LASER Presenters

Leonardo Art Science Evenings

Past and future program

Biographies

(As they were the day they presented at a LASER)

Dor Abrahamson is currently Assistant Professor of Cognition and Development in UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Education. Abrahamson researches mathematical intuition, reasoning, and learning, the relations among them, and the roles that artifacts can play in facilitating deep conceptual understanding and procedural fluency. Abrahamson holds a Ph.D. in the Learning Sciences (Northwestern University) and an M.A. in Cognitive Psychology (Tel Aviv University). He is a recipient of a National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship.
Luca Antonucci is a practicing artist and co-founder of Colpa Press. He received his MFA from San Francisco Art Institute in 2010 and is currently in an Artist in Residence at the Kala Art Institute for Printmaking. He resides in San Francisco and was part of a group show at the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery in January. His frequent collaborations with Daniel Small led to their project First Light. Salma Arastu, a native of India's Rajasthan, has been creating and exhibiting her paintings internationally since the 1970s. Her work with continuous and lyrical line is influenced by her native culture and her residence after marriage in Iran and Kuwait before coming to the US in 1987. Born into the Sindhi, Hindu tradition in her native India, she later embraced Islam through her marriage. At birth, Ms. Arastu was given the life-defining challenge of a left hand without fingers. Seeing the unity of an all-encompassing God, she was able to transcend the barriers often set-forth in the traditions of religion, culture and the cultural perceptions of handicap. She has almost 40 solo shows to her credit, won several awards including East Bay Community's fund for artists in 2012, three works in public places and two books published with her poems and paintings. She is the author of two books: "The Lyrical Line: Embracing All and Flowing" and "Turning Rumi: Singing Verses of Love Unity and Freedom" (2012).
Deborah Aschheim makes drawings, sculptures and installations that try to give form to invisible worlds of the mind and brain. her recent work exploring the subject of memory has led her to collaborate with musicians and neuroscientists on projects that are a mixture of science and poetry. she has exhibited recent projects at the Armory Center and the Pasadena Museum in Pasadena, ca; at the Austin Museum in Texas; the weatherspoon museum in Greensboro, North Carolina; Laumeier Sculpture Park in St. Louis and the mattress factory in Pittsburgh. Aschheim is the Hellman visiting artist at the memory and aging center in the neurology department of UC San Francisco.
Lucia Ayala, art and astronomy historian, is currently a postdoc researcher at the Office for History of Science and Technology in the University of California, Berkeley. She accomplished her binational PhD at the Humboldt University of Berlin (Germany) and the University of Granada (Spain). She deals with historical as well as contemporary contexts, since her main research field is the visual history of astronomy from early modern period until current astrophysics. She is a team member of Fluid Skies, a collaborative project developed together with the astrophysicist Jaime Forero and the artist Yunchul Kim.
Henrik Bennetsen is the CEO of Katalabs and maintains a strong interest in 3D collaborative spaces and open source technology. In a previous life Henrik was a professional musician and still has a strong side interest in creative self expression augmented by technology.
Terry Berlier is an interdisciplinary artist who works primarily with sculpture and expanded media. Her work is often kinetic, interactive and/or sound based and focuses on everyday objects, the environment, ideas of nonplace/place and queer practice. She has exhibited in solo and group shows both nationally and internationally. Her work has been reviewed in the BBC News Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle and in the book `Seeing Gertrude Stein' published by University of California Press. Her work is in several collections including the Progressive Corporation in Cleveland Ohio, Kala Art Institute in Berkeley California and Bildwechsel Archive in Berlin Germany. She has received numerous residencies and grants including the Zellerbach Foundation Berkeley, Arts Council Silicon Valley Artist Fellowship, Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research Fellow at Stanford University, Recology San Francisco, Hungarian Multicultural Center in Budapest Hungary, Exploratorium: Museum of Science, Art and Human Perception in San Francisco, Arts Council Silicon Valley Artist Fellowship, California Council for Humanities California Stories Fund and the Millay Colony for Artists. She currently is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University. Her exhibition opens October 9 on the Stanford campu: details.
Jesse Austin and Charles Lee are members of the architecture collective BIOS. Living organisms are distinguished from inanimate objects in that they exhibit metabolism, reproduction, and response to stimuli. Living organisms communicate: depending on feedback to find optimal patterns for their continued existence. They self-organize, living in negative entropy. As designers we find the patterns of life and use them to negotiate the layering of diverse parameters and constraints inherent in architectural design.
Ruzena Bajcsy is director of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) at UC Berkeley
Sam Bower is co-founder and executive director of greenmuseum.org, an online museum of environmental art, launched in 2001. Prior to this, Sam created environmental art for 8 years as part of a San Francisco Bay Area collaborative art group known as Meadowsweet Dairy. He helped found Cellspace, a non-profit community art space in San Francisco, and Co-Directed Crucible Steel Gallery. Sam has worked as a solo artist, puppeteer, web designer, in advertising, events planning and the environmental non-profit sector in the United States and in Ecuador.
Robert Buelteman has published 4 books of photographs and thirteen limited-edition portfolios of his work. He has been honored with three residencies at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the subject of his monograph Eighteen Days in June (2000), as well as a three year residency at the Santa Fe Institute. He is currently working on a new collection of images as a guest of Stanford's Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve. His work is found in the permanent collections of he Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Santa Fe Institute, Yale University Art Museum, Stanford University and numerous corporate and private collections as well.
Jim Campbell, who studied Mathematics and Engineering at the MIT, is an electronic artist whose work is included in the collections of several museums around the world. In 1992 he created one of the first permanent public interactive video artworks in the USA. He has lectured on interactive media art at many Institutions throughout the world. As an engineer he holds almost twenty patents in the field of video image processing.
Helena Carmena, a former science educator, is the Manager of Teacher Services at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. She has been active in curriculum development for use in the museum and classroom setting and has delivered numerous inquiry-based educational programs for children and adults. Helena has worked with many organizations to develop multi-disciplinary curricula. The most recent project has been focused on art, science, and literacy integration in collaboration with the de Young Fine Arts Museum and the San Francisco Unified School District.
