Panelists



David Abram – cultural ecologist and geophilosopher – is the author of The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World, and Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology. Described as "revolutionary" by the Los Angeles Times, as “daring” and “truly original” by Science, David’s work engages the ecological depths of the imagination, exploring the ways in which sensory perception, language, and wonder inform the relation between the human body and the breathing earth. He is a two-time recipient of the Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction, and recently held the international Arne Naess Chair in Global Justice and Ecology at the University of Oslo. A close student of traditional ecological knowledge systems of diverse indigenous peoples, David was the first contemporary philosopher to advocate for a reappraisal of "animism" as a complexly nuanced and uniquely viable worldview (a broad reappraisal that is now underway in many disciplines). In recent years Dr. Abram's work has come to be associated with a broad movement loosely termed "new materialism," due to his espousal of a radically transformed sense of matter and materiality. David is founder and creative director of the Alliance for Wild Ethics (AWE); he lives with his family in the foothills of the southern Rockies.

 

 

Deborah Barlow is a Boston-based visual artist, writer, and curator of images and ideas. Deeply respectful of the intuitive and indefinable nature of creativity, Barlow nudges the verbal and the visual to move a bit closer to the numinous elsewhere. Fiercely independent, she is a free-form thinker and maker.

During the past 50 years she has had over 50 solo exhibitions and many group shows in museums, galleries, universities and institutions in the United States, Europe and the UK. Built by layering pigments, metallics and natural substances, her paintings mirror the complexity of a multi-dimensional world. Art News described her work by saying “one risks confounding the senses even before peeling back the first layer of brusque sensuality that clings to the surface of her paintings…a soulful, sympathetic sensibility that is rare to find in such an obsessive technician.”

Barlow has authored over 1500 essays on her site Slow Muse (slowmuse.com), with over twenty thousand readers and millions of page views since its inception in 2006. In addition to artist monographs and reviews, she has contributed to publications and books on creativity, art making, business and entrepreneurship.

Her most recent project is Pell Lucy, a digital collective of international artists who believe form “possesses an intelligence of its own—an intelligence far deeper and more complex than conscious, discursive thought” (Pell Lucy artist Taney Roniger.) Through purpose-built networks, Pell Lucy introduces viewers to a full spectrum of artistic experiences that are intimate, inclusive and pandemic-proof.

 

 

Jane Bennett is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities, in the Department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. Her recent essays have appeared in Grain/Vapor/Ray (on Odradek and the end of the world), Evental Aesthetics (special issue on Vital Materialism), MLN (on mimesis), LA+: Interdisciplinary Journal of Landscape Architecture, and Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung (on walking). She is the author of Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010); The Enchantment of Modern Life (2001); Thoreau's Nature (1994), and Unthinking Faith and Enlightenment, (1987). Her new book is Influx & Efflux: Writing up with Walt Whitman (2020).





 

 

Christine Corday is an artist who engages a materials practice with the evolving human scale of perception and fundamental forces. She works with temperature, pressure, material states, elemental metals, and other created media often in collaboration with international scientists and science organizations, among them NASA, SETI (US), ITER (FR), ORNL (US), Enbio (IE), ZYBECK (US), UCLA Galactic Center Group (US) and KBNNO (FI). Current projects include: Sans Titre, a five-year collaboration with ITER (Saint-Paul-Lez-Durance, FR; 2019) culminating with Art as the 36th and final global infrastructural contributor to realizing an artificial star on Earth; multimedia sculptural work Material Phases of Suns for the Venice Architecture Biennale (Venice, IT 2021); Suns Lost Twin, a series of cast observations with Nobel Laureate astrophysicist Dr. Andrea Ghez (UCLA /Keck Observatory US; 2023); and the touch-focused color for the National September 11 Memorial (Ground Zero, US; 2011). She has had solo exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2015), the Contemporary Art Museum Saint Louis (2019), and the New York City High Line (2008). Corday created Foundation Civilization (Seville, ES; 2000) for multidisciplinary projects led by Art such as Instrument for the Ocean to Play (2001). Awards and honors include a nomination for United States Artist Fellow (2016) and grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Brian Wall Foundation (2019); the National Endowment for the Arts (2019), the Robert Lehman Foundation (2019) and the Lannan Foundation (2015). She lives and works in New York’s Hudson Valley.

 

 

Charles Eisenstein is a teacher, speaker, and writer focusing on themes of civilization, consciousness, money, and human cultural evolution. His numerous books include The Ascent of Humanity (2007), Sacred Economics (2011), The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible (2013), and Climate: A New Story (2018).






