Caden Manson is an artist, curator (Contemporary Performance and Special Effects Festival), and educator. Through the company Big Art Group, their performance work creates radical queer narrative structures and embodiments to construct and aid transitory generative critical space for participants and audience. Their work is dense, fast, multi-layered, and traverses multiple genres and forms, often using interference, slippage, and disruption strategies. Manson has presented throughout 14 countries and over 50 cities in Europe, Asia, and North America.
Elena Marchevska is a practitioner, academic and researcher interested in creating work that can help us to think through new historical discontinuities that have emerged in post-capitalist and post-socialist transition. This is ever more relevant at a time when the Eurozone is fragmenting, and right wing populisms are on the rise. In addition, she does research and writes extensively on the issues of belonging, female body and the border and intergenerational trauma.
Susanne Martin (PhD) is a Berlin based artist, researcher, and teacher rooted in contemporary dance and performance. She works internationally as soloist and in collaborative settings. Her artistic practice and research focus on improvisation, practices and narrations of the aging body, humor and irony in dance, artistic research methods, improvisation-based and art-based approaches to learning, knowledge production and knowledge dissemination
Andrew McNiven was born in Edinburgh in 1963 and studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths' College, graduating in 1987, a contemporary of many of the artists who rose to international prominence during the 1990s. He received his MA from Goldsmiths' in 1995. Since 1990 his work has been shown nationally and internationally by, amongst others: the Lisson Gallery, the Whitechapel Gallery, the Akademie der Kunst, Berlin, and the Neue Galerie, Dachau. Recent projects include ‘The First Night of Experimental Boredom’ at 222Lodge, Dordrecht (NL), ‘Visual Art by Verbal Means’ at Kunstal Rotterdam (NL); 'The Understanding Gaze': Perre Bourdieu/Andrew McNiven, White Box, Zeppelin University, Friedrichshafen, (DE). He completed an AHRC-funded, practce-led PhD at Northumbria University in 2011. Previously a lecturer at Edinburgh College of Art, he is currently Senior Lecturer in Visual Culture at Zeppelin Universität in Friedrichshafen, Germany.
Astrid Menze, born in Frankfurt/Main Germany, studied Audiovisual Media at the Gerrit Rietvield Academie in Amsterdam and San Francisco Art Institute where she received her diploma in 1999, her MFA in New Media from the Transart Institute in August 2010. She lives and works as a freelance editor and video artist in Berlin. Her work is shown and awarded nationally and internationally as group and individual projects. She is currently teaching editing and visualization at Academy for International Education in Bonn, LMU Los Angeles, A&M Texas University and film history and media theory at DEKRA Akademie Berlin.
Nancy Messegee is a text- and movement-based artist living in Austin, where she is dedicated to fully inhabiting and exploring the sacred spaces of body, home, and world through iterative creative practice. Born in upstate New York, she grew up in a village of 750 residents in Alaska, which she left at 16 to attend and then graduate from Yale, becoming the first woman in her family with a college degree.
Rene MG believes that art is an experience and is enhanced when shared with others and when it includes interactive and visceral moments. She created PIP art popup in 2016. PIP=participatory immersive/interactive performance art operates on the idea that the viewer/participant is invited into a space where they can chose to participate, facilitate or watch. PIP is site-reactive, site-specific and site-enhancing based on deep hanging out and research.
Prof. Dr. Thomas Mical is Professor of Architectural Theory. Previously a tenured faculty in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and he has taught and lectured internationally. His research crosses architectural theory, media-philosophy, design research methods. He edits the book series Architectural Intelligences (Brill).
Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh (Ph.D. Columbia University) is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Babson College teaching courses in world literature, philosophy, cultural studies, and visual art. He also holds a faculty position at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts (IDSVA) and is Director of the Transdisciplinary Studies Program for the New Centre for Research & Practice.
Tine Frich Møller is a multidisciplinary artist, painter, writer, and educator in Norway. At core, she is humbled and puzzled by life, by people and all their worldly complexities - and in the midst of this, she thinks of her selves as an explorer, a people-traveller or a hoarder of people and their life stories and a thinker-doer.