Chris Chafe is a composer/ cellist / music researcher with an interest in computer music composition and interactive performance. He has been a long-term denizen of the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, Stanford University where he directs the center and teaches computer music courses. His doctorate in music composition was completed at Stanford in 1983 with prior degrees in music from the University of California at San Diego and Antioch College. Two year-long research periods were spent at IRCAM, and the Banff Center for the Arts developing methods for computer sound synthesis based on physical models of musical instrument mechanics. Two recent discs of his works are available from Centaur Records.
Luciano Chessa is a composer, conductor, pianist, and musical saw/Vietnamese dan bau soloist who has been active in Europe, the U.S., and Australia. Recent premieres include a large orchestral work commissioned by the Orchestra Filarmonica of Torino "Ragazzi Incoscienti Scarabocchiano Sulla Porta Di Un Negozio Fallito" "TomBoy" for piano and a video by Terry Berlier, and "Movements", a multimedia work for 16mm film, dan bau and amplified film projectors produced in collaboration with filmmaker Rick Bahto. Chessa has just composed "Come un'Infanzia", a guitar + string quartet piece for the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, and is collaborating with performance artist Kalup Linzy and the Ensemble Parallele on an opera commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to be premiered at YBCA in August 2011. As a music historian Chessa has written "Luigi Russolo, Futurist. Noise, Visual Arts, and the Occult" (UC Press, 2012). In 2009 Chessa supervised the first reconstruction of Russolo's "intonarumori" orchestra. His recordings include: Humus Destination X (1997), Entu (2000), Tryptique pour Gerard (2008), Peyrano (2008) Money is Money and Time is Time (2008) the dvd Tom's Heart (2008) The Orchestra of Futurist Noise Intoners Vol. 1 (Sub Rosa, 2012).
Irene Chien is a PhD candidate in Film and New Media at UC Berkeley. She writes and teaches about race and gender at the intersection of cinema and new media, including a column "Camera Ludica" for Film Quarterly.
Grisha Coleman, assistant professor of Movement, Computation and Digital Media at the School of Arts, Media and Engineering and School of Dance at Arizona State University works as a dancer, composer and media artist in performance and experiential media systems and is currently a resident at the Montalvo Arts Center in Silicon Valley. She has created large scale works for a variety of residencies and venues, e.g. the site-specific sound/kinetic installation for public interaction and participation "Reach, Robot", commissioned by the Robotics Institute.
Alan Cooper is an emeritus scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey and consulting professor at Stanford. He has 28 years experience working on Antarctic studies and heads the Antarctic Seismic Data Library System for Cooperative Research under the 1959 Antarctic Treaty. He has published more than 250 research papers. Alan is also co-concertmaster of the California Pops Orchestra and performs with the Left Bank trio and Fiume di Musica.
Anna Couey works at the intersection of art, communications, information and social justice, using participatory media tools and story-collecting methods to re-imagine and restructure power. During the 1980s-1990s, she helped develop art telecommunications projects such as the Art Com Electronic Network and Arts Wire, as well as producing temporary cross-cultural communications events as social sculpture. Since the mid-1990's, Anna has applied social sculpture strategies outside the art world, collaborating with alternative media makers; librarians, educators, and youth; and poor and working class communities of color organizing for social justice. Her communication sculptures have been exhibited at digital art festivals internationally, including ISEA and SIGGRAPH.
Mathias Crawford is a researcher in IFTF's Technology Horizons program. Mathias has written extensively about changing patterns of urban mobility, the future of education, and using games to change real world behaviors. He has participated in research into the technological forces that are contributing to changing structures of community support; the nature of collaboration, especially as it is practiced in open source communities and by youth; and the future of mobile communications devices. Mathias has also been integrally involved in development of the Foresight Engine, IFTF's platform for massively collaborative thought experiments that address provocative scenarios about the future.
Beatriz DaCosta is an Associate Professor of Arts, Computation, Engineering at the University of California, Irvine. A former collaborator of Critical Art Ensemble and a co-founder of Preemptive Media, she works at the intersection of contemporary art, engineering, politics, and the life sciences.
Sharon Daniel is an Associate Professor of Film and Digital Media and Chair of the Digital Arts and New Media MFA program at the University of California, Santa Cruz where she teaches classes in digital media theory and practice. Her research involves collaborations with communities that focus on the use and development of information and communications technologies for social inclusion.
Joe Davis is an artist-researcher who has been at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for 29 years. He has been a Research Fellow and Lecturer at MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies and for most of the past two decades, he has been a Research Affiliate at MIT Biology in the laboratory of Alexander Rich. Joe is noted as a pioneer in the field of art and molecular biology. He was the 2008 recipient of a Rockefeller Fellowship in New Media and has widely published in both artistic and scientific venues.
Terrence Deacon, Professor of Biological Anthropology and Neuroscience at the University of California at Berkeley, Ph.D. in Biological Anthropology from Harvard University and formerly a neurologist and anthropologist at Harvard Medical School, is the author of the seminal book "The Symbolic Species: The Coevolution of language and the brain" (2007). His research combines Neurolinguistics, Evolutionary Biology, Anthropology, Semiotics and Complex Systems Theory. His work extends from laboratory-based cellular-molecular neurobiology to the study of semiotic processes underlying animal and human communication, especially language.
Abigail DeKosnik Abigail De Kosnik is an Assistant Professor in the Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM) and the Department of Theater, Dance & Performance Studies (TDPS). She has written two books: The Survival of Soap Opera - Strategies for a New Media Era (essay collection, co-edited with Sam Ford and C. Lee Harrington) from the University Press of Mississippi and Illegitimate Media - Minority Discourse and the Censorship of Digital Remix Culture from the University of Georgia Press. She testified before the US Copyright Office at their hearings regarding the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, in favor of an exemption to the DMCA's ban on the circumvention of digital copyright technologies that would allow non-Film Studies college professors to rip DVDs for the purpose of screening clips of film and television in their courses. She organized a conference on Open Source and the Humanities, sponsored by the Berkeley Center for New Media.
Bonnie DeVarco is an interdisciplinary researcher, writer and curator and Media X Distinguished Visiting Scholar. With an academic background in cultural anthropology, dance ethnology and archives management, she writes and lectures on Design Science, virtual worlds, next generation geographic information systems, information visualization and the culture of cyberspace. She is currently co-authoring Shape of Thought, on the history and evolution of visual language with Eileen Clegg and is co-editing a book on Ludic Cartographies with Matteo Bittanti and Henry Lowood of the Stanford University's Humanities Lab.