 

 

Daniel Hill is a painter, sound artist, curator, educator, and writer whose work explores the relationship between visual art, sound, and science. His paintings employ a rules-based system in which the notion of embodied cognition is an inquiry as well as the balance between the aesthetic and conceptual. His paintings are held in many private and public collections, including United States Embassies, Microsoft Corporation, and Bank of America. Recent and upcoming exhibitions include: Odetta Gallery, Museum Modern Art in Hunfeld Germany, International Fine Art Festival in Kranj -Slovenia, Scholes Street Studio, Seton Hall University, McKenzie Fine Art, Westbeth Gallery, Brattleboro Museum of Art, NurtureArt, Holland Tunnel Gallery-Greece, Pace University, and Margret Thatcher Projects. He has curated “Visual Inquiries: Artists Inspired by Science” at Pace University and co-curated the traveling exhibition “Emergence and Structure” at Lafayette College, Miami Dade College and the University of Florida. Hill has appeared on panel talks or contributed writing to; The Brooklyn Rail, The CUE Art Foundation, The Helix Center, SciArt Center, TransBorder Art, Interalia Magazine, Shirley Fiterman Art Center, SciArt Magazine among others. His sound environments have appeared at Scholes Street Studio in Brooklyn, NY, and in the video/sound installations “Mythograph” and “Aurorasis” with Angie Drakopoulos exhibited in New York and Paris. His music has received airplay on radio stations in New York, Canada, and Europe. He is currently an Adjunct Associate Professor of Art at Pace University in Manhattan.

 

 

Wendy Beth Hyman (Ph.D. Harvard University; A.B. Smith College) is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Oberlin College. She is the author of Impossible Desire and the Limits of Knowledge in Renaissance Poetry (Oxford, 2019), editor of The Automaton in English Renaissance Literature (Ashgate, 2011), and co-editor of Teaching Social Justice Through Shakespeare: Why Renaissance Literature Matters Now (Edinburgh, 2019), and Theorizing Renaissance Fictions (proposed special issue of English Literary Renaissance; under review). She has published over a dozen essays on Shakespeare, Renaissance literature, lyric poetry, visual culture, and the history of science and technology in the early modern era. She is the Knowledge editor for the Routledge Encyclopedia of the Renaissance World, and is writing a book on optics and imagination called Shakespearean Romance and the Ingenious Machine.



 

 

Stephanie Grilli is an independent art historian, writer, and curator with a PhD from Yale University. She taught art history and interdisciplinary studies at Bucknell University, the University of Texas/Dallas, and the University of Colorado and academically is known for her work on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Through her Artscribe service, Grilli works closely with artists to provide her analytical essays for catalogs and websites as well as assists artists with their statements. As a member of the advisory board, she organized and facilitated a conversation series at the Center for Visual Art, Metropolitan State University at Denver. She serves on the Yale Alumni Association Board of Governors and the Yale Graduate School Alumni Association board, and for the former she is the showrunner and moderator of a monthly virtual program, “The Human Experience.”


 

 

Paul Myoda (b. 1967, United States) is a Japanese-American sculptor based in Rhode Island. Myoda is inspired by the underlying logic and mathematical principles of the natural world and applies them to his work with new media, technology and industrial materials. The results are compositions of light, motion, and form that find a balance and a beauty between the organic and built. His sculptures and installations are regularly exhibited both nationally and internationally.

Myoda holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from Yale University. Based in NYC from 1990-2006, Myoda was represented by the Friedrich Petzel Gallery, and was co-founder of Big Room, an art production and design collective in New York City. He was also a contributor to Art in America, Flash Art and Frieze. He is a recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Warhol Foundation and Howard Foundation, among others. In 2001 he participated in the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s World Views Program and had a studio on the 91st floor of WTC I. In March of 2002 he co-created the Tribute in Light in memory of the tragic events of September 11th, 2001, which has since become an annual installation.

Over the past decade, Myoda has been developing an extended series of interactive illuminating sculptures and sculptural installations that respond to the presence of viewers. Their design is informed by a wide range of forms, such as bioluminescent fauna, crystal morphology and religious nimbuses. An example of hybrid arts practice and cybernetic sculpture, the series bridges the disconnections and eases the anxieties of the post-industrial world through affect, presence and responsive gesture. His works are part of the collections of the Queens Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami and the Library of Congress, among others. He has had solo exhibitions of this series of works at the Dorsch Gallery, Miami, FL; the Project 4 Gallery, Washington DC; the Yellow Peril Gallery, Providence, RI; the Maine Museum at the University of Maine; the Peligro Amarillo Gallery, San Juan, Puerto Rico; and the Plug-In Exhibition, Istanbul, Turkey, in addition to numerous group exhibitions.

