. Her practice encompasses drawing, photography, and sculpture and my work has been exhibited in the UK, Spain and Portugal. She is currently immersed in an interdisciplinary project which investigates psychoanalytic approaches to making and understanding objects of seduction within the fields of fine art, consumption studies and material culture. She has contributed to debates around knowledge production in the creative disciplines. Her research includes an examination of parallels between artistic and analytic practices, a study of Manolo Blahnik‘s shoes as objects of desire and the creation of a psychoanalytically inspired Discourse of the Artefact, a framework enabling the circulation of questions and answers through a relational approach to artworks. >> site
Victoria Hindley is an artist, writer, and independent curator. She works primarily with photography, language, the book form, and in collaboration with others. Her work challenges the construction of meaning(s) through applying strategies of decoding such as abstraction, humor, and decontextualization as a way of investigating representations, stereotypes, cultural obsession, and institutional constructs. Her work has been published, exhibited, and collected internationally since the early 90s. Victoria holds a BA in Literature and a MFA in New Media from Transart Institute. Recent projects include: SHE IS, a public installation commissioned by the City of Vienna, Austria and developed in VALIE EXPORT’s Kubus Raum; The Shelter Project, a multi-platform 5-day art event involving 30 international artists, theorists, and writers; and a second edition of the artist book: Pay Close Attention to Size of Pill Before Swallowing, which was recently part of a year-long exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Leipzig, Germany. Victoria currently works with SOHO Ottakring in Vienna, an artist-led research and activism organization focused on the urban public sphere. She teaches at Transart Institute in Berlin/New York. >> site
Klaus Knoll received received a PhD from the University of Salzburg for work on "Social and Private Use of the Photographic Medium". Klaus studied photography with with Juan Fontcuberta, Roger Palmer, Thomas Joshua Cooper and Dörte Eißfeldt, amongst others. He is currently teaching photography at the University of Hawai'i Manoa, Honolulu. Klaus has taught photography and media studies in Europe, Japan and the U.S. He has works in the collections of the Cologne Museum Ludwig, Biblioteque Nationale in Paris, and Austrian National Fine Art Photo Collection. His exhibition record includes one man shows at the Tokyo Shinjuku Nikon Salon, Berlin Brennpunkt/DGPh, Alfred Lowenherz Gallery, New York, the Art Complex Museum in Boston. >> site
Lisa Mezzacappa is a San Francisco-based bassist, composer, and musical instigator. An active collaborator and curator in the Bay Area music community, she leads her own groups Bait & Switch and Nightshade, and co-leads the ensembles duo B., Cylinder, the Permanent Wave Ensemble, and the Oakland Active Orchestra. She collaborates frequently on cross-disciplinary projects in sound installation, digital poetry, film, sculpture and public music/art. As curator, she programs the annual JazzPOP concert series at the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles; the monthly Monday Makeout creative music series in the Mission District of San Francisco, and a new quarterly music and film series, Mission Eye and Ear, at the Red Poppy Art House. Lisa has been artist-in-residence at Djerassi Resident Artists Program (2008), Headlands Center for the Arts (2006), the Banff International Jazz Workshop (2000), and the Painted Bride Arts Center (2000). She holds an MA in ethnomus icology from UC Berkeley (2003), and a BA in music from the University of Virginia (1997). She has performed at countless Bay Area venues including Intersection for the Arts, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SFMOMA, Yoshi’s, the Jazzschool, and the de Young Museum, San Francisco; as well as the Earshot Jazz Festival, Seattle; and the Montreal Jazz Festival; Canada. She performs regularly in New York City, where she leads an East Coast version of her jazz quartet, as well as the Brooklyn-meets-San Francisco trio Soft Pitch. Lisa has been awarded grants by Southern Exposure/the Warhol Foundation, the San Francisco Friends of Chamber Music, American Composers Forum, the City of Oakland and Meet the Composer. She currently performs in more than a dozen original jazz, pop, improv and chamber ensembles, working with bandleaders Phillip Greenlief, Aaron Novik, Beth Custer, Randy McKean, Aaron Bennett, Graham Connah, Cory Wright, Tom Djll, and Ross Hammond, and collaborating with Darren Johnston, Katy Stephan, Aram Shelton, Kjell Nordeson, Murray Campbell, Jason Levis, Dina Maccabbee, Noah Phillips, Rob Ewing, Aaron Novik, Kasey Knudsen, Aaron Bennett, Vijay Anderson, Michael Coleman, Matt Nelson, Sam Ospovat, John Hanes, and many many others. For Gold Record Studio (2007-8), she co-hosted, with Jon Brumit, a free public recording studio for six weeks at an Oakland neighborhood flea market, assuming the role of record producer, audio engineer and musical instigator. For Earworms (2006-08), a collaboration with installation artist Deborah Aschheim, she composed and recorded 18 pieces, with more than a dozen musicians, for a series of sculptural installations exploring the relationships between music, memory and language. Nostalgia for the Future is another Aschheim collaboration that uses analog sounds, acoustic instruments and electronic processing in architecturally-inspired installations. Moths Drink the Tears is an ongoing digital poetry/music collaboration with poet Oni Buchanan. >> www.lisamezzacappa.com