Jennifer Dionne is an assistant professor in the department of Materials Science and Engineering. Her research investigates metamaterials - engineered materials with optical and electrical properties not found in nature - for applications ranging from high-efficiency solar energy conversion to bioimaging. Jen received her Ph. D. in Applied Physics in 2009 at the California Institute of Technology and B.S. degrees in Physics and Systems & Electrical Engineering from Washington University in 2003. Prior to joining Stanford, she served as a postdoctoral research fellow in Chemistry at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Her work has been recognized with a NSF CAREER Award, AFOSR Young Investigator Award, Hellman Faculty Scholar Award, and MRS Gold Award. In 2011, she was named one of Technology Review's TR35 - 35 international innovators under 35 tackling important problems in transformative ways.
Brad Drda is the environmental manager for Recology San Francisco. He manages energy efficiency and renewable power projects at Recology San Francisco facilities and is an adjunct instructor at the University of San Francisco's Environmental Management program.
Carina Earl has shown her work in various galleries in Washington DC. During a brief time in Philadelphia she asked to lead and execute a mural with the Philadelphia Mural Arts Commission and Keep Pennsylvania Beautiful. In San Francisco she has been deeply involved with Trickster Arts Salon which has presented opportunities to show at Mission Control and Aspect Gallery. She has also shown numerous times at the Diego Rivera Gallery in N. Beach, presented a solo show at Hive Mind Gallery in Oakland in 2011, and exhibited several pieces at SFAI's Vernassage in 2012. Carina began a serious interest in art when she received her first canvas and paint set in 1986. She has always felt that through painting she has been able to access portals into other times and dimensions. Currently she is working on a body of large scale paintings called Labyrinth of Infinite Doorways which focuses on a period about 4 billion years from now when the Milky Way will merge with neighboring Andromeda. Her concepts are based on a principle that intention is stronger than fear, that life is a structural component of physics, and that eventually life will penetrate both star systems to form a galactic biosphere.
Robert Edgar is a digital media producer presently living in the Bay area. Robert creates and employs software engines to examine mediated artifacts forged at his zone of proximal development. His engines include Memory Theatre One (1985), Living Cinema (1988), Sand, or How Computers Dream of Truth in Cinema (1992), Memory Theatre Two (2003), and Simultaneous Opposites (presently under development). He holds an MFA from Syracuse University College of Visual and Performing Arts, presently works at Stanford University, and teaches at the Art Institute of Sunnyvale.
John Edmark teaches design, color theory, and animation at Stanford University. His creative investigations range from geometric kinetic works and transformable objects, to products for storage, kitchen, and creative play. Previously, he researched 3-D virtual environments at Bell Laboratories. He has Masters degrees in Product Design (Stanford), and Computer Science (Columbia), and is named inventor on nine U.S. utility patents. His other interests include hyper-stereo landscape photography, ultra-light backpacking, and throat singing.
Rachel Beth Egenhoefer is an artist, designer, writer, and educator. Her work explores the intersections between textiles, technology, and the body on historical, constructional and conceptual levels; and often incorporates tactile elements such as candy, knitting, and machines to represent intangible computer codes and conceptual spaces. Egenhoefer is currently an Assistant Professor in Design in the Department of Art + Architecture at the University of San Francisco.
Ken Eklund is a game designer and a thought leader in the area of serious games and collaborative gameplay for the social good. He is the creator of World Without Oil, a landmark massively collaborative alternate reality game, and currently team lead on EVOKE, "a ten-week crash course on changing the world." Ken has long been interested in the positive social effects of games and open-ended, creative play. Ken and his partner on ZOROP, Annette Mees, both seek ways to use technology to create new narrative forms and experiences - he approaches it as a game designer, she is a director of immersive theater in London. Both believe "participation through play can make stories more personal, meaningful and adventuresome."
Mona El Khafif is an Associate Professor of Architecture and Urban Design and Project Coordinator of the CCA URBANlab, who holds a doctorate in urban design from the TU Vienna. El Khafif worked in architectural offices in Germany and Vienna, on projects which received important urban design awards including the Otto Wagner Urban Design Award for the BUSarchitecture Homeworkers project and the Ortner & Ortner Museumsquartier. El Khafif is a founding principal of phase 1 Fox_El Khafif_Nuhsbaumer, a co-author of URBANbuild local global, and has recently published Staged Urbanism: Urban Spaces for Art, Culture and Consumption in the Age of Leisure Society in Germany.
Hasan Elahi is an assistant professor at San Jose State University's CADRE laboratory for New Media. He is an interdisciplinary artist whose work examines issues of surveillance, simulated time, transport systems, borders and frontiers. His work has been presented in numerous exhibitions at venues worldwide.
Mark Feldman is a scholar of US culture and a lecturer in Stanford University's Program in Writing and Rhetoric, with interests in urban studies, environmental humanities, ecocriticism, and visual culture. In 2009-10 he was a fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, pursuing initial research for "Urban Ecology: New York City's Visionary Urbanism." "Urban Ecology" explores how artists, landscape architects, and educators are reimagining New York City, greening the streets and changing perceptions of nature. A native New Yorker, this project stems from his long-standing fascination with this city and environmentalism. Mark's first book manuscript ("Still Wild: The Human and the Animal in American Literary Naturalism") reconsiders literary naturalism's preoccupation with animality, arguing that it was part of a serious and modern attempt to rethink what it meant to be human in an evolutionary age. Mark teaches "The Rhetoric of Urban Life" (an introduction to thinking and writing about cities) and "Speaking About Art: Narrating the Cantor's Collections." Mark also directs, along with John Peterson, a sustainability blog, SUSSingSustinability@Stanford that fosters creative communication (written and visual) of environmental issues.
Peter Foucault creates works on paper, videos, and installations that are fueled by his love of drawing and mark making. He has created a series of Drawing-Projects, which utilize systems developed by the artist that produce complex abstract compositions. Viewer interactivity plays an integral part in his drawing installations, large-scale artworks in which participants influence the outcome of a drawing that is created by a small robot over the duration of an event or exhibition. Foucault has participated in numerous exhibitions nationwide and has curated several art events.
