→ 2024
→ 2023
Participants
AJ Artemel is a writer, designer, and curator based in New Haven. AJ is Director of Communications at the Yale School of Architecture and a member of the New York-based architecture and urbanism collective Citygroup.
Annabel Castro is a digital media artist. The overlapping of geographic, virtual and mental spaces, landscape as trajectory, body identities, are recurring subjects in her work. She has received the research-creation grant from the Center for Research, Innovation and Development of the Arts of the Autonomous University of Nuevo León (CEIIDA-UNAL), the PBEE grant from the National Foundation for Arts and Culture and Object Art first prize from the Third National Biennale Puebla de los Ángeles in Mexico. In Bolivia she received the La Paz award from the International Art Biennial SIART, the Open Territories Commission of mARTadero Culture Center and has served as adviser at their new media theater initiative Yvyrasacha (supported by the International Relief Fund for Organizations in Culture and Education of the German Federal Foreign Office & the Goethe-Institut). She has published articles in the journals Artnodes (Open University of Catalonia), Arte y Políticas de Identidad (University of Murcia) and Cultural Geographies (Sage Publications). She studied a PhD at DXARTS department in University of Washington and a master in science specialized in art and technology at Chalmers University of Technology. She is member of the Red Multidisciplinaria de Estudios del Desierto (Multidisciplinary network on Desert Studies) and professor of the Cinema & Communications Department at Universidad de Monterrey (UDEM). Her work has been shown in spaces such as Ethnography and Folklore Museum (La Paz), Jardín Borda (Cuernavaca), Transmediale festival (Berlin), SIGGRAPH Asia, Stamps Gallery (University of Michigan), Motomoto-air (Kumamoto) and Zonas de contacto: Art History in a Global Network at DHAJ Gallery (Berkeley University / Samuel H. Kress Foundation).
Joshua Clayton is a New York-based artist and academic. His research-oriented creative practice encompasses material artifacts and ephemeral situations, digital and analog media. Originally from southeastern Michigan, Joshua studied art and design before moving to Tokyo and then New York. He completed a master’s degree in interactive telecommunications and currently teaches at NYU. Joshua’s interests range from semiotics, mysticism, and epistemology to landscape, climate, and phenomenology.
Dr. Ariel Ekblaw directs the MIT Space Exploration Initiative, a team of 50+ students, faculty, and staff building and flying advanced technology for space exploration; Ariel is also the founding CEO of Aurelia Institute, a hybrid space architecture research institute and venture incubation studio. Ariel graduated with a B.S. in Physics, Mathematics, and Philosophy from Yale University and designed a novel space architecture habitat for her MIT PhD in autonomously self-assembling space structures. Her research work and the labs she leads build towards future habitats and space stations in orbit around the Earth, Moon, and Mars. Ariel is the author/editor of Into the Anthropocosmos: A Whole Space Catalog from the MIT Space Exploration Initiative (MIT Press 2021) and serves on the NASA Lunar Surface Innovation Consortium (LSIC) Executive Committee. Ariel’s work has been featured in WIRED, Harvard Business Review, the Wall Street Journal, the BBC, CNN, NPR, numerous academic papers, and more.
Dana Karwas is the Director of CCAM and is faculty at the Yale School of Architecture teaching courses on mechanized perception and design for the future of off-planet life. At CCAM, Dana curates all programming and directs the research activities at the center. She leverages her background in architecture and interdisciplinary media to drive CCAM’s mission to activate creative research and practice to advance the cultural landscape of our time. Her vision for CCAM began in 2019 when she started as the Director and launched CCAM’s first publication, Maquette, an archive in motion celebrating the unique nature of CCAM’s diverse range of projects and community in the interdiciplinary arts. In 2020 she initiated Ultra Space, a research initiatve and course at CCAM that investigates off-planet culture through an artistic lens.
Verneda Lights is a multidisciplinary artist who uses technology as an approach to the creation of fine art. She is also CEO of E-graphX Omnimedia, a design firm and business consultancy based in Port Royal, SC. Verneda’a work bridges the worlds of technology, science, spirituality, and art. A retired physician, science writer, and griot of the Gullahgeechee Nation of South Carolina’s Lowcountry, Verneda is also an accomplished poet, performance artist, and fiction writer. Her body of work includes digital and traditional fine art, photography, and surface pattern design, with a focus on Afrosurreal, Afro-futuristic, Post-Gullah-Art styles. "Caterpillar Dreams," her recent collaboration with Night Café's AI software platform, uses poetry and digital paintings to explore the transformative power of the Overview Effect, kairos time, and Jungian synchronicity. As a whole, Verneda's art seeks to inspire positive change and new ways of thinking about the world we inhabit. Within the past six years, Verneda’s work has been exhibited at the Whitney Biennial (as part of the Occupy Museums group exhibit), the Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art, Woman Made Gallery, the Edward M Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate, Barrett Art Center, Trolley Barn Gallery, The Wrong Biennial, South Hampton Art Center, M.A.D.S. Galleries in Milan and the Canary Islands, Ashton Gallery, and the Gaudí Room at La Pedrera. A native of the South Carolina Lowcountry, Verneda is a graduate of Bryn Mawr College, the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine (MD), and Strayer University (MBA). She also holds a certificate in International Arts Management from the International Leadership Program in Visual Arts Management, a program offered jointly by NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Deusto University Business School, and Guggenheim Museum (Bilbao). She has been featured in National Geographic and other major publications.