Radhika Subramaniam is a curator, editor and writer based in New York. She is presently the Director/Chief Curator of the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center at Parsons The New School for Design where she is also assistant professor of Art and Design History and Theory. Her recent projects include Abecedarium for Our Times (Apexart, 2008), Rods and Cones: Seeing from the Back of One's Head (Guest curated for the South Asian Women's Creative Collective, 2008) and a major two-year international initiative Cities, Art and Recovery (LMCC, 2005-2006) focused on the work of art and culture in the aftermath of catastrophe. Subramaniam was also the founding and Executive Editor of an interdisciplinary art journal, Connect:art.politics.theory.practice, published by Arts International. "With a curatorial practice that is both cross disciplinary and dialogic, Radhika has a demonstrated commitment to public pedagogy, critical urbanism, and questions of political and social justice," said Parsons Dean Joel Towers. International cultural exchange, cross-disciplinary encounters, South Asian urban modernity and issues of cultural translation define Subramaniam's professional practice. >>
Christina Stuckert has been an independent medical practitioner in Berlin for over fifteen years. Her focus is on ZenShiatsu, a Japanese body therapy developed by Shizuto Masunaga. The basis of her work is regular Zen practice in daily life as a nun and she shares responsibility for the Berlin Zen Dojo. Christina integrates daily meditation experience in her treatments in order for her clients to perceive new energy levels. She provides people with an interest in Zen meditation with the possibility to practice together in small groups. >> site
ADMINISTRATIVE SUPPORT
Yvonne Ahearn, Legal Counsel, Kailua, Oahu
Andy Blount, Senior Administrator (Programmes), University of Plymouth, UK
Al Bolton, Financial Accounting, New York, New York
Drew Henmi, Administrative Assistant, Honolulu, Oahu
Michael Poetschko, Residency Support, Vienna, Austria
Astrid Menze, Residency Support, Berlin, Germany
Jorge Prado, Senior Systems Administrator, Solid Space, US
BOARD MEMBERS
Transart Institute Faculty Advisory Board
Jean Marie Casbarian, MFA
Geoff Cox, PhD
University of Plymouth Program Liaison
Sarah Bennett, PhD, Associate Professor, Master's Coordinator, School of Art and Media, University of Plymouth
Transart Institute Collegium
Faculty Reps: Jean Marie Casbarian, Geoff Cox, Nicolas Estevez
Student Reps: Adina Bier, Stephan Takkides
Alumnae Reps: Karen Marshall, Jeanne Criscola, Victoria Hindley
Transart Institute External Advisory Board
Wolfgang Suetzl, PhD, Peace Studies, Universities of Innsbruck & Vienna
Annette Weintraub, MFA, Chair of Art, City College, New York, NY
Virgil Wong, MFA, Ti Alumnus, MFA Faculty Member New School, New York, NY
Stewart Parker, MFA, Alumnus, Asst. Professor, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY
Summer faculty and guests, 2011
Tatiana Bazzichelli, PhD, Italy/Denmark
Myron Beasley, PhD, Brazil/US (2012)
Sarah Bennett, PhD, UK
Lynn Book, MFA, US, (2012)
Michael Bowdidge, PhD, UK
Jean Marie Casbarian, MFA, US
Cella, MFA, US
Ofri Cnaani, MFA, Israel/US
Dorit Cypis, MFA, MA, Israel/Canada/US
Geoff Cox, PhD, UK/Denmark
David Dunn, MFA, US
Nicolás Dumit Estevez, MFA, Dominican Republic/US
Victoria Hindley, MFA, USA/Austria
Laura González, PhD, Spain/UK
Dmytri Kleiner, Russia/Germany
Klaus Knoll, PhD, Austria/US
Alanna Lockward, Dominican Republic/Germany
Merete Røstad, MFA, Norway
Christina Stuckert, Germany
Radhika Subramaniam, PhD, India/US
Wolfgang Suetzl, PhD/ Austria (2012)
Mary Ting, MFA, China/US (2012)
Bios
Tatiana Bazzichelli is a communication sociologist, researching on network culture, hacktivism and net art. She is Ph.D. Scholar at the Department of Information and Media Studies, Aarhus University (DK) and Visiting Scholar at the Stanford Humanities Lab, Stanford University (California, 2009). In 2001, she founded the networking project AHA:Activism-Hacking-Artivism (www.ecn.org/aha), which won the Honorary Mention for the Digital Communities category at the Ars Electronica Festival (Linz, 2007). In 2002, she initiated the aha.list, "the most popular in Italian art and hacktivism" according to Neural magazine. She wrote the book Networking. The Net as Artwork published in English by the Digital Aesthetics Research Center, Aarhus, 2008 (www.networkingart.eu/english.html). From 2003 to 2008 she was a journalist and curator based in Berlin, Germany and she organized several exhibitions and conventions on media art and hacktivism, such as Sousveillance (Aarhus, 2009), HACK.Fem. EAST (www.hackfemeast.org, Berlin, 2008), HackMIT! (Berlin, 2007), CUM2CUT (www.cum,2cut.net, Berlin, 2006-2008), Hack.it.art (Berlin 2005), Art on the Net in Italy (Berlin 2005), MediaDemocracy and Telestreet (Munich, 2004), AHA (Rome, 2002), Hacker Art Lab (Perugia, 2000). Since 2008, she lives in Aarhus, Denmark. >> site
Myron Beasley is an International Curator and Ethnographer who lectures in the areas of Critical Cultural Studies and Performance Studies. His recent work explores how traditional ritual practices of Death/Loss are mitigated, configured, and interpreted in particular sites/cities of the African Diaspora. Considering how performances of traditional ritual practices in contemporary society as more than just spiritual and mystical performative acts; rather ritual as a vehicle by which one can extrapolate (both political and religious) meaning in the contemporary world. His work has led him to fieldwork in the United States, Morocco, Brazil, and most recently Haiti where he is the co-curator of the Ghetto Biennale. His work as appeared in such international academic journals as Performance Research and Text and Performance Quarterly. He is also a performance artist who uses food as his primary medium. Myron teaches at Bates College, Maine. >> site and site.