Anne Fougeron has provided architectural services in the Bay Area since her graduation from the Masters program in Architecture at the University of California at Berkeley 25 years ago. Currently her firm's work ranges from feasibility studies to new construction projects in the commercial, health care and residential sectors. Some of her major projects include: the two phase remodel of Planned Parenthood MacArthur Clinic started in 1996 and completed in 2003 (winner of several awards), a 2005 award-winning vacation house in Big Sur, mixed-use housing developments and urban planning studies, and supervising the redevelopment effort for San Jose's downtown area. Fougeron has taught architectural design to both undergraduate and graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley and at the California College of Arts.
Curt Frank is a Professor in Chemical Engineering at Stanford and the Senior Associate Dean for Faculty and Academic Affairs in the School of Engineering. He was the founding Director of the Center on Polymer Interfaces and Macromolecular Assemblies, a Materials Research Science and Engineering Center sponsored by the National Science Foundation, from 1994 to 2010. He was also the Chairman of the Department of Chemical Engineering from 2001 to 2006. His research interests are in polymer materials science, and he has current collaborations with the School of Medicine directed at development of an artificial cornea and toward hydrogel-based arrays for study of primary hepatocytes, with Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Light Source on the development of proton and anion exchange membranes for fuel cells, and with the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering on developing bio-based composites and foams for applications in the construction industry. In collaboration with his wife Sara Loesch-Frank, a calligrapher, artist, and art teacher, Curt has taught an Introductory Sophomore Seminar on "Art, Chemistry, and Madness: the Science of Art Materials" for the past six years. Curt lectures on a series of historical palettes: Paleolithic, Egyptian, Greco-Roman, Medieval, Renaissance, Industrial, and Contemporary.
Laurie Frick draws from neuroscience to construct intricately hand-built works and installations to explore the nature of pattern and the mind. Formerly an executive in high-technology, using her background in engineering and high-technology she explores science, compulsive organization and the current culture of continual partial attention. She has been awarded fellowships and residencies at Yaddo, The Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, The Amerian Academy in Rome, McColl Center for Visual Art, The Lower East Side Printshop, Djerassi Fellowship and the Headlands Center for the Arts. The body of work from her Spring 2011 show at Edward Cella in Los Angeles are experiments in brain rhythm using time studies of daily activity logs and sleep charts. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Frick lives and works in Austin, Texas and Brooklyn, New York.
Linda Gass is an Artist in Residence at the Palo Alto Cubberley Studios. Textiles have been an important part of her life since childhood when her grandmother taught her to sew doll clothes. In her early adult life, she took a detour through the software industry. Linda returned to making textiles 14 years ago, this time for the wall, and now exhibits her work internationally in galleries and museums. She is an avid backpacker and travels extensively in the wilderness areas of the West where she finds much of the inspiration for her work.
Evelyne Gayou is a researcher and electroacoustic composer with a master degree in cinema and a PhD in musicology at the Sorbonne. She is editor in chief of the collection "Portraits Polychromes" books and multimedia documents for INA in Paris. Involved in audiovisual activities as an editor for Radio France for many years, she also performs in concert and lectures at universities. As a GRM member since 1975 she has had the opportunity of collaborating with the experimental musical milieu in Europe, from Pierre Schaeffer to Karlheinz Stockhausen, and in the USA especially with the computer music pioneers, Max Mathews, John Chowning, and many others. She published a history of the discovery and development of Musique Concrete under the title "GRM, Groupe de Recherches Musicales, 50 ans d'histoire" (2007).
Eri Gentry is the founding President and Executive Director of BioCurious, the Bay Area's first bio-hackerspace, where members come to think and create in a collegial, informal setting. Her mission is to make positive change in the world by enabling innovation in science through collaboration and education. Eri serves on the Scientific Advisory Board of SynBERC and is a Citizen Science blogger at MAKEzine. She enjoys forex trading, sailing, and swinging kettlebells. Eri was previously CEO of Livly, a nonprofit biotech on a mission to cure cancer, and received a bachelor's in Economics at Yale.
Zann Gill started her career as a researcher for Buckminster Fuller. Early interest in Fuller's concepts for "World Game" to achieve environmental sustainability and "design science" sparked her focus on cross-disciplinary innovation, including a networked system of urban innovation as a complex adaptive system. She moved to Australia in 1989 to work on a proposal from the Japanese government to the Australian government to build an IT "city of the future", the so-called Multifunction Polis (MFP). At NASA she developed plans for an Institute for Advanced Space Concepts (IASC), a collaboratory BEACON (Bio-Evolutionary Advanced Concepts) and the astrobiology program for NASA University. Zann is currently working with Australia's National ICT Center Excellence (NICTA) to reposition the "eco-sustainable city of the future" initiative to harness smart systems technology, ubiquitous computing, and social networks.
Ken Goldberg is an artist and professor of engineering at UC Berkeley, where he is currently Director of the Berkeley Center for New Media. Goldberg's art installations such as the Telegarden have been exhibited. Goldberg is an IEEE Fellow and Vice President of Technical Activities for the Robotics and Automation Society. His PhD is in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University.
Christian Gonzenbach is an experimenter and an explorer at the edge between the normal and the bizarre. It is the unexpected, the little weird thing, that the artist focuses on. Hence he has created installations in which a landscape is made out of corn flakes, a video in which all the people are pickles, that play soccer, go for a dance or a boxing match, etc. His works look familiar but always disorient the viewer.
Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley. She is an internationally recognized leader in the study of children's learning and is the author of over 100 articles and several books including the bestsellers "The Scientist in the Crib" and "The Philosophical Baby; What children's minds tell us about love, truth and the meaning of life". She has also written for Science, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, New Scientist and Slate. She has three sons and lives in Berkeley, California.
Deborah Gordon is a Professor in the Department of Biology at Stanford. She studies collective organization by investigating the ecology and behavior of ant colonies, including a population of harvester ant colonies in Arizona, the invasive Argentine ant in northern California, and ant-plant mutualisms in tropical forests in Central America. She is the author of two books, Ants at Work (2000) and Ant Encounters:Interaction Networks and Colony Behavior (2010). She has been awarded fellowships from Guggenheim and the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences. She is interested in analogies between ant colonies and other distributed networks such as brains, the immune system, the internet, and distributed robotic systems.