ST Luk is the project manager at the Reversible Destiny Foundation. He was heavily involved in the multidisciplinary studio practice of Arakawa+Gins, and worked closely with Madeline Gins to realize their last built architectural project during their lifetime, the Biotopological Scale-Juggling Escalator, Dover Street Market, New York in 2013. Since their passing, he has played a crucial role in the preservation of the artists’ lifetime works and unique legacy. Among various projects, he is currently working on the reconstruction of Arakawa’s early installation artwork Ubiquitous Site X (1987-91).
Aleksa Milojević is a designer from Central/Eastern Europe, with experience in architecture, filmmaking, set design, and beekeeping, and with an interest in languages, literature, and history. He conducted his Bachelor studies at TU Vienna, and his Master studies at Kazuyo Sejima’s masterclass at University of Applied Arts in Vienna, AHO in Oslo, and Tongji University in Shanghai, where he researched the history of rural life in PR China. Currently he is finishing his postgraduate Master studies at Yale School of Architecture with a thesis in the fields of urbanism and cinematography. Besides architecture, Milojević pursues at Yale University filmmaking, teaching, and works as researcher at the Center for Collaborative Arts and Media on prototypes of functional cultural artifacts for zero-gravity-environments, which have been presented at the symposium "Beyond the Cradle" at MIT. For the near future he aspires to realize a new documentary film project on the mythologization of cities.
Elise Morrison is an Assistant Professor of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at Yale, where she teaches courses on Creativity, Collaboration, Feminist Theater, Embodied Communication, and Digital Media in Performance. She received her PhD in Theater and Performance Studies from Brown University and held a postdoctoral fellowship in Interdisciplinary Performance Studies at Yale from 2012-2015. She has taught at Texas A&M University, as an Assistant Professor of Performance Studies in Digital Media, and at Harvard University, where she served as the Associate Director for Speaking Instruction at the Bok Center for Teaching and Learning. Morrison’s first book, Discipline and Desire: Surveillance Technologies in Performance was published by University of Michigan Press in 2016. Morrison has edited several special issues: on “Surveillance Technologies in Performance” for the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media (2015), and, along with the Yale-TDR Consortium Editorial team, two special issues for TDR: The Drama Review on “Algorithms and Performance” (2019) and “Presence” (2022). Her current book project, Post-Dramatic Stress: Theatrical Performance in the Aftermath of War, explores how technologies of 21st century war, from drones to first person shooter video games to virtual therapies developed to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), “perform” in and across socio-political, therapeutic and theatrical arenas. Morrison is also a singer-songwriter, theater director, and has devised and performed multiple intermedia cabaret performances that focus on gender, surveillance, and mediatized culture.
Annabel Castro is a digital media artist. The overlapping of geographic, virtual and mental spaces, landscape as trajectory, body identities, are recurring subjects in her work. She has received the research-creation grant from the Center for Research, Innovation and Development of the Arts of the Autonomous University of Nuevo León (CEIIDA-UNAL), the PBEE grant from the National Foundation for Arts and Culture and Object Art first prize from the Third National Biennale Puebla de los Ángeles in Mexico. In Bolivia she received the La Paz award from the International Art Biennial SIART, the Open Territories Commission of mARTadero Culture Center and has served as adviser at their new media theater initiative Yvyrasacha (supported by the International Relief Fund for Organizations in Culture and Education of the German Federal Foreign Office & the Goethe-Institut). She has published articles in the journals Artnodes (Open University of Catalonia), Arte y Políticas de Identidad (University of Murcia) and Cultural Geographies (Sage Publications). She studied a PhD at DXARTS department in University of Washington and a master in science specialized in art and technology at Chalmers University of Technology. She is member of the Red Multidisciplinaria de Estudios del Desierto (Multidisciplinary network on Desert Studies) and professor of the Cinema & Communications Department at Universidad de Monterrey (UDEM). Her work has been shown in spaces such as Ethnography and Folklore Museum (La Paz), Jardín Borda (Cuernavaca), Transmediale festival (Berlin), SIGGRAPH Asia, Stamps Gallery (University of Michigan), Motomoto-air (Kumamoto) and Zonas de contacto: Art History in a Global Network at DHAJ Gallery (Berkeley University / Samuel H. Kress Foundation).
Joshua Clayton is a New York-based artist and academic. His research-oriented creative practice encompasses material artifacts and ephemeral situations, digital and analog media. Originally from southeastern Michigan, Joshua studied art and design before moving to Tokyo and then New York. He completed a master’s degree in interactive telecommunications and currently teaches at NYU. Joshua’s interests range from semiotics, mysticism, and epistemology to landscape, climate, and phenomenology.