He is an Associate Professor in Brown University's Visual Art Department, where he has been teaching since 2006.

 

 

Sarah Robinson is an architect whose practice is based in Pavia, Italy. She holds degrees in both philosophy and architecture, and was the founding president of the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture board of trustees. Her books include Nesting: Body, Dwelling Mind, Mind in Architecture: Neuroscience, Embodiment and the Future of Design> with Juhani Pallasmaa and Architecture is a Verb, forthcoming by Routledge, 2/2021. She co-founded and edits the journal Intertwining and teaches in the Neuroscience Applied to Architectural Design program at IUAV in Venice and is an Adjunct Professor in the department of Architecture, Design and Media Technology at Aalborg University in Denmark. She writes about the ways that design shapes human perception and well-being, applying multi-disciplinary research to a more than human practice of architecture.

 

 

Carrie Rohman is Professor of English at Lafayette College. She has published widely in animal studies, modernism, and performance, in such journals as Deleuze Studies, Modernism/modernity, American Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, Hypatia, and a number of edited volumes. She is the author of Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal (Columbia 2009) and Choreographies of the Living: Bioaesthetics in Literature, Art, and Performance (Oxford 2018), and co-editor with Kristin Czarnecki of Virginia Woolf and the Natural World (Clemson Digital 2011). Rohman is on the editorial board of the Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature series. She also worked as a modern dancer and choreographer within and outside of the academy for more than twenty years.


 

 

Concert pianist and transdisciplinary artist Jon Sakata works at the intersection of the 21 senses; but also, in the traumatic shadow of his parents’ imprisonment in US concentration camps during WWII and the cataclysm of relatives who were annihilated by the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. Is it any wonder that his musical interpretations, friction-full neuro-diverse designs, compositions intermesh precarity, contingency, discomfort, fracture, defamiliarization; but also, involute energies, forces, sensorial conditions that trouble fixity, monumentality, engineered perfection, preciousness, predictability? Collaborative projects have found seed and sound at such venues and institutions as Radialsystem V (Berlin), Färgfabriken (Stockholm), the Exhibition Pavilion of the National Museum of Architecture (Oslo), Bagsværd Kirke (Copenhagen), Myyrmäki Kirkko (Vantaa), Sandels Cultural Center – Gyllensbergsalen (Helsinki), St. Henry’s Ecumenical Arts Chapel (Turku), ILLUMINUS 2015 (Boston); Beijing Central, Shanghai, China National, Wuhan and Xi’an Conservatories; Tallinn, Porto Alegre, Montreal, New Mexico, Tsinghua, Harvard, Boston, Tufts Universities; The New School (NYC), Carnegie Mellon Center for Arts in Society, Williams College Multicultural Center, Goethe-Institut-Boston, Japanese-American Cultural Center-Los Angeles. Jon lives in Exeter-NH with his partner and frequent collaborator, Jung Mi Lee, and teaches at Phillips Exeter Academy.

 

 

Charlene Spretnak is a cultural historian and ecophilosopher who has written 8 books, including The Resurgence of the Real (1997), Relational Reality (2011), and The Spiritual Dynamic in Modern Art, 1800 to the Present (2014). She is a cofounder of the ecofeminist movement and the Green Party movement in the US. She lives in Ojai, California.








 

 

Werner Sun is a visual artist who lives and works in Ithaca, NY. A particle physicist by training, he has exhibited his work at the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, Aon (New York, NY), Exhibit A (Corning, NY), Corners Gallery (Ithaca, NY), Manifest Gallery (Cincinnati, OH), the Islip Art Museum, and the Azarian McCullough Art Gallery. His essays and images have been published in Stone Canoe, SciArt Magazine, and The Brooklyn Rail. He is the 2019 recipient of the Aon-CUE Artist Empowerment Award from the CUE Art Foundation, as well as a 2017 recipient of a Strategic Opportunity Stipend from the Community Arts Partnership of Tompkins County, NY.





 

 

Arthur Whitman is an art critic and journalist based in Ithaca, NY. He has published regularly in the local weekly newspaper, the Ithaca Times, for most of the past fourteen years. Occasionally he writes for Delicious Line, a website devoted to micro-reviews. Trained as a painter at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, he considers criticism a way of engaging some of the same passions, albeit with cleaner hands. Although attentive to a wide range of activity in the contemporary visual arts, renewing and rethinking the historical legacies of modernism and abstraction remain an abiding interest.





 

 
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