Sean Gourley, Quid co-founder and CTO, did research into the mathematics of war for his PhD thesis at Balliol College, Oxford. His findings appeared as the featured article in "Nature" (December 2009) and were the subject of a popular TED talk (2009). His work on statistical analysis, probability, and algorithm development applied to complex systems and large datasets inspired the creation of Quid. Sean is a Rhodes Scholar PhD in Physics (Complexity) from the University of Oxford; his is undergraduate degree in Physics is from the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand.
Laura Granka is a User Experience Researcher at Google, Inc, and is working towards her PhD at Stanford University. She has spent the past seven years studying how people look for information, specifically in online search environments. Laura has approached information discovery through several research methodologies, including the behavioral (eyetracking), the implicit (clickthrough data), and the qualitiative (ethnography). Laura has applied these key learnings towards improving UI design and result ranking algorithms while at Google. She has authored over 20 publications and presentations on this topic.
John Granzow is a Canadian artist, instrument designer and music researcher. He studied classical guitar with Dale Ketcheson and constructed his first instrument (a flamenco guitar) under the instruction of luthier George Rizsany in Nova Scotia. In 2006 he took began research in auditory perception, completing a Masters of Science in Psychoacoustics at the University of Lethbridge in the lab of Dr. John Vokey. At the Analogous Fields: Arts and Science residency at the Banff Centre in 2009 John explored instrumentation in artistic and scientific practice with artist Denton Fredrickson. A generative construction process was devised to produce a series of daxophones from a single plank of cherry, each instrument undergoing an imposed mutation with timbral consequences. These daxophones were played in networked performances in Portugal and Italy as well as at The Center For Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford University, where John now pursues his Ph.D in Computer Based Music Theory and Acoustics. In more recent research, he investigates applications of computer aided design and digital fabrication to new organologies. Rapid prototyping techniques are leveraged to produce performance-specific musical instruments. Outcomes from this research have been presented at concerts and sound installations in Canada, France, and the United States.
Kathelin Gray, artistic director, Theatre of All Possibilities, is known for her wide-ranging interdisciplinary collaborations involving performance, music, science and installations. She is co-founder of October Gallery and Institute of Ecotechnics in London, October Galley in London, Synergia Ranch in Santa Fe, Caravan of Dreams Performing Arts Center in Texas, and more. Theatre of All Possibilities is a 35-year-old international performance and event production company (www.allpossibilities.org). She has traveled all over the world, organised 30 interdisciplinary conferences, been selected as one of the most innovative CEO's by the Tarrytown 100, served on the board of directors to the Biosphere 2 project.
Bathsheba Grossman is a mathematical sculptor, instantiating her own designs as well as scientific illustrations as 3D physical objects. She is a pioneer in the use of freeform fabrication in metal for art, as well as 3D laser etching in glass.
Minna Harri received an MFA in Performance and Theory from Theater Academy Helsinki in her native Finland, relocated to San Francisco in 2008 via Amsterdam in the Netherlands (2003-2008) and has since created several choreographies in different locations in the Bay Area, as well as danced for choreographers Laura Arrington, Jesse Hewit (Goldie winner 2010) and Macklin Kowal. Her previous projects have included dance: Life Sustenance, Raja, Everything Under Control that represented Theater Academy Helsinki in Warsaw Theater Schools Festival in 2003, singing in the group Calle Real (2003-2006), three solo shows in galleries in Helsinki (1998, 1999, 2001), published articles in Finnish periodicals and by Theater Academy, and co-curating a performance art salon in Helsinki (2003).
Katharine Hawthorne is a San Francisco based choreographer and dancer working at the intersection of art and science. She has performed with Hope Mohr Dance, Liss Fain Dance, and Ledges and Bones, among others. Her choreography has been presented widely in the San Francisco Bay Area, Minneapolis, Chicago, New York, Belgium, Greece, and Argentina. Katharine holds a B.S. in Physics and Dance, with honors, from Stanford University.
Marti Hearst is a professor in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. She received BA, MS, and PhD degrees in Computer Science from UC Berkeley and was a Member of the Research Staff at Xerox PARC from 1994 to 1997. A primary focus of Dr. Hearst's research is user interfaces for search.She just completed the first book on the topic of Search User Interfaces and she has invented or participated in several well-known search interface projects including the Flamenco project that investigated and the promoted the use of faceted metadata for collection navigation. Professor Hearst's other research areas include computational linguistics, information visualization, and analysis of social media.Prof. Hearst has received an NSF CAREER award, an IBM Faculty Award, a Google Research Award, an Okawa Foundation Fellowship, two Excellence in Teaching Awards, and has been principle investigator for more than $3M in research grants.
Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison are an artist team, emeritus professors from the University of California San Diego, Department of Visual Arts. They are pioneers in the development and evolution of what can be described as ecologically-based art from a systems perspective.
Matt Heckert has been working as an engineer, as well as a performance and sound artist, since 1978. He operates his own design-build shop where he does design, fabrication and machining. One of the founding directors of Survival Research Laboratories, he has built robots and designed soundtracks for performances and films. In 1989 he conceived and developed a group of sound producing machines know as the Mechanical Sound Orchestra and toured it in the United States and Europe. Matt is obsessed with making sound-noise-music with the mechanical devices he builds.
Taraneh Hemami is an Iranian-born artist who relocated to the USA after the Iranian revolution of 1979. Hemami's work examines the liminality of her existence, of being of two world that are continuously and contentiously at odds with one another. Through her projects she explores personal and collective stories and histories while creating spaces for creative exchange and dialogue.
Rhonda Holberton is an interdisciplinary artist. Her recent installation work addresses the circuitry of power and investigates the game-like structures that direct systems of desire and control. The work relies on a displaced scientific/corporate language to question systems of commerce, capitalism, consumption, corporate futures, media, and resource supplies. Recently Rhonda co-organized the Rising Tide Conference, a joint effort between CCA and Stanford to bring together an international gathering of artists, scientists, policy-makers, and business professionals to engage in conversations about the intersections of ethics, aesthetics, and environmentalism.
Robert Horn did did not start out to be an artist. He have had several previous careers: political scientist; entrepreneur; CEO; futurist; cognitive science researcher; author. He was a visiting scholar at Stanford University's Human Sciences and Technology Advanced Research Institute (H-STAR) and the author of Visual Language: Global Communication for the 21st Century. His mural work was represented in the first-ever exhibits of information design as a fine art at the Stroom Museum in The Hague and at the Coventry (UK) School of Art and Design in 2000. One of his info-murals - for Nirex, the British government agency that regulates nuclear waste disposal - incorporates the history and future plans of the agency going out twelve thousand years, and hangs in its cafeteria. You can view the Vision 2050 poster and mural.