Dr. Ariel Ekblaw directs the MIT Space Exploration Initiative, a team of 50+ students, faculty, and staff building and flying advanced technology for space exploration; Ariel is also the founding CEO of Aurelia Institute, a hybrid space architecture research institute and venture incubation studio. Ariel graduated with a B.S. in Physics, Mathematics, and Philosophy from Yale University and designed a novel space architecture habitat for her MIT PhD in autonomously self-assembling space structures. Her research work and the labs she leads build towards future habitats and space stations in orbit around the Earth, Moon, and Mars. Ariel is the author/editor of Into the Anthropocosmos: A Whole Space Catalog from the MIT Space Exploration Initiative (MIT Press 2021) and serves on the NASA Lunar Surface Innovation Consortium (LSIC) Executive Committee. Ariel’s work has been featured in WIRED, Harvard Business Review, the Wall Street Journal, the BBC, CNN, NPR, numerous academic papers, and more.
Dana Karwas is the Director of CCAM and is faculty at the Yale School of Architecture teaching courses on mechanized perception and design for the future of off-planet life. At CCAM, Dana curates all programming and directs the research activities at the center. She leverages her background in architecture and interdisciplinary media to drive CCAM’s mission to activate creative research and practice to advance the cultural landscape of our time. Her vision for CCAM began in 2019 when she started as the Director and launched CCAM’s first publication, Maquette, an archive in motion celebrating the unique nature of CCAM’s diverse range of projects and community in the interdiciplinary arts. In 2020 she initiated Ultra Space, a research initiatve and course at CCAM that investigates off-planet culture through an artistic lens.
Verneda Lights is a multidisciplinary artist who uses technology as an approach to the creation of fine art. She is also CEO of E-graphX Omnimedia, a design firm and business consultancy based in Port Royal, SC. Verneda’a work bridges the worlds of technology, science, spirituality, and art. A retired physician, science writer, and griot of the Gullahgeechee Nation of South Carolina’s Lowcountry, Verneda is also an accomplished poet, performance artist, and fiction writer. Her body of work includes digital and traditional fine art, photography, and surface pattern design, with a focus on Afrosurreal, Afro-futuristic, Post-Gullah-Art styles. "Caterpillar Dreams," her recent collaboration with Night Café's AI software platform, uses poetry and digital paintings to explore the transformative power of the Overview Effect, kairos time, and Jungian synchronicity. As a whole, Verneda's art seeks to inspire positive change and new ways of thinking about the world we inhabit. Within the past six years, Verneda’s work has been exhibited at the Whitney Biennial (as part of the Occupy Museums group exhibit), the Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art, Woman Made Gallery, the Edward M Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate, Barrett Art Center, Trolley Barn Gallery, The Wrong Biennial, South Hampton Art Center, M.A.D.S. Galleries in Milan and the Canary Islands, Ashton Gallery, and the Gaudí Room at La Pedrera. A native of the South Carolina Lowcountry, Verneda is a graduate of Bryn Mawr College, the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine (MD), and Strayer University (MBA). She also holds a certificate in International Arts Management from the International Leadership Program in Visual Arts Management, a program offered jointly by NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Deusto University Business School, and Guggenheim Museum (Bilbao). She has been featured in National Geographic and other major publications.
ST Luk is the project manager at the Reversible Destiny Foundation. He was heavily involved in the multidisciplinary studio practice of Arakawa+Gins, and worked closely with Madeline Gins to realize their last built architectural project during their lifetime, the Biotopological Scale-Juggling Escalator, Dover Street Market, New York in 2013. Since their passing, he has played a crucial role in the preservation of the artists’ lifetime works and unique legacy. Among various projects, he is currently working on the reconstruction of Arakawa’s early installation artwork Ubiquitous Site X (1987-91).
Aleksa Milojević is a designer from Central/Eastern Europe, with experience in architecture, filmmaking, set design, and beekeeping, and with an interest in languages, literature, and history. He conducted his Bachelor studies at TU Vienna, and his Master studies at Kazuyo Sejima’s masterclass at University of Applied Arts in Vienna, AHO in Oslo, and Tongji University in Shanghai, where he researched the history of rural life in PR China. Currently he is finishing his postgraduate Master studies at Yale School of Architecture with a thesis in the fields of urbanism and cinematography. Besides architecture, Milojević pursues at Yale University filmmaking, teaching, and works as researcher at the Center for Collaborative Arts and Media on prototypes of functional cultural artifacts for zero-gravity-environments, which have been presented at the symposium "Beyond the Cradle" at MIT. For the near future he aspires to realize a new documentary film project on the mythologization of cities.