Lynn Book's 25 year history of transmedia, interdisciplinary practice engages bodies as becoming, bodies being with. Her hybrid projects include full scale performance media works, concerts in contemporary music and club settings, exhibitional stagings, recordings and public actions that draw from performance art, movement, the theatrical, visual art, language, sound and new music. Content and form merge in Book’s works which are part delirium and part meditation. Book's work has received citations, fellowships, and awards from among others, the National Endowment for the Arts, Illinois Arts Council, Franklin Furnace, and Mary Duke Biddle Foundation. ‘RE:garding Next’, a collaborative culture project investigating utopian desire, premiered at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in North Carolina, 2007 and was subsequently performed at Roulette in New York City, Pittsburgh and Vienna. The New York Foundation for the Arts has supported several projects with Book as writer, composer, director, and producer including the The Dice Project: a CD of adventurous women composers and accompanying series of live concert and media events at Thundergulch, EAR Studios at RPI, and The Kitchen in New York. Book’s current projects include ‘FROTH’, a collaboration with an opera company and an early music orchestra in New York City, a video artist and a composer in Vienna, that collides with an 18th century French Baroque opera and received a preview at Symphony Space, May 2010. She is a featured artist at Art Stays, an international festival of contemporary art in Slovenia in 2010, where she will produce ‘SongSpot’, a new site specific performance and installation project. Lynn Book has taught at the Kitchen Summer Institute, Sarah Lawrence College, Barnard, and the School of the Art Institute, among others. >> site
Ofri Cnaani lives in New York and works in Video and Large-scale Video Installations as well as drawing. Cnaani's work blurs the boundaries between a constructed reality and reality itself and explore notions of domination, feminine bodily experiences, and spatial awareness by analyzing their formal dimensions within social and psychological spheres. Ofri Cnaani graduated from Hunter College's MFA studio program in 2004. She is currently completing a large scale commission to create 10 site-specific video installations at 10 museums of contemporary art in Italy's Lombardy region. Cnaani is a Six Points Fellow and was twice the winner of the America-Israel Cultural Foundation award. One-person exhibitions include: Twister, Network of Lombardy Contemporary Art Museums, Italy; Andrea Meislin Gallery; NYC, Braverman Gallery, Tel Aviv; Pack Gallery, Milan; Haifa Museum of Art, Israel; Herzlyia Museum of Art, Israel. Group exhibitions include: Moscow Biennial, The Kitchen, NYC; Bronx Museum of the Arts, NYC; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; Arnolfini Foundation Museum, Bristol, UK; Tel Aviv Museum; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel; Prague Triennale among many others. >> site
Jean Marie Casbarian is an interdisciplinary installation artist who incorporates photography, film and video projections, sound, sculpture and performance into her artworks. She received her MFA from Milton Avery School of Art at Bard College in New York in the year 2000. Along with a nomination for the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Jean Marie has received a number of awards and artist residencies including The LaNapoule Foundation Grant in LaNapoule, France, the Chicago Artist's Assistance Project Grant, and a yearlong Associateship with The Rocky Mountain Women's Institute. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Jean Marie is Chair of the Studio Arts Program at Transart Institute, a low-residency MFA program based in Berlin and New York City where she also teaches and mentors graduate students. She has been a faculty member with both the ICP-Bard MFA program and General Studies Program at the International Center of Photography in New York City and has taught in the film and photography departments at Hampshire College, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the City Colleges of Chicago. Currently, Jean Marie resides in Western Massachusetts where she holds an appointment as artist and research associate at Five Colleges, Inc. in Amherst, Massachusetts. >> site
Sarah Benett's art practice is predominantly engaged with exploration of discursive sites and contexts, particularly our relationships with institutions and their histories in relation to discourses of power. Her practice is not bound by any particular processes or materials but is contingent upon and open to the contexts with which she works, as are the potential meanings emerging through her work, which she hopes remain fluid and open to active interpretation. Her doctoral practice involved animating the vestiges of repetitious acts, which she performed within architectural spaces, reflecting the way in which individual agency is circumscribed by the controlling mechanisms that exist within institutions, both through their spatial rationale and their regulatory frameworks. She also uses photography as an archiving tool to produce visual essays that reflect on the ways we occupy institutional sites and contexts. >> site
Dorit Cypis is an artist, MFA, California Institute for the Arts and a mediator, Masters of Dispute Resolution, Pepperdine University. Since the 1980's Dorit Cypis has employed strategies of photography, performance, installation, social sculpture to explore relationships between personal and social identity, questioning subjectivity in relation to corporeal, social, political and psychological spaces. | Her work has been presented nationally and internationally including at the Whitney Museum of American Art, International Center of Photography, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Orange County Museum, Walker Art Center, Musee d'Art Contemporain at Montreal, Musee des Beaux Arts @ Bruxelles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Cypis has taught on identity, representation and social relations at universities and colleges across the USA as well as in Canada, Holland, France and Israel. | Cypis has generated extensive cultural programming including FAR (Foundation for Art Resources), 1979-1982, Los Angeles, questioning the production of art, the role of artists and the ability of art and artists to penetrate cultural domains. FAR developed partnerships between artists and public, private and educational organizations throughout Los Angeles. She founded Kulture Klub Collaborative (KKC), Twin Cities, 1992-1999, within a large social service agency, Minneapolis Youth Link, to challenge social workers to accept art as a viable discipline for crisis intervention with homeless teens. KKC developed strategies to bridge survival and inspiration, networking between homeless youth, artists and arts organizations across the Twin Cities. Both these organization continue today. | Cypis' recent study of mediation and conflict transformation pro actively addresses difference, the negotiation of power and reciprocity. Her work today mines aesthetics and ethics. Cypis' museum exhibitions are immersive laboratories abstracting forms, positions, gestures, and meanings to shed light on the paradoxes of identity, while her public works and actions are social/political extensions, mediating aesthetic abstractions into living life. Here form meets function and ideology shifts back to experience. | Founded by Cypis in 2006, Foreign Exchanges offers strategies of engagement bridging personal and cultural differences through aesthetics, conflict resolution and somatic arts, for the arts, culture, education, social service, social activism and innovative business. Foreign Exchanges represents the strengths of Cypis' work as an artist, a mediator, and an educator. | Dorit Cypis has received numerous awards including the National Endowment for the Arts, Japan Foundation, Bush, McKnight, Jerome, Ordway, Durfee Foundations, City of Los Angeles Cultural Arts Department and the Fellows of Contemporary Art. She is a founding member of Mediators Beyond Borders, Chair of Mediation and the Arts Committee, Southern California Mediation Association and is on the Advisory Board for Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. >> site
Cella is an artist working mainly in post-documentary photography, video, experimental film and with architectural projections. Her practice explores otherness, liminality and identity. It is driven by curiosity, loss, dislocation, longing, and questions of cultural identity, exploring the possibilities for living in liminality, and ideas about the location of "home" in terms of nostalgia and memory. Many projects share an attention to the built environment, specifically temporary architecture and ideas about the use of space. Selected exhibitions include the Museum of Modern Art, Salzburg, the Art Complex Museum, Boston and the Kitchen in New York. She holds an MFA in New Media and Cultural Studies from Vermont College. She was most recently Artist in Residence at Lingnan University Hong Kong. >> site