Jesse Houlding has exhibited nationally and locally, including at SFMOMA, Berkeley Art Center, San Diego Institute Museum of the Living Artist, Stanford University, San Francisco State University, Kala Art Institute, the LAB, and Root Division. As a recipient of the 2009 American Psychoanalytic Association Academic Fellowship he spent a year researching psychoanalytic theories relating to his practice. In October of 2011 he became the Print Shop Manager at Kala Art Institute in Berkeley. Jesse was recently interviewed in the art practice interview blog, In The Make http://www.inthemake.net/Jesse-Houlding
William Hsu is an Associate Professor at San Francisco State University. His interests are in interactive computer music, computer architecture and performance evaluation.
Jeff Hull's aim, As a street artist and guerrilla events producer, was "to infuse more variability and play into the civic realm" and to create opportunities for real cultural exchange in negative urban space. The result was Oaklandish, a decade strong grassroots community arts organization with 21 consecutive "Best of the East Bay" Awards to its credit. Having dabbled in many creative professions, he was not satisfied until he invented his own job; Creative Director at Nonchalance, a hybrid arts consultancy with an expertise in Situational Design. Their mission is to provoke discovery through visceral experience and pervasive play.
Suzanne Husky is a French American visual artist that has been living and practicing in the Bay Area since 2000. She obtained my MFA from the Beaux-Art school of Bordeaux, France, spending half of the program duration at CCAC. The socialist ideologies and the rural environment of 1970s France molded her upbringing and became important components of her work. Our intimate relations with plants, animals, the earth, and how we interact together in poetic and political ways, are examined through sculpture, installation, drawing, documentary photography, and film. Problems relating to the exploitation of natural resources, landscape use and globalization are the persistent backdrop of her multimedia practice.
Javier Ideami (born Francisco Javier Gonzalez Bernardo) is a Spanish-born multidisciplinary artist and founder of Ideami Studios. With studies in both artistic (Painting, Photography, Filmmaking, Design and Music) and technical fields (Computing Engineering), Javier has been blending the arts and the sciences, being awarded numerous awards for his work across different disciplines. Javier has exhibited his creative work in many galleries in both Europe and the USA. Javier collaborates regularly with artists, architects, engineers and other creative minds in innovative projects around the world. He is one of the founders of the creative group RAN, winner of an award by the Spanish museum of art and technology Laboral. He was also the founder of the Web 2.0 online application Ewidi, an online social network in 33 languages. In 2008 Javier co-founded Flaii, a Silicon Valley startup in the social networking and gaming space. Javier later launched the interactive creative application Posterini. Javier is also an award-winning filmmaker, screenwriter, and director who occasionally works as well on the photography and music of his films. His filmography includes the films: 2011. The Weight of Light (HD), 2010. The Long Goodbye (Red One 4K), 2010. Erase Love (Red One 4K), 2008. La Ultima Cena (HD), 2007 - El Cuadro (HD), 2006 - Magic Mountain (35mm, Dolby Digital), 2005 - The Moontamer, 2004 - Ego. They won awards at the London International Sci-Fi Film festival, at the Ourense International Film Festival, at the Gaudi Prizes in Barcelona, and at the San Francisco International SFShorts Film Festival. He has also won awards for his photography and music He has also produced the illustrated book for children "The Moontamer" (2010).
Amy Ione, an international lecturer, painter, and writer, is presently the Director of the Diatrope Institute in Berkeley. She has published several books, most recently Innovation and Visualization: Trajectories, Strategies, and Myths (Rodopi, 2005), and is working on a special issue for the Journal of the History of Neuroscience on Visual Images and Visualization.
Mark Jacobson is Director of the Atmosphere/Energy Program and Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University. He is also a Senior Fellow of the Woods Institute for the Environment and Senior Fellow of the Precourt Institute for Energy. He received a B.S. in Civil Engineering with distinction, an A.B. in Economics with distinction, and an M.S. in Environmental Engineering from Stanford University, in 1988. He has been on the faculty at Stanford since 1994. His work relates to the development and application of numerical models to understand better the effects of energy systems and vehicles on climate and air pollution and the analysis of renewable energy resources. He has published two textbooks of two editions each and over 120 peer-reviewed scientific journal articles. He received the 2005 American Meteorological Society Henry G. Houghton Award for "significant contributions to modeling aerosol chemistry and to understanding the role of soot and other carbon particles on climate." He co-authored a 2009 cover article in Scientific American with Dr. Mark DeLucchi of U.C. Davis on how to power the world with renewable energy. He is also on the Energy Efficiency and Renewables Advisory Committee to the U.S. Secretary of Energy.
Elizabeth Jameson's fascination with medical imaging and brain scans has a personal basis. Diagnosed with the disease of multiple sclerosis, She found herself confronting stark images of her brain that seemed equally frightening and mesmerizing. In tackling this contradiction, s he reinterpret ed these images and used them to explore the amazing biological structure of the brain. Her current artwork saturates these cold, two-dimensional computerized pixels with rich colors that transform scientific images into portraits of individuals with all the frailties, humor, and idiosyncrasies that make us human.
Shamit Kachru (Stanford) is a Professor of Physics at Stanford University and at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. He obtained his A.B. from Harvard University in 1990 and his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1994. He was a Research Associate at Rutgers University in 1996-1997. He became an Assistant Professor at the University of California at Berkeley in 1997, and moved to Stanford in 1999. He was also a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in 1999. Dr Kachru won an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship in 1998, the Bergmann Memorial Award in 1999, and a Packard Foundation Fellowship in 2000. In 2008, he was awarded the 2008 American Chapter of the Indian Physics Association (ACIPA) Outstanding Young Physicist Prize "for fundamental contributions shedding light on the nature of string theory ground states, and on the origin of dark energy in string theory, leading to an accelerating universe." Dr. Kachru is interested in the physics of string theory and M theory. His previous work has focused on stringy modifications of geometry, duality and exact results in supersymmetric compactifications, and supersymmetry breaking. Most recently, he has been doing research at the interface between string theory and cosmology.