Elise Morrison is an Assistant Professor of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at Yale, where she teaches courses on Creativity, Collaboration, Feminist Theater, Embodied Communication, and Digital Media in Performance. She received her PhD in Theater and Performance Studies from Brown University and held a postdoctoral fellowship in Interdisciplinary Performance Studies at Yale from 2012-2015. She has taught at Texas A&M University, as an Assistant Professor of Performance Studies in Digital Media, and at Harvard University, where she served as the Associate Director for Speaking Instruction at the Bok Center for Teaching and Learning. Morrison’s first book, Discipline and Desire: Surveillance Technologies in Performance was published by University of Michigan Press in 2016. Morrison has edited several special issues: on “Surveillance Technologies in Performance” for the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media (2015), and, along with the Yale-TDR Consortium Editorial team, two special issues for TDR: The Drama Review on “Algorithms and Performance” (2019) and “Presence” (2022). Her current book project, Post-Dramatic Stress: Theatrical Performance in the Aftermath of War, explores how technologies of 21st century war, from drones to first person shooter video games to virtual therapies developed to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), “perform” in and across socio-political, therapeutic and theatrical arenas. Morrison is also a singer-songwriter, theater director, and has devised and performed multiple intermedia cabaret performances that focus on gender, surveillance, and mediatized culture.
Harshita Nedunuri is a transdisciplinary designer and researcher based in NYC. Her creative practice is centered around applied speculative design and cyborg anthropology, with a specific interest in empathy and poetry as instruments of divining collective consciousness. Harshita has been cultivating a myriad of explorations with Yale’s CCAM since late 2020. She mentors students for The Mechanical Artifact: Ultra Space, consults on course projects that embark in parabolic research flights, and is a key collaborator in progressing Ultra Space philosophies towards radical & equitable futures. Rooted in this work, she produced the Terra Cosma film probing anthropocosmic architecture. She directed the Celestial World of CCAM podcast; a series of rhizomatic audio offshoots featuring collisions between astronauts/architects/artists/artificial intelligences. As a CCAM fellow, Harshita will continue to support future experiments in these realms. Harshita holds an M.A. from NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study and a dual B.A. from NYU Media, Culture & Communications + Psychology. She is currently a design strategist at Google, working to evolve conversational experiences on emerging surfaces. She is also an educator in Design Theory at Queens College, City University of New York.
Sydney Skybetter is a choreographer. Hailed by the Financial Times as “One of the world’s foremost thinkers on the intersection of dance and emerging technologies,” Sydney’s choreography has been performed at such venues as The Kennedy Center, Jacob’s Pillow and The Joyce Theater. A sought-after speaker, he has lectured at SXSW, Yale, Mozilla, and Stanford, and served as an advisor for The National Ballet of Canada, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Hasbro, New York University and The University of Southern California, among others. He is a Senior Affiliate of metaLAB at Harvard University, a member of Dark Laboratory at Cornell University, and a contributor to WIRED and Dance Magazine. His work has been supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, and honored by a New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award. He has served as a Grant Panelist for the National Endowment of the Arts, is a founding member of the Guild of Future Architects, and is the Founder of the Conference for Research on Choreographic Interfaces. Sydney is the Deputy Dean of the College for Curriculum and Co-Curriculum at Brown University and recipient of a 2023 Creative Capital “Wild Futures” Award.
Che-Wei Wang [pron. sey-wey] is an artist, designer & architect with expertise in computational and generative design, fabrication technologies, electronics, CNC machining, and metal manufacturing. The results range from architecture & sculpture to interactive installations & mobile apps. He is the winner of the 2003 SOM fellowship and the Young Alumni Achievement Award from Pratt Institute. Che-Wei has taught courses on design, time, creative computing, and inflatables, at various institutions. He is an alumnus of MIT Media Lab, ITP at NYU, and Pratt Institute.
Domenica Bucalo is a visual artist who lives and works in New York City. She has studied at Brera Accademia of Fine Arts in Milano and School of Visual Arts in NY. Exhibitions where her work has been featured include “Contemporaneo DOC/DOCVA” Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo, Roma; “Photomedia Europe” Palazzo della Triennale, Milano; “La Photographie Italienne Contemporaine” Galerie du Chateau D’eau,Toulouse; “Huesca Imagen” Zaragoza; “From pencil to laser” Italian Cultural Institute of San Francisco; International Festival of Photography, Roma; Ascona Museum of Contemporary Art, Untitled Space NY, Underline Gallery NY, Salone del Mobile Milano, Site Gallery NY, Galleria Neon, Bologna, Arts Gowanus and Assembly Required Collective. Bucalo is a first-place recipient of Portfolio Immagini in Movimento Award. “Domenica Bucalo produces images then she xeroxes them: the contrast among surreal characters - absurd and paradoxical urban landscapes - and the simple characteristic of the xerox copy technique, create a sort of visual misplacement.” - Gabi Scardi, Flash Art Magazine. Her series “Girls Will Be Girls”, has been included in Endless Edition Biennial Catalogue 2018, the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts. The series is now part of Casa del Vaca del Parquet del Retiro Collection, in Madrid, through the exhibition “Make America Dystopian Again”. In 2022 Bucalo’s work has been shown at MAMbo, Museum of Modern Art in Bologna in the collective exhibit “No, Neon, No Cry”. Curated by Gino Gianuizzi. In the collective exhibit “Sacred Pause, Sacred Fertilizer” - curated by Work in Progress Advisory, Lisa Wirth and Marly Hammer, Nevelson Chapel Gallery in NY. Bucalo’s work has been part of a curated billboard program simultaneously happening in Bologna, Cervia and Berlin in 2022. A guest artist of their Artist in Residency in September 2022. Bucalo has been a visual correspondent for Vogue Italia and Photo Vogue with a project called NY Profile, collaborating with Alessia Glaviano.