Geoff Cox is currently a Researcher in Digital Aesthetics in the Department of Information and Media Studies at Aarhus University (DK). He is also an occasional artist, writer, and Associate Curator of Online Projects, Arnolfini, Bristol (UK), and Reader in Art and Technology, University of Plymouth (UK) where he is part of KURATOR/Art and Social Technologies Research group. He is an editor for the DATA Browser book series (published by Autonomedia), and co-edited 'Economising Culture' (2004), 'Engineering Culture' (2005) and 'Creating Insecurity' (2009). His research interests lie in the areas of software studies, network culture and a reappraisal of the concept of the 'public'. >> site
David Dunn is a composer and artist who primarily engages in site-specific interactions or research-oriented activities. Much of his current work is focused upon the development of listening strategies and technologies for environmental sound monitoring in both aesthetic and scientific contexts. Dunn is internationally known for his articulation of frameworks that combine the arts and sciences towards practical environmental activism and problem solving. From 1970 to 1974, he was an assistant to the American composer Harry Partch and remained active as a performer in the Partch ensemble for over a decade. Other mentors included composers Kenneth Gaburo and Pauline Oliveros, in addition to Polish theater director Jerzy Grotowski. He has been the recipient of over 35 grants and fellowships for both artistic and scientific research, including the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, Langlois Foundation, McCune Foundation, Meet the Composer, Ford Foundation, Delle Foundation, Tides Foundation, New Mexico Arts Division, and various US embassies. In 2005, he received the prestigious Alpert Award for music, and the Henry Cowell Award from the American Music Center in 2007. His compositions and soundscape recordings have appeared in over 500 international forums, concerts, broadcasts, and exhibitions. | As a pioneer in the fields of acoustic ecology, bioacoustics, interspecies communication, and scientific sonification, he has composed a body of innovative and experimental work and has contributed to projects as diverse as sensory enhancement of healthcare environments, intervention strategies for forest and agricultural pests, reducing sensory deprivation problems in captive animals, and the design of international broadcast networks. He has investigated, among other things, the interrelationship between music and language and the ultrasonic world beyond human hearing. As an expert wildlife recordist, Dunn has invented microphones to record such phenomena as the sounds of bark beetles within trees and underwater invertebrates in freshwater ponds, and the design of self-organizing autonomous sound systems for interaction between artificial and natural non-human systems. As a scientific researcher, Dunn is about to co-file a provisional patent on a device and protocol for control of tree invading invertebrates using acoustic means. >> site
Nicolás Estevéz is an interdisciplinary artist working mostly in performance art, and public interventions. His projects have been exhibited extensively in the US as well as internationally at venues such as Madrid Abierto/ARCO, Havana Biennial, El Museo del Barrio, Bronx Museum of the Arts, P.S.1/MoMA, among many others. Recent work includes "For Art's Sake", a series of secular pilgrimages to seven museums in the New York City metropolitan area. In 2007, he published "Pleased to Meet You" a trilingual publication that was part of a town-wide public intervention presented for IDENSITAT 07. Other publications include "Induced Labor", produced for a solo exhibition at Dean Project in 2008, and part of a public intervention presented at the Prague Quadrennial with Franklin Furnace in 2007 in the Czech Republic. In 2007 Estevez was awarded an alumni commission to present a town-wide project as part of The MacDowell Colony Centennial. His work has been reviewed in The New York Times, NYArts Magazine, The Boston Globe, Art Nexus, Flash Art, Cuban Arts, and in major publications in Mexico, Spain and the Dominican Republic. In September of 2008 Estevez exhibited the "Passerby Museum", an ongoing public installation/intervention in collaboration with Mexican artist María Alós, at the Claremont Museum of Art in LA. Born in Santiago de los Treinta Caballeros, Dominican Republic, he lives and work in the South Bronx. >> site
Laura Gonzalez is a visual artist and a research lecturer. Her practice encompasses drawing, photography, and sculpture and my work has been exhibited in the UK, Spain and Portugal. She is currently immersed in an interdisciplinary project which investigates psychoanalytic approaches to making and understanding objects of seduction within the fields of fine art, consumption studies and material culture. She has contributed to debates around knowledge production in the creative disciplines. Her research includes an examination of parallels between artistic and analytic practices, a study of Manolo Blahnik‘s shoes as objects of desire and the creation of a psychoanalytically inspired Discourse of the Artefact, a framework enabling the circulation of questions and answers through a relational approach to artworks. >> site
Victoria Hindley is an artist, writer, and independent curator. She works primarily with photography, language, the book form, and in collaboration with others. Her work challenges the construction of meaning(s) through applying strategies of decoding such as abstraction, humor, and decontextualization as a way of investigating representations, stereotypes, cultural obsession, and institutional constructs. Her work has been published, exhibited, and collected internationally since the early 90s. Victoria holds a BA in Literature and a MFA in New Media from Transart Institute. Recent projects include: SHE IS, a public installation commissioned by the City of Vienna, Austria and developed in VALIE EXPORT’s Kubus Raum; The Shelter Project, a multi-platform 5-day art event involving 30 international artists, theorists, and writers; and a second edition of the artist book: Pay Close Attention to Size of Pill Before Swallowing, which was recently part of a year-long exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Leipzig, Germany. Victoria currently works with SOHO Ottakring in Vienna, an artist-led research and activism organization focused on the urban public sphere. She teaches at Transart Institute in Berlin/New York. >> site
Dmytri Kleiner is a software developer working on projects that investigate the political economy of the internet, and the ideal of workers’ self-organization of production as a form of class struggle. Born in the USSR, Dmytri grew up in Toronto and now lives in Berlin. He is a founder of the Telekommunisten Collective, which provides internet and telephone services, as well as undertakes artistic projects that explore the way communications technologies have social relations embedded within them, such as deadSwap (2009) and Thimbl (2010). >> site
Klaus Knoll received received a PhD from the University of Salzburg for work on "Social and Private Use of the Photographic Medium". Klaus studied photography with with Juan Fontcuberta, Roger Palmer, Thomas Joshua Cooper and Dörte Eißfeldt, amongst others. He is currently teaching photography at the University of Hawai'i Manoa, Honolulu. Klaus has taught photography and media studies in Europe, Japan and the U.S. He has works in the collections of the Cologne Museum Ludwig, Biblioteque Nationale in Paris, and Austrian National Fine Art Photo Collection. His exhibition record includes one man shows at the Tokyo Shinjuku Nikon Salon, Berlin Brennpunkt/DGPh, Alfred Lowenherz Gallery, New York, the Art Complex Museum in Boston. >> site
Alanna Lockward is an author; critic and independent curator specialized in time-based undertakings. In 1988, she was appointed Director of International Affairs at Museo de Arte Moderno in Santo Domingo. She is the founding director of ArtLabour Archives, a cultural platform and agency responsible for producing situation-specific art events and exhibitions since 1997, in the US, the Caribbean, Europe and the African continent and is Editor of VideoArtWorld online magazine. Lockward is the author of Apremio: Apuntes sobre el pensamiento y la creación contemporánea desde el Caribe, and co-author of Vídeo en Latinoamérica: Una visión crítica and Arte Contemporáneo Dominicano. Her essays and articles have been published by Arte Contexto, Art Nexus, Cariforum, Archipiélago, ARCONOTICIAS and Atlántica. She obtained her Licentiate at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Xochimilco on communications science, and her MA at the Institute for Art in Context of Universität der Künste Berlin. Lockward has been a consultant of Séptima Bienal de La Habana (2000) and IV Caribbean Biennial (2001), as well as of important exhibitions such as Políticas de la Diferencia: Arte Iberoamericano Fin de Siglo (2000), Visa oder die Verhinderung des Reisens (2003) and Global Feminisms (2007) >> site