Rebecca Kamen's work explores the nexus of art and science. Her recent large- scale sculpture installation, Divining Nature: An Elemental Garden has been informed by wide ranging research into chemistry, cosmology, spirituality and philosophy. She has also investigated rare books and manuscripts at the libraries of the American Philosophical Society and the Chemical Heritage Foundation, utilizing these scientific collections as a muse in the creation of her work. She has exhibited and lectured both nationally, and internationally in China, Hong Kong, and Egypt. She has been the recipient of a Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Professional Fellowship, a Pollack Krasner Foundation Fellowship, a Strauss Fellowship, and a travel grant fellowship from the Chemical Heritage Foundation. Her work is represented in many private and public collections such as, KPMG Peat Martwick Corporation, Gannett Corporation, IBM, Capital One and the Institute for Defense Analysis.
Cosmo Kichman, nee Dr. Daniel Grupp, is a well-published and patented nanotechnology physicist and entrepreneur. Prior to making art, he was most recently a Visiting Scholar at Stanford in the Electrical Engineering department. His transistor technology is currently being developed at Sematech. He has always sought to maintain a sense of play, evident in activities from costuming to fire performances, to scientific innovation, and now to sculpture. His current work will be on exhibit and visitors can participate in creating art while he is the Artist in Residence for the month of March 2009 at the de Young Museum in San Francisco.
Shona Kitchen is an international multidisciplinary artist/designer. Graduating in Architecture at the Royal College of Art in London, she continued for several years within the Interaction Design Department, while running her own London-based design partnership KRD (Kitchen Rogers Design) until 2004. Now Residing in California, Kitchen is a parttime professor of Digital Media Art at San Jose State University's "CADRE Lab" and serves as a thesis advisor at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Most recent works are a multi-site electronic installation DATA NATURE (Hooker & Kitchen) centered at San Jose International Airport, conceptual housing project ELECTROPLEX HEIGHTS (Hooker & Kitchen) part of a touring exhibition commissioned by Vitra Design Museum & Art Center Pasadena, DOMESTIC WILDERNESS CHANNEL (Shona Kitchen) a site-specific exhibition at Montalvo Arts Center, DREAMING F.I.D.S., commissioned for San Jose International Airport, and THE GREEN CORRIDOR for Deptford Creek in East London, a 328-foot long, 10-foot high solar-powered billboard.
Walter Kitundu is an artist and designer, instrument builder and photographer. He is a Senior Design Developer for the Studio Gallery at the Exploratorium. In this capacity he helps to design and build environments for learning, develops and facilitates activities, and provides artistic direction. As an artist he has created hand built record players powered by the wind and rain, fire and earthquakes, birds, light, and the force of ocean waves. Walter has performed and been in residence at art centers and science museums internationally. He has performed with the renowned Kronos Quartet, bassist Meshell Ndegeocello, the electronic music duo Matmos, and the legendary Marshall Allen - in venues from Carnegie Hall to a high school library in Egilstaadir, Iceland.
Randal Koene heads the organization carboncopies.org, which is the outreach and roadmapping organization for action towards Advancing Substrate-Independent Minds (ASIM). Dr. Koene is a neuroscientist and neuroengineer, and he is director of the Analysis team at the nanotechnology company Halcyon Molecular in Silicon Valley. Between 2008 and 2010, Koene was director of the Department of Neuroengineering at Tecnalia, the third largest private research organization in Europe. Dr. Koene has been involved with organized research in artificial general intelligence (AGI) since the first AGI conference in 2008.
Fred Kuttner is currently Lecturer in Physics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He holds degrees in physics from MIT and the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is coauthor with Bruce Rosenblum of Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness, published by Oxford University Press.
Therese Lahaie studied Fine Art at Emmanuel College and Glass Technology at Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, MA. She is a kinetic sculptor using glass, low rpm motors and LED lighting and also has a background in architectural lighting design. At a 2010 Djerassi Artist Residency she collaborated with NY choreographer Leigh Evans. Their performance installation called "Quite Two Departure," will be premiered at PS. 122 in NYC in July 2010.
Miu-Ling Lam is a postdoctoral research fellow at the UCLA California NanoSystems Institute. Her research interests include Robotics, Computational Geometry, Pattern Formation, Complex Systems and Bioinformatics. She received the Best Student Paper Award in the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Biomimetics, the Croucher Fellowship and the Sir Edward Youde Memorial Fellowship.
Robert Lang, after a 15-year career doing research and development in semiconductor lasers and optoelectronics, became a full-time origami artist devoted equally to the art of origami and its practical applications. He is the author, co-author, or editor of 9 books on origami and his work has been exhibited in shows worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Wayne Lanier is earned his PhD degree in microbial genetics at the University of Chicago. Wayne professed these, and similar subjects at New York University, the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School, and London Polytechnic. He has been Research Director in Biotechnology and a Consultant in Clinical Studies. Finally, Wayne gracefully retired and now wanders the San Francisco Bay salt marsh, examining the natural history of life at the bottom of the food chain. "Hidden Ecologies" is the title of his program.
Sasha Leitman is an inventor, composer, sound artist, and teacher. She is currently the Technical and Projects Manager at the Stanford University Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics where she teaches courses and workshops on interactive sound art.
Cheryl Leonard is a San Francisco-based composer, performer and instrument builder. Over the last decade she has focused on investigating sounds, structures and objects from the natural world. Her recent works cultivate stones, wood, water, ice, sand, shells, feathers and bones as musical instruments. Leonard uses microphones to explore the intricate sounds hidden within these instruments and develops compositions that highlight the unique voices they contain. She has also composed numerous soundtracks for film, video, dance and theater, and created sounds for museum exhibits Her commissions include works for Kronos Quartet, Illuminated Corridor and Michael Straus.
Caroline Lewis and Robert Davis are Artists in Residence at the Montalvo Arts Center. Caroline Lewis is a lecturer in Social Science teaching, Psychology, Sociology and Social Policy. She trained as a Psychologist at University of Wales and University of London, where she followed a masters program in Counselling and Psychotherapy. She is currently leading a multi disciplinary team from San Jose State University (SJSU) as part of the San Jose Climate Clock Initiative. Robert Davis is a software developer, engineer, and artist who currently works as Systems Developer at Goldsmiths College, University of London. For the last sixteen years he has been actively involved in research in the field of Psychology and Artificial Intelligence. He has also created interactive installations with particular emphasis on ways in which adaptive systems interact with each other, whether biological or mechanical in substrate.