Genoveva Castro holds a PhD in South Asian Languages and Literatures from the University of Washington in Seattle and B.A. in Archaeology from the National School of Anthropology in Mexico City. She currently teaches at Southern Connecticut State University at the department of World Languages and Literatures. In addition to her scholarly work, she is also interested in nonfiction writing and dance.
Karno Dasgupta is an interdisciplinary researcher and artist from Nepal and India, based in Abu Dhabi. Their practice moves through film, writing, and curation. Schooled in performance studies, art history, and literary studies, Karno’s investigations examine how aesthetics intersects with conceptualizations of temporality, movement, human rights, and anthropocene futures. His long term scholarly and curatorial project is “Being in Time: Aestheses of the Anthropocene,” which involves tracing the affordances of aesthetics as a method; as an everyday practice of solidarity and resistance. Often at the interstice between proposition and application, pondering an ethical life between the immediacy of the ordinary and the immensity of catastrophe, they hope for their work to have been for good. Karno’s recent publications include “Neither Universal nor Essentially Particular: Notes on Sharjah in March” (Sharjah Art Foundation, 2022); their presentations include papers titled “Writing Unhappy Policy: On the Affective Landscapes of the IPCC Assessments” (American Comparative Literature Association, 2023) and “Blackbrown, brownBlack: Whose Chromatics, Whose Coalition?” (South Asian Literary Association, 2023). He is currently a divisional research fellow at NYU Abu Dhabi (also his alma mater), and a curatorial apprentice as part of Jameel Arts Centre’s Assembly program.
Amelia Gates is a designer from Fort Bragg, NC, with experience in architecture, building construction, and concrete fabrication. She conducted her undergraduate studies at University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and currently studies in the Master program at Yale School of Architecture. Besides pursuing her professional degree, Gates has been committed to integrating animations and agent-based simulations in her experimental work process. She also works as researcher at the Center for Collaborative Arts and Media on prototypes of functional cultural artifacts for zero-gravity-environments, which have been presented at the symposium "Beyond the Cradle" at MIT.
Dr. Ravi Kopparapu is a planetary scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. He is a lead for Sellers Exoplanet Environments Collaboration (SEEC), and Science-PI for CHAMPs science collaboration. Dr. Kopparapu’s research work includes methods to identify those planets that could host biological or technological life on other worlds. He was the recipient of NASA’s Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal in 2020.
Dr. Mae-ling Lokko is an Assistant Professor at Yale University’s School of Architecture and Yale's Center for Ecosystems in Architecture (Yale CEA) and the founder of Willow Technologies Ltd, in Accra, Ghana. As an architectural scientist, designer and educator from Ghana and the Philippines, her work focuses on the design and integration of just, biogenic material practices across the agricultural, architectural and textile sectors. Lokko was the Director for the Building Sciences Program and Assistant Professor at Rensselaer’s School of Architecture from 2018-2021. Lokko’s work has been exhibited globally, most recently at Stedelijk Museum, Netherlands; Museum of the Future, Dubai; Z33 House for Contemporary Art, Design and Architecture, Belgium; Somerset House, London and Triennale Milano, Italy. Her recent research has been funded by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) SOM Foundation, Luma Foundation, the British Council, MIT’s Global Architectural History Teaching Collaborative, and NYSERDA’s NEXUS Clean Energy Accelerator Program.
Conor MacVarish is a PhD candidate at Columbia University's Department of English and Comparative Literature. His research focuses on the relationship between ecological form and speculative literature in the nineteenth century.
Viktoria Modesta is a bionic artist, creative director, musician, and champion of future innovations. Currently living in Los Angeles she has established herself as a "Sci-Fi in real life" artist & creative leader by challenging modern identity with avant-garde performance and visuals, one-of-a-kind prosthetics and fashion designs, and collaborations that bridge STEM with Pop Culture. Her mission is to explore & test the outer limits of a technologically-enhanced human experience on earth, space, and the metaverse. Viktoria first stepped onto the global stage with a performance at London 2012 Paralympic Closing Ceremony, followed by her perennially viral music/art video Prototype commissioned by Channel 4. Tallying hundreds of million views across the internet & television, her arresting spike dance and post-disability aesthetic introduced Viktoria as the world's first Bionic Pop Artist. She is known for her hyper-stylized performances and productions across the globe and constantly pushing forward art innovation and inclusivity in entertainment. A frequent keynote speaker & panelist, she has been featured in Forbes, Wired, Elle USA, Guardian, CNN, Vice, Vogue, LA Times, Dazed, and New York Times. Her work with brands spans from an ambassadorship to fully involved art direction, team curation, strategy, and production executed via a co-founded creative studio Modestar specializing in accelerating future-focused narrative. Extending her life’s mission, her avatar designed by Lilium Labs debuted in a TIME Pieces, 'Build a Better Future' NFT drop with a follow-up raising funds for Ukraine. Her first large installation the 'Virtual Twin' with virtual fashion commerce DressX, went on display in early 2023 at the Crystal Bridges Museum, Fashioning America 'Grit to Glamour' exhibit. An MIT Media Lab, Directors Fellow - 2016 Cohort, Young European Leaders - class 2019, and ambassador for accessibility space initiative Mission Astro access, Viktoria explores the impact of technology on the future of human lifestyle and culture . Her latest project with Aurelia Institute tapped into a new frontier of body augmentation in microgravity through tech wearables and architectural fashion.