Lisa Mezzacappa is a San Francisco-based bassist, composer, and musical instigator. An active collaborator and curator in the Bay Area music community, she leads her own groups Bait & Switch and Nightshade, and co-leads the ensembles duo B., Cylinder, the Permanent Wave Ensemble, and the Oakland Active Orchestra. She collaborates frequently on cross-disciplinary projects in sound installation, digital poetry, film, sculpture and public music/art. As curator, she programs the annual JazzPOP concert series at the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles; the monthly Monday Makeout creative music series in the Mission District of San Francisco, and a new quarterly music and film series, Mission Eye and Ear, at the Red Poppy Art House. Lisa has been artist-in-residence at Djerassi Resident Artists Program (2008), Headlands Center for the Arts (2006), the Banff International Jazz Workshop (2000), and the Painted Bride Arts Center (2000). She holds an MA in ethnomus icology from UC Berkeley (2003), and a BA in music from the University of Virginia (1997). She has performed at countless Bay Area venues including Intersection for the Arts, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SFMOMA, Yoshi’s, the Jazzschool, and the de Young Museum, San Francisco; as well as the Earshot Jazz Festival, Seattle; and the Montreal Jazz Festival; Canada. She performs regularly in New York City, where she leads an East Coast version of her jazz quartet, as well as the Brooklyn-meets-San Francisco trio Soft Pitch. Lisa has been awarded grants by Southern Exposure/the Warhol Foundation, the San Francisco Friends of Chamber Music, American Composers Forum, the City of Oakland and Meet the Composer. She currently performs in more than a dozen original jazz, pop, improv and chamber ensembles, working with bandleaders Phillip Greenlief, Aaron Novik, Beth Custer, Randy McKean, Aaron Bennett, Graham Connah, Cory Wright, Tom Djll, and Ross Hammond, and collaborating with Darren Johnston, Katy Stephan, Aram Shelton, Kjell Nordeson, Murray Campbell, Jason Levis, Dina Maccabbee, Noah Phillips, Rob Ewing, Aaron Novik, Kasey Knudsen, Aaron Bennett, Vijay Anderson, Michael Coleman, Matt Nelson, Sam Ospovat, John Hanes, and many many others. For Gold Record Studio (2007-8), she co-hosted, with Jon Brumit, a free public recording studio for six weeks at an Oakland neighborhood flea market, assuming the role of record producer, audio engineer and musical instigator. For Earworms (2006-08), a collaboration with installation artist Deborah Aschheim, she composed and recorded 18 pieces, with more than a dozen musicians, for a series of sculptural installations exploring the relationships between music, memory and language. Nostalgia for the Future is another Aschheim collaboration that uses analog sounds, acoustic instruments and electronic processing in architecturally-inspired installations. Moths Drink the Tears is an ongoing digital poetry/music collaboration with poet Oni Buchanan.
Merete Røstad’s current work has developed out of a rigorous drawing practice in both her academic and professional life in Norway, England and Germany. As a result, she now uses industrial materials to sculpt metaphors within urban contexts. She will continue to explore the potential of spatial and temporal constructs as a catalyst for engaging with history, identity and memory. Røstad has earned a Master Fine Arts at the Bauhaus Universität Weimar, Germany in Public Arts and New Artistic Strategies and a Bachelor degree in Fine Arts at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts (LIPA), Liverpool, UK. >> site
Christina Stuckert has been an independent medical practitioner in Berlin for over fifteen years. Her focus is on ZenShiatsu, a Japanese body therapy developed by Shizuto Masunaga. The basis of her work is regular Zen practice in daily life as a nun and she shares responsibility for the Berlin Zen Dojo. Christina integrates daily meditation experience in her treatments in order for her clients to perceive new energy levels. She provides people with an interest in Zen meditation with the possibility to practice together in small groups. >> site
Radhika Subramaniam is a curator, editor and writer based in New York. She is presently the Director/Chief Curator of the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center at Parsons The New School for Design where she is also assistant professor of Art and Design History and Theory. Her recent projects include Abecedarium for Our Times (Apexart, 2008), Rods and Cones: Seeing from the Back of One's Head (Guest curated for the South Asian Women's Creative Collective, 2008) and a major two-year international initiative Cities, Art and Recovery (LMCC, 2005-2006) focused on the work of art and culture in the aftermath of catastrophe. Subramaniam was also the founding and Executive Editor of an interdisciplinary art journal, Connect:art.politics.theory.practice, published by Arts International. "With a curatorial practice that is both cross disciplinary and dialogic, Radhika has a demonstrated commitment to public pedagogy, critical urbanism, and questions of political and social justice," said Parsons Dean Joel Towers. International cultural exchange, cross-disciplinary encounters, South Asian urban modernity and issues of cultural translation define Subramaniam's professional practice. >>
Wolfgang Sützl is a transdisciplinary researcher, writer and educator chiefly concerned with a critique of violence and understanding the conditions in which such a critique is possible. His Ph.D. is in Philosophy from the Universitat Jaume I de Castellón, Spain where he wrote on "Emancipation or Violence. Aesthetic Pacifism in Gianni Vattimo". He is Chief Researcher of World-Information.Org a project of Public Netbase / Institut fuer Neue Kulturtechnologien, Lecturer in Peace Studies at the MA Programme in Peace Studies at the University of Innsbruck, Universitat Jaume I (Spanien) und Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Mexcio, Mexiko, a Faculty member of the UN University for Peace; MA Program in Media, Conflict and Peace Studies, Lecturer in political science at the Department of Political Science, University of Vienna, and Lecturer in philosophy at the Department of Philosophy, University of Innsbruck. >> site
Within Mary Ting's varied art practice of installation, drawing, photography and video, the prevailing emphasis is the use of the fragment within a nonlinear narrative. Her work inhabits the realm of temporality, private obsessions and the sensual. Layered with stories, glimpses of memories, metaphors, her animals, figures, limbs, and cropped forms are both personal and allegorical. Mary Ting's artwork has been exhibited extensively in the U.S. and abroad since 1986. Mary currently teaches sculpture, drawing and paper, 2D/3D, and Bookarts for Pratt Manhattan, SUNY at Nassau Community College and CUNY. She lives and works in New York City. >> site
2010
Summer Faculty 2010-11
Myron Beasley, PhD, Brazil/USA
Sarah Bennett, PhD, UK
Lynn Book, MFA, USA
Jean Marie Casbarian, MFA, USA
Ofri Cnaani, MFA, Israel/USA
Cella, MFA, USA
Geoff Cox, PhD, UK/Denmark
David Dunn, MFA, USA
Nicolás Dumit Estevez, MFA, Dominican Republic/USA
Victoria Hindley, MFA, USA
Laura González, PhD cand. Spain/UK (2011)
Carolyn Guertin, PhD, Canada/USA (2011)
Klaus Knoll, PhD, Austria/USAb
Mary Ting, MFA, China/USA
Myron Beasley is an International Curator and Ethnographer who lectures in the areas of Critical Cultural Studies and Performance Studies. His recent work explores how traditional ritual practices of Death/Loss are mitigated, configured, and interpreted in particular sites/cities of the African Diaspora. Considering how performances of traditional ritual practices in contemporary society as more than just spiritual and mystical performative acts; rather ritual as a vehicle by which one can extrapolate (both political and religious) meaning in the contemporary world. His work has led him to fieldwork in the United States, Morocco, Brazil, and most recently Haiti where he is the co-curator of the Ghetto Biennale. His work as appeared in such international academic journals as Performance Research and Text and Performance Quarterly. He is also a performance artist who uses food as his primary medium. Myron teaches at Bates College, Maine. >> site and site.