Dafna Naphtali is a electronic-musician/performer/singer/composer from an eclectic musical background (jazz, classical, rock and near-eastern music). Since the mid-90’s she composes/performs experimental, interactive electro-acoustic music using her custom Max/MSP programming for live sound processing of her voice and other instruments, and also interprets the work of Cage, Stockhausen and contemporary composers.
Carrie E Neal is an integral thinker. Liking the challenge of making connections between diverse fields of study and look for ways to connect the ethereal with the practical, Carrie find ways to bring design thinking, consciousness evolution, facilitation, social justice, and holistic healing to each project. As an artist and maker, the work spans multiple disciplines including video, multimedia theater projects, book making, and quilting.
Nkechi Deanna Njaka (she/her) is a neuroscientist, choreography artist, leading mindfulness expert and meditation guide. She is the founder of The Compass, NDN lifestyle studio and co-founder of the sleep app DreamWell. She was a 2017 YBCA Truth Fellow and a 2021 Kennedy Center Artist in Residence. She is currently Esalen Faculty, an Advisor of Chorus Meditation, and a lululemon ambassador for her work in mindfulness.
Ruth Novaczek is an artist and curator, she studied fine art film at St. Martins School of Art in London, and an MA in Fine Art, at Central St Martins in 2000. In 2015 she earned a practice-based PhD entitled ’21st Century Avant-Garde; New Vernaculars and Feminine Ecriture’ from the University of Westminster, London (UK) and is currently a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Westminster.
Abbéy Odunlami Ph.D. (b. Abeokuta, Ogun State '82) is a Yoruba-Nigerian-American researcher, theorist, and educator/curator whose work investigates contemporary urban history and visual culture(s). His interdisciplinary practice challenges assumptions of history, culture, race, and conventions of display. Odunlami has worked with institutions such as the Sundance Film Festival, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin.
Freya Björg Olafson is an intermedia artist who works with video, audio, painting and performance. Her creations have been presented and exhibited internationally at venues such as SECCA – SouthEastern Center for Contemporary Art (North Carolina), OchoYmedio / Alas de la Danza (Quito, Guayaquil and Manta in Ecuador), The National Arts Center (Ottawa), High Performance Rodeo (Calgary), Tangente – Laboratoire des Movements Contemporains (Montreal), Sequences Real Time Media Arts Festival (Iceland) and Medea Electronique / Onassis Cultural Center (Athens, Greece).
Morgan O’Hara (Los Angeles 1941) was raised in an international community in post-war Japan. Her practice researches the vital movement of living beings through drawing. In 1989 she began doing performative drawing in international performance art festivals, did her first site specific wall drawings and began the practice of aikido, a Japanese martial art. In 1997 O’Hara’s work was honored with a solo show in the newly opened Drawing Room at the Drawing Center in New York. O’Hara lives in New York and works internationally.
Phei Phei Oon is a Canada-based Registered Psychotherapist with more than 15 years of clinical experience. She was trained as a Clinical Psychologist and Drama Therapist and has worked at vastly diverse settings including hospitals, academia, non-profit community centers, the corporate world, and recently a reception center for Ukrainian refugees. She specializes in Selective Mutism, grief, and trauma. Phei Phei is invigorated by play, beautiful images, dance, and drama in her own personal life and often seeks to integrate elements of these four disciplines in her clinical practice. Phei Phei draws from her studies and experience in group work, games facilitation, conscious dance, bodywork, creative arts therapies, and dramatic play in facilitating individual and group sessions.
Lisa Osborn has maintained a studio since 1994. Her practice is dedicated to the subject of the figure and the medium of clay. She completed a practice-based PhD at Transart Institute in 2018 entitled 'Encountering Statues: Object Oriented Ontology And The Figure In A Sculptural Practice'. Her research remains focused on what happens when we encounter statues and what is revealed about us when that encounter is considered.
Eto Otitigbe is a polymedia artist who sets alternative narratives into motion; creating spaces for unique experiences. His interdisciplinary practice includes sculpture, performance, installation, and public art.