Nahum is an artist and musician focused on challenging our perceptions through unusual perspectives. He produces works that reframe the way we engage with the universe with a wide range of media. He founded the KOSMICA Institute, a space organisation focused on the cultural discourses of space activities and their impact on Earth. Nahum's work has been exhibited in countries such as the USA, Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Germany, UK, France, Sweden, Russia, Australia, Taiwan, China, Japan and Brazil.
Sarah Oppenheimer is an architectural manipulator. Oppenheimer creates new circulatory pathways that establish unexpected kinesthetic and visual relays between bodies and living buildings. Gestural manipulation of interwoven sculptural instruments alters the contours of surrounding architecture, authoring and shuffling our experience of exhibition space. Interconnections require coordinated action between people and things, across tools and technologies. The viewer is transformed into an agent of spatial change. Oppenheimer’s exploration of human-environment reciprocity has taken many forms. In addition to solo exhibitions and artist collaborations, Oppenheimer has developed a didactic program entitled Sensitive Machine, in which participants learn new bodily limits, exploring how gesture is entwined with the movement of a collaboratively controlled apparatus. Originally conducted at Yale University’s large-scale motion capture studio, sensors were affixed to bodies and prostheses; positional shifts were projected as a dynamic point cloud image in real time. We asked: would the visual stimuli of the projection influence proprioceptive feedback? Would this feedback alter the collaborative manipulation of a prosthetic machine? Oppenheimer’s solo exhibitions include Sensitive Machine (Wellin Museum of Art, USA 2021), N-01 (Kunstmuseum Thun, Switzerland 2020), S-337473 (Mass MoCA, USA 2019), S-337473 (Wexner Center for the Arts, USA 2017), S-281913 (Pérez Art Museum Miami, USA 2016), S-399390 (MUDAM Luxembourg 2016) and 33-D (Kunsthaus Baselland, Switzerland 2014). Oppenheimer’s work has also been exhibited at ZKM, the Baltimore Museum, the Andy Warhol Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Art Unlimited at Art Basel, the Mattress Factory, the Drawing Center, and Sculpture Center. Oppenheimer is currently a senior critic at the Yale University School of Art.
Dr. Miwako Tezuka is Associate Director of the Reversible Destiny Foundation, a progressive artist foundation in New York established by Arakawa and Madeline Gins. Previously, she held the positions of Gallery Director of Japan Society, New York (2012–15), and Curator of Contemporary Art at Asia Society Museum, New York (2005–12). She has curated numerous exhibitions of artists, including Kimsooja, Maya Lin, Mariko Mori, Yoshitomo Nara, Pinaree Sanpitak, teamLab, Yang Fudong, among many others. Her most recent project as Associate Curator includes the Hawaiʻi Triennial 2022. Tezuka holds a doctorate in post-war Japanese art history from Columbia University and is Co-Director of PoNJAGenKon, a global network of over 250 postwar Japanese art scholars and curators.
mollie caffey is an artist, writer, and thinker living in the Mid-West. They received an MFA from Tyler School of Art in 2020. They are an observer: of contrast, of contridiction, of pattern, of spontenatiy, of evolution, of revolution. here to translate and record their observations best they can so as to see themselves, see others, and to help others see themselves as honestly as possible. This honesty, in turn, expands awareness, compassion, and facilitates healing. mollie is a vessel, a poet, a psychopomp, a synecdoche, an eteranl force and a contained human. Their work is interested in the dynamic between how the material world appears and what technological apparati and biological technologies tapped into through physical and metaphysical practices of religion, spirituality, and the occult reveal about the potential of shifting reality through perception.