Lynn Book's 25 year history of transmedia, interdisciplinary practice engages bodies as becoming, bodies being with. Her hybrid projects include full scale performance media works, concerts in contemporary music and club settings, exhibitional stagings, recordings and public actions that draw from performance art, movement, the theatrical, visual art, language, sound and new music. Content and form merge in Book’s works which are part delirium and part meditation. Book's work has received citations, fellowships, and awards from among others, the National Endowment for the Arts, Illinois Arts Council, Franklin Furnace, and Mary Duke Biddle Foundation. ‘RE:garding Next’, a collaborative culture project investigating utopian desire, premiered at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in North Carolina, 2007 and was subsequently performed at Roulette in New York City, Pittsburgh and Vienna. The New York Foundation for the Arts has supported several projects with Book as writer, composer, director, and producer including the The Dice Project: a CD of adventurous women composers and accompanying series of live concert and media events at Thundergulch, EAR Studios at RPI, and The Kitchen in New York. Book’s current projects include ‘FROTH’, a collaboration with an opera company and an early music orchestra in New York City, a video artist and a composer in Vienna, that collides with an 18th century French Baroque opera and received a preview at Symphony Space, May 2010. She is a featured artist at Art Stays, an international festival of contemporary art in Slovenia in 2010, where she will produce ‘SongSpot’, a new site specific performance and installation project. Lynn Book has taught at the Kitchen Summer Institute, Sarah Lawrence College, Barnard, and the School of the Art Institute, among others. >> site
Ofri Cnaani lives in New York and works in Video and Large-scale Video Installations as well as drawing. Cnaani's work blurs the boundaries between a constructed reality and reality itself and explore notions of domination, feminine bodily experiences, and spatial awareness by analyzing their formal dimensions within social and psychological spheres. Ofri Cnaani graduated from Hunter College's MFA studio program in 2004. She is currently completing a large scale commission to create 10 site-specific video installations at 10 museums of contemporary art in Italy's Lombardy region. Cnaani is a Six Points Fellow and was twice the winner of the America-Israel Cultural Foundation award. One-person exhibitions include: Twister, Network of Lombardy Contemporary Art Museums, Italy; Andrea Meislin Gallery; NYC, Braverman Gallery, Tel Aviv; Pack Gallery, Milan; Haifa Museum of Art, Israel; Herzlyia Museum of Art, Israel. Group exhibitions include: Moscow Biennial, The Kitchen, NYC; Bronx Museum of the Arts, NYC; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; Arnolfini Foundation Museum, Bristol, UK; Tel Aviv Museum; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel; Prague Triennale among many others. >> site
Jean Marie Casbarian is an interdisciplinary installation artist who incorporates photography, film and video projections, sound, sculpture and performance into her artworks. She received her MFA from Milton Avery School of Art at Bard College in New York in the year 2000. Along with a nomination for the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Jean Marie has received a number of awards and artist residencies including The LaNapoule Foundation Grant in LaNapoule, France, the Chicago Artist's Assistance Project Grant, and a yearlong Associateship with The Rocky Mountain Women's Institute. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Jean Marie is Chair of the Studio Arts Program at Transart Institute, a low-residency MFA program based in Berlin and New York City where she also teaches and mentors graduate students. She has been a faculty member with both the ICP-Bard MFA program and General Studies Program at the International Center of Photography in New York City and has taught in the film and photography departments at Hampshire College, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the City Colleges of Chicago. Currently, Jean Marie resides in Western Massachusetts where she holds an appointment as artist and research associate at Five Colleges, Inc. in Amherst, Massachusetts. >> site
Cella is an artist working mainly in post-documentary photography, video, experimental film and architectural projections. Her practice explores otherness, liminality and identity. It is driven by curiosity, loss, dislocation, longing, and questions of cultural identity, exploring the possibilities for living in liminality, and ideas about the location of "home". Many projects share an attention to the built environment, specifically temporary architecture and ideas about the use of space. Selected exhibitions include the Museum of Modern Art, Salzburg, the Art Complex Museum, Boston and the Kitchen in New York. She holds an MFA in New Media and Cultural Studies from Vermont College. She was most recently Artist in Residence at Lingnan University Hong Kong. >> site
Geoff Cox is currently a Researcher in Digital Aesthetics in the Department of Information and Media Studies at Aarhus University (DK). He is also an occasional artist, writer, and Associate Curator of Online Projects, Arnolfini, Bristol (UK), and Reader in Art and Technology, University of Plymouth (UK) where he is part of KURATOR/Art and Social Technologies Research group. He is an editor for the DATA Browser book series (published by Autonomedia), and co-edited 'Economising Culture' (2004), 'Engineering Culture' (2005) and 'Creating Insecurity' (2009). His research interests lie in the areas of software studies, network culture and a reappraisal of the concept of the 'public'. >> site
David Dunn
David Dunn is a composer and artist who primarily engages in site-specific interactions or research-oriented activities. Much of his current work is focused upon the development of listening strategies and technologies for environmental sound monitoring in both aesthetic and scientific contexts. Dunn is internationally known for his articulation of
frameworks that combine the arts and sciences towards practical environmental activism and problem solving. From 1970 to 1974, he was an assistant to the American composer Harry Partch and remained active as a performer in the Partch ensemble for over a decade. Other mentors included composers Kenneth Gaburo and Pauline Oliveros, in addition to Polish theater director Jerzy Grotowski. He has been the recipient of over 35 grants and fellowships for both artistic and scientific research, including the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, Langlois Foundation, McCune Foundation, Meet the Composer, Ford Foundation, Delle Foundation, Tides Foundation, New Mexico Arts Division, and various US embassies. In 2005, he received the prestigious Alpert Award for music, and the Henry Cowell
Award from the American Music Center in 2007. His compositions and soundscape recordings have appeared in over 500 international forums, concerts, broadcasts, and exhibitions.
As a pioneer in the fields of acoustic ecology, bioacoustics, interspecies communication, and scientific sonification, he has composed a body of innovative and experimental work and has contributed to projects as diverse as sensory enhancement of healthcare environments, intervention strategies for forest and agricultural pests, reducing sensory deprivation problems in captive animals, and the design of international broadcast networks. He has investigated, among other things, the interrelationship between music and language and the ultrasonic world beyond human hearing. As an expert wildlife recordist, Dunn has invented microphones to record such phenomena as the sounds of bark beetles within trees and underwater invertebrates in freshwater ponds, and the design of self-organizing autonomous sound systems for interaction between artificial and natural non-human systems. As a scientific researcher, Dunn is about to co-file a provisional patent on a device and protocol for control of tree invading invertebrates using acoustic means. >> site
Nicolás Estevez is an interdisciplinary artist working mostly in performance art, and public interventions. His projects have been exhibited extensively in the US as well as internationally at venues such as Madrid Abierto/ARCO, Havana Biennial, El Museo del Barrio, Bronx Museum of the Arts, P.S.1/MoMA, among many others. Recent work includes "For Art's Sake", a series of secular pilgrimages to seven museums in the New York City metropolitan area. In 2007, he published "Pleased to Meet You" a trilingual publication that was part of a town-wide public intervention presented for IDENSITAT 07. Other publications include "Induced Labor", produced for a solo exhibition at Dean Project in 2008, and part of a public intervention presented at the Prague Quadrennial with Franklin Furnace in 2007 in the Czech Republic. In 2007 Estevez was awarded an alumni commission to present a town-wide project as part of The MacDowell Colony Centennial. His work has been reviewed in The New York Times, NYArts Magazine, The Boston Globe, Art Nexus, Flash Art, Cuban Arts, and in major publications in Mexico, Spain and the Dominican Republic. In September of 2008 Estevez exhibited the "Passerby Museum", an ongoing public installation/intervention in collaboration with Mexican artist María Alós, at the Claremont Museum of Art in LA. Born in Santiago de los Treinta Caballeros, Dominican Republic, he lives and work in the South Bronx. >> site
Laura Gonzalez is a visual artist and a research lecturer. Her practice encompasses drawing, photography, and sculpture and my work has been exhibited in the UK, Spain and Portugal. She is currently immersed in an interdisciplinary project which investigates psychoanalytic approaches to making and understanding objects of seduction within the fields of fine art, consumption studies and material culture. She has contributed to debates around knowledge production in the creative disciplines. Her research includes an examination of parallels between artistic and analytic practices, a study of Manolo Blahnik‘s shoes as objects of desire and the creation of a psychoanalytically inspired Discourse of the Artefact, a framework enabling the circulation of questions and answers through a relational approach to artworks. >> site
Carolyn Guertin, Director of the _eCreate Lab and Assistant Professor of Digital Media in the Department of English at the University of Texas at Arlington. She is also a Mentor in the de Montfort University's Online MA in Creative Writing and New Media in the U.K. and Senior McLuhan Fellow at the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto, Canada. She was a presenter at the Hybridities Symposium at Ars Electronica in 2005. She earned her doctoral in digital narrative at the University of Alberta in 2003, and does theoretical work on cyberfeminism, interface technologies and born-digital arts. The author of textbooks on hypertext literature and information aesthetics, she is a literary adviser to the Electronic Literature Organization, an editorial board member of Convergence, a founding editor of the online journal MediaTropes, and curator of Assemblage: The Online Women's New Media Gallery. She is working on a new book called "Connective Tissue: Queer Bodies, Postdramatic Performance and New Media Aesthetics". >> site
Victoria Hindley is an artist, writer, and independent curator. She works with photography, language, and the book form. Interested in exploring the cultural construction of meaning, she applies strategies of decoding such as abstraction, humor, and decontextualization as a way of questioning representations, stereotypes, and institutional constructs. Victoria studied literature, semiotics, and visual arts in the US and Europe and has a BA in Literature and a MFA from Transart Institute. Her work has received awards from the American Institute of Graphic Artists and the New York Guild of Bookworkers, and has been acquired by collectors and institutions internationally. It has been exhibited internationally and featured in Metropolitan, Print, How, and Arcade magazines. Recent written contributions include "Exile and Becoming" for Afterimage Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism. She currently live in Vienna, Austria. >> site
Klaus Knoll received received a PhD from the University of Salzburg for work on "Social and Private Use of the Photographic Medium". Klaus studied photography with with Juan Fontcuberta, Roger Palmer, Thomas Joshua Cooper and Dörte Eißfeldt, amongst others. He is currently teaching photography at the University of Hawai'i Manoa, Honolulu. Klaus has taught photography and media studies in Europe, Japan and the U.S. He has works in the collections of the Cologne Museum Ludwig, Biblioteque Nationale in Paris, and Austrian National Fine Art Photo Collection. His exhibition record includes one man shows at the Tokyo Shinjuku Nikon Salon, Berlin Brennpunkt/DGPh, Alfred Lowenherz Gallery, New York, the Art Complex Museum in Boston. >> site
Within Mary Ting's varied art practice of installation, drawing, photography and video, the prevailing emphasis is the use of the fragment within a nonlinear narrative. Her work inhabits the realm of temporality, private obsessions and the sensual. Layered with stories, glimpses of memories, metaphors, her animals, figures, limbs, and cropped forms are both personal and allegorical. Mary Ting's artwork has been exhibited extensively in the U.S. and abroad since 1986. Mary currently teaches sculpture, drawing and paper, 2D/3D, and Bookarts for Pratt Manhattan, SUNY at Nassau Community College and CUNY. She lives and works in New York City. >> site