Filippa Christofalou, M.S.Ed. (she/her) is currently a doctoral student in Museum Education, in the Art & Art Education program, at Teachers College Columbia University. Filippa’s work and research are situated in art museums and gallery spaces, focusing on body based learning, engagement, and participation. With an anti-oppressive, decolonial praxis lens, Filippa is interested in the ways that body based pedagogies disrupt institutional violence and epistemological oppression. So far, the two entry points to her research, are (i) locating in-situ, emergent “acts of disembodiment” in art museums, and (ii) regarding the examination of social location and positionality as a prerequisite for practicing body based pedagogies in complex and loaded places of learning, such as museums. Filippa is also a performance artist, and the founder of The Drama Science Lab, a series of evolving projects that use the body as a medium to explore the boundaries between art and science. As a museum educator Filippa has worked in different capacities in cultural institutions, including Saatchi Gallery, London National Maritime Museum, Chicago Art Institute, Whitney Museum, and National Archaeological Museum of Athens. Filippa’s PhD in Art and Art Education builds on an interdisciplinary background and studies in Geology & Environment, a Master’s degree in Science & Technology Education, and diplomas in History of Art, Theatre, Theatre in Education and Drama & Education.Lauren Dubowski is an interdisciplinary creative producer who brings experience in film, journalism, mixed reality, theater, and more. She has collaborated on projects with Ado Ato Pictures, Kinhouse Studio, the Łodź Film School vnLab (Visual Narratives Lab), and others. Lauren holds an MFA in Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism from the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale, where she is currently a DFA candidate. She was a Luce Scholar in Indonesia and a Fulbright research fellow to Poland.
Konrad Kaczmarek is a composer, musician, and instrument designer whose music incorporates live audio processing and improvisation, drawing on his musical and technical background. As a soloist, he has performed at the Sonorities Festival at Queens University in Belfast, The SoundBytes Festival in Halifax NS, Bargemusic, The Stone, Joyce SoHo, the 92nd Street Y, The Chelsea Art Museum, The Flea Theater, and at the Princeton Composers Ensemble. His compositions have been performed by an eclectic group of performers and ensembles including Cygnus, Crash Ensemble, Yarn/Wire, Dither, Janus, Psappha, PLOrk, Sideband, and the NOW Ensemble. He has been awarded residencies at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, The Banff Centre in Canada, and STEIM in The Netherlands. His freelance programming and performing have taken him to The River to River Festival in lower Manhattan (2013), Kunstnernes Hus in Olso, Norway (2009), The New Zealand International Arts Festival (2008), The 2008 Whitney Biennial Performance Series, the Next Wave festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (2006), “Works and Process” at the Guggenheim (2006), and The Strings of Autumn Festival at the Estate Theater in Prague (2006). Konrad is on the faculty in the Department of Music at Yale University, where he teaches courses in composition, music technology, and instrument design. He is Co-Director of Yale College New Music, Associate Director of the YalMusT Music Technology Labs, and has a joint appointment as Lecturer in Sound Design at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale.
Mari Kroin graduated from YSoA’s MArch II Program in 2021. She currently explores the everyday in NYC, her forever home. After graduating from Laguardia High School, the “Fame” school (not the airport), she made the rough trek across the East River to attend Pratt Institute. Five years later, with a degree in Architecture and a minor in Morphology, she set out to pursue what felt like a straightforward path in architecture, only to realize further down -the path had many forks. She’s still walking. You may find her editing the upcoming issue of Perspecta (56) or making paperclip people at her desk.
Irene Loughlin is a queer, neurodivergent artist, writer and academic instructor. After seeking solutions for living in a neurotypical world since childhood, she has finally accessed late diagnosis and treatment for ADHD. Her art functions as both alarm and affirmation by resisting neuro-ableism and advocating for change. She continues to imagine into being a future Art Department of Neurodivergency as a metaphoric composition of pencil points on equatori horizon lines which orthogonally project emotive satellites into geostationary orbit. (De)scribed here as a constellation of graphic notation, this school of study and possibility exists collaboratively amongst neurodivergent colleagues, students and allies via an interdisciplinary studio art + telescopic lab + lecture stream. Her further research interests include acknowledging the privilege and history of her white settler background in North America in relation to and in support of the work of IBPOC. She creates sibylline images, often in collaboration with the swirling atoms of objects, that both concede to and interrupt emotional and ecological collapse. She imagines a future in which a neurodiverse, interdisciplinary laboratory works with NASA under the direction of Indigenous communities globally to assist in healing the earth’s ecosphere from space. Throughout the pandemic, she was absorbed in creating drawings for a performance art graphic novel during an ‘at home’ residency sponsored by FADO. During that time, she developed an interest in using AI as an adaptive technology. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including photographic works at the Westbeth Gallery in NY at the conference Transforming Community: Disability, Diversity and Access. She also participated in the New York University Encuentro Corpolîticas working group in Buenos Aires, Argentina. In 2007, her work was presented at the New York University Performance Studies International Conference, where she spoke on the subject of disability, pain and performance.
Mona Mahall / Asli Serbest: Asli Serbest and Mona Mahall work in collaborations across spatial, image, sound, and text practices, at the intersection of art and architecture. They often begin their projects by investigating minor finds, fragments, figures, sites, and rites that exhibit discrepancies, but imply spatial agility and generosity, as well as poetic and political possibilities. Whether it be in the form of installation, model, video, sound, exhibition, or publication, all their projects follow a feminist methodology. As such, they constitute less fixed spaces and objects than non-linear physical or digital versions and speculations that share an interest in serial variation and possible distortions of form and scale. They play and replay architectural histories, events, and movements and rethink the re-production of space and implied power relations. The aim is to collectively (re-)consider rejected knowledge and to find alternative modes of organizing our lives, schools, online and offline movements. Serbest/Mahall exhibit and publish internationally, including at the Biennale di Venezia, Ural Biennial, Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien Berlin, Riverrun Istanbul, Württembergische Kunstverein Stuttgart, Pinakothek der Moderne Munich, Storefront for Art and Architecture New York, HKW Berlin, Vancouver Art Gallery, Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, New Museum New York; in e-flux journal, Volume Magazine, Perspecta, Istanbul Art News, etc. They are the editors of the independent magazine Junk Jet. In 2019, they curated the 7th International Sinop Biennial under the title of “A Politics of Location.” They live and work in Berlin and hold positions at the University of the Arts Bremen and the Bauhaus-University Weimar.
Emily Tate Moreu is a physician, conceptual artist and writer based in New York City. Her practice is an exploration of the duality between art and science with emphasis on the human body as functional living and breathing beings yet simultaneously magical constructs of art. Her approach is multi-disciplinary with cross-titrations in mediums that span from large installations, sculptures, poetry to public art pieces.
Priya Natarajan finished her undergraduate studies at M.I.T., and got her Ph.D. from the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge University, where she was elected a Fellow of Trinity College. She is a theoretical astrophysicist working in cosmology, trying to understand the invisible Universe – dark matter, dark energy and black holes.. Priya has made seminal contributions to our understanding of the coupling of the visible and dark universe: the formation, fueling, feedback and assembly history of supermassive black holes in their larger scale cosmic context and mapping dark matter substructure in clusters of galaxies. Her research has focused on confronting and testing theoretical ideas with observational data in astrophysics. She has made significant contributions to two key open problems in astrophysics – to the studies of dark matter using gravitational lensing and to our current understanding of the formation, fueling and growth of black holes over cosmic time. She is the recipient of many awards and honors including the APS, AAAS, Guggenheim and Radcliffe Fellowships and the 2022 Liberty Science Center ‘Genius Award.’ Priya has served as Chair of the National Astronomy and Astrophysics Advisory Committee that advises NASA, NSF and DoE; as Chair of the Division of Astrophysics of the American Physical Society and is on the Scientific Editorial Board of The Astrophysical Journal. Deeply invested in inter-disciplinary scholarship, she is currently the Director of Yale’s Franke Program in Science and the Humanities and frequently collaborates with artists and her VR project LUNATICK done in collaboration with Antony Gormley has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2018. She is also the author of the critically acclaimed book Mapping the Heavens: The Radical Scientific Ideas That Reveal the Cosmos.
Originally trained as an anthropologist, Jeff Ostergren has been a practicing artist for two decades and has exhibited work in locations around the world including Los Angeles, Vancouver, and the Czech Republic. Recent exhibitions include “Avidya” at URSA Gallery in Bridgeport, CT, “Perverse Furniture” at Artspace in New Haven, CT, and a solo commissioned installation “Science For a Better Life,” a site-specific project in New Haven in which he explored the chemical history of Bayer Pharmaceuticals. Ostergren is a recipient of a 2017 Artist’s Resource Trust Grant from the Berkshire Taconic Foundation and was chosen a 2021 “Artist-To-Watch” by Ortega y Gasset Projects in Brooklyn. He also has a curatorial practice, including a well-reviewed exhibition “False Flag: The Space Between Reason and Paranoia” at Franklin Street Works in Stamford, CT in 2018. In addition, Ostergren runs Tilia Projects, an occasional project space, out of his studio in New Haven. Ostergren received his MFA from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA in 2006, following upon receiving a BA in a double major of anthropology and gender studies at Rice University in Houston, TX in 1998. He lives and works in New Haven, CT.
Emmy Thelander devises idiosyncratic systems that give rise to drawings, paintings, objects, and digital media. Appropriating vocabularies of scientific data, information graphics, adolescent notebooks, and 20th century painting her artwork diagrams daily routines and the physical and categorical containers that mold subjectivity. She received her MFA in Painting & Printmaking from the Yale School of Art in 2014 and a BFA from Washington University in St. Louis in 2010. She has been awarded fellowships including the Lighthouse Works, the Fountainhead at Virginia Commonwealth University, and the Alice Kimball English Traveling Grant in addition to residencies at Casa Lü, The Alex Brown Foundation, ACRE, Signal Culture, Osage Arts Community, and the Yale/Norfolk Summer School of Art. She has exhibited solo projects at Practice (Philadelphia, PA), Los Ojos (Brooklyn, NY), In The Pines (Jackson, WY), and Reynolds Gallery (Richmond, VA) and two-person exhibitions at Fjord (Philadelphia) and Hungryman Gallery (San Francisco). She teaches at Hunter and Hostos Colleges of the City University of New York (CUNY), and in 2018 was the Herndon Smith Fellow at Washington University in St. Louis.