Summer Guest Speakers
Sarah Benett's art practice is predominantly engaged with exploration of discursive sites and contexts, particularly our relationships with institutions and their histories in relation to discourses of power. Her practice is not bound by any particular processes or materials but is contingent upon and open to the contexts with which she works, as are the potential meanings emerging through her work, which she hopes remain fluid and open to active interpretation. Her doctoral practice involved animating the vestiges of repetitious acts, which she performed within architectural spaces, reflecting the way in which individual agency is circumscribed by the controlling mechanisms that exist within institutions, both through their spatial rationale and their regulatory frameworks. She also uses photography as an archiving tool to produce visual essays that reflect on the ways we occupy institutional sites and contexts. >> site
Wolfgang Sützl is a transdisciplinary researcher, writer and educator chiefly concerned with a critique of violence and understanding the conditions in which such a critique is possible. His Ph.D. is in Philosophy from the Universitat Jaume I de Castellón, Spain where he wrote on "Emancipation or Violence. Aesthetic Pacifism in Gianni Vattimo". He is Chief Researcher of World-Information.Org a project of Public Netbase / Institut fuer Neue Kulturtechnologien, Lecturer in Peace Studies at the MA Programme in Peace Studies at the University of Innsbruck, Universitat Jaume I (Spanien) und Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Mexcio, Mexiko, a Faculty member of the UN University for Peace; MA Program in Media, Conflict and Peace Studies, Lecturer in political science at the Department of Political Science, University of Vienna, and Lecturer in philosophy at the Department of Philosophy, University of Innsbruck. >> site
Hannah Hurtzig
Selected installation projects Department for temporary memory, a media installation on the subject of the memory in art. Hamburger Kammerspiele (2000). INFORMATION RETRIEVAL - Dialogues on Archiving, public art installation, British Museum, King's Library, London International Festival of Theatre (2001). The Refugee: Services Rendered to Undesirables, Mobile Academy/ ErsatzStadt/ Volksbühne am Rosa- Luxemburg- Platz (2002). BLACKMARKET FOR USEFUL KNOWLEDGE AND NON-KNOWLEDGE No 1 - 12 Berlin, Warsaw, Istanbul, Hamburg, Vienna, Graz, Liverpool, Jaffa (since 2005). Future Perfect Advice Bureau, Berlin (2008)Shadowplay for a Dialogue Duo, Bluecoat, Liverpool (2008) Night Lesson No.1, manifesta 7, Trento (2008), KIOSK: Nation Builders. Dubai/Abu Dhabi, UAE Pavilion, La Biennale di Venezia (2009). On the Scene of Initimacy.A Phantasmagory, Berlin (2009).
Artistic director of Kampnagelfabrik in Hamburg from1985 to 1990. Programming director of the international festival THEATER DER WELT in Dresden in 1996 and in the artistic direction of BONNER BIENNUAL, a European festival of contemporary drama, in 1998. Concept and direction of the International Theater Academy Ruhr, A Meeting Point of Theater, Field Research and Philosophy on a Post-Industrial Site in Bochum 1999. Dramaturge at the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg- Platz 2000- 2003, Rolling-Road-Show, a mobile container theater, a joint project with the set designer Bert Neumann, Berlin (2000/2001). Curator of Project ErsatzStadt (SubstituteCity), an initiative of the Kulturstiftung des Bundes and Volksbühne am Rosa- Luxemburg- Platz, 2003- 2005; Director of Mobile Academy since 2004 Selected dramaturgical activities: DU - DIE STADT (You - The City). An urban play in 15 sequences for one spectator. Fiona Templeton, New York, Munich 199Feel time, Les Levine, New York. Billboard Art, Lenbachhaus , Munich 1999 Going Bye Byes. Stephen Taylor Woodrow, Munich Orangerie, Englischer Garten 199 BLOOMSDAY. Eighteen hour dramatic reading of James Joyce's Ulysses, 16 June, 1988 Hamburg, 16 June, 1991 MunicThe Passions of Natasha, Nokiko, Nicola, Nanette and NormBarbara Bloom/ Shelley Hirsch. Bavarian Staatsschauspiel, Vienna Festival Weeks, Hebbel Theater Berlin 199A Voyeur is a Witness is a Customer. A Trilogy on the Subject of the Audience Jerzy Kalina, Warsaw, David Maayan, Israel, Dirk Groeneveld, Amsterdam, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin 1991 I LAB U - A Laboratory for the Research of Memory. Akko Theater Center, Israel. David Mayaan. Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin 1994 and the Vienna Festival Weeks 1995 MEMORY ARENA. A Journey into the Archive. Arnold Dreyblatt/ Fred Pommerehn Kampnagelfabrik Hamburg 1995 THE LADY IS NOT TO BE BURNED. Michael Simon, Dramatic Sketches, Dokumenta X, Kassel 1998 Ye Yan. The Night Banquet. Chen Shi Zheng/ Guo Wenjing Festival d'Automne, Paris, Lincoln Center, New York, Berlin 2001 >> site
Maja Lenhardt has been teaching at the juvenile penitentiary, Jugendstrafanstalt Berlin, since 2002. In addition, she has been working as an online editor at the Jewish Museum Berlin since 2005 with an emphasis on picture editing. The Juvenile Detention Center Berlin Plötzensee (JDC) is the largest detention center for young adult males in Germany. Approximately 500 offenders aged 14 to 23 are imprisoned, many of them from immigrant families, many from Arab, Eastern European, and Turkish backgrounds. Curiosity about Judaism prompted Maja Lenhart to the Jewish Museum’s mobile educational “on.tour” team and its mobile exhibition to the JDC. For one week, five museum staff members dealt with the subject of German-Jewish history with around 100 juvenile detainees. Prejudices on both sides were quickly overcome and an interesting conversation ensued. To this day, some of the juvenile prisoners and museum staff exchange letters.
She has since co-founded an education program in the drug addiction department where she has been teaching social sciences, photoshopping and social training among other classes. She has also implemented mediation and art classes in the school, by inviting painters, actors, directors and musicians to teach. Starting this year, her work at the prison will shift from the classroom further to voluntary projects for the young men: introducing a prisoner and guard cooperative newspaper and cooking and eating classes. The prisoners will cook for themselves and also invite guards to eat with them. >> site