Sydell Lewis is a painter and printmaker. Educated in chemistry, she conducted biomedical research as a mass spectrometrist before becoming a fulltime artist. Her background in science and dance is reflected in her work with its juxtapositions of hard edge rendering and sensual organic forms. In 2005 She pioneered the concept of "Rotating Paintings" to enable viewers to fully comprehend a 2 dimensional abstract work of art. As a printmaker, she was one of the first proponents of the new technique of acrylic monotypes. She is a member of the California Society of Printmakers. Her work has been shown in Los Angeles and the Bay Area in numerous galleries and venues including the San Francisco Arts Commission and Triton Museum. Her work is in numerous private and corporate collections on both coasts.
Darlene Lim is a research scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center and is the Principal Investigator of the Pavilion Lake Research Project (www.pavilionlake.com). She has conducted field work from the Arctic to the Antarctic and specializes in limnology (study of freshwater) and geobiology.
Sara Loesch-Frank is an exhibiting artist and educator working in the Bay Area. Her work has been included in the book, " Art and Craft of Hand Lettering," " Writing Beyond Words," and Letter Arts Review magazine. Her work has been shown at the Southern Highland Craft Guild in Asheville N.C. and at the National Cathedral in Washington D.C. Along with Chinese artists, Sara exhibited her work in Chengde and Qufu, China in a joint exhibition. Filoli Gardens and the Triton Museum of Art have often shown her artwork. Sara team teaches a Sophomore Seminar Series at Stanford University: "Art Chemistry and Madness: the Science of Art Materials." in Chemical Engineering with her husband.
Roger Malina is a space scientist and astronomer, with a specialty in space instrumentation and optics, previously Director of the NASA EUVE Observatory at U.C. Berkeley and Director of the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Marseille CNRS. He serves on the Comite National of the French CNRS for astronomy and on the French National Commission on Cosmology. He is also Chairman of the Board of Leonardo/International Society for the Arts/Sciences and Technology in San Francisco and President of the sister association in Paris.
Reuben Margolin was raised in Berkeley, California. A love of math and physics propelled him to Harvard, where he changed paths and got a degree in English. He then went on to study traditional painting in Italy and Russia. In 1999 he became obsessed with the movement of a little green caterpillar, and set out to make wave-like sculptures. In 2004 he moved to his current studio in Emeryville and began making a series of large-scale undulating installations that attempt to combine the logic of mathematics with the sensuousness of nature. He has since made about 20 of these mechanical mobiles and shown them internationally. He also makes pedal-powered rickshaws and has collaborated on a couple large-scale pedal-powered vehicles.
Margarita Marinova's main research interests are in characterizing extreme environments, and understanding the surface of Mars. She has worked at NASA Ames Research Center on understanding extreme environments and the limits of habitability for Earth life. Margarita received her PhD in Planetary Science from Caltech in 2010, where she examined planetary-scale impacts and their implications for the early history of Mars and the solid Solar System planets. Her research interests focus on understanding interesting processes and features on Mars through simulations and field measurements. Her study sites range from the High Arctic, to the Sahara Desert in Egypt, the bottom of a lake in British Columbia in Canada, Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, and to the Dry Valleys of Antarctica.
Christine Marie is an artist and director creating original lo-fi spectacles of large-scale cinematic shadow theater. She seamlessly integrates performers, objects and hand made special effects to elicit connections with concepts, phenomenology and history in emotional and visually stimulating performances. She studied Wayang Kulit traditional shadow puppetry in Bali and is a former member of ShadowLight theater. Christine Marie received an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in Integrated Media and Theater. She lectures and conducts workshops for theater companies, film studios, universities and schools. She has taught shadow animation at Pixar and consulted for the film, "Me and My Shadow," for DreamWorks studios. Christine Marie is a 2012 TED Fellow. She also directs, designs and edits for film and video design. "Signaling Arcana" will premiere in 2013.
Michael Marmor is Professor and past Chair of Ophthalmology at Stanford University. He also teaches in the Bioethics program, and the undergraduate Program in Human Biology. He is a leading expert in retinal physiology and disease, and in studies on the interface of vision and the arts. He has written several books and more than 300 papers, not only about retina but also about vision in art, history, music and sports. A recent article showed simulations of how Degas and Monet might have seen their own work as their eyesight failed. His most recent book is The Artist's Eyes (Abrams, 2009).
Christina Mazza is a San Francisco Bay Area artist working primarily with reclaimed materials, creating intricate works of art that focus on the urban byproducts of human life while encourage sustainability and environmental responsibility. She has exhibited at the Boston Center for the Arts, San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, Southern Exposure, Intersection for the Arts, and numerous other venues throughout the Bay Area. Mazza recently completed a residency at Recology's AIR Program in 2010 and the Artist's Studio Program at the de Young Museum in 2009. Her work has also been accepted into The Drawing Center's Viewing Program in NYC. Selected works have been published in an anthology showcasing contemporary Asian American women artists and in Recology's 20th Anniversary publication. Mazza has a BFA in Advertising and Illustration and previously worked 15 years at leading advertising agencies in Dallas, Los Angeles and San Francisco before becoming a full-time visual artist.
Jamie McHugh RSME (Registered Somatic Movement Educator) is a fine art photographer and a master teacher of somatics. He has taught body-based work internationally for over twenty-five years to people of all ages. Jamie has been on faculty in the Holistic Health Department at John F Kennedy University since 1991 and at Anna Halprin's Tamalpa Institute since 1988. Jamie divides his time between San Francisco and The Sea Ranch. www.SomaticExpression.com www.NatureBeingArt.org
Chris McKay is a Planetary Scientist with the Space Science Division of NASA Ames. His current research focuses on the evolution of the solar system and the origin of life. He is also actively involved in planning for future Mars missions including human exploration. Chris been involved in research in Mars-like environments on Earth, traveling to the Antarctic dry valleys, Siberia, the Canadian Arctic, and the Atacama desert to study life in these Mars-like environments. His was a co-I on the Titan Huygen's probe in 2005, the Mars Phoenix lander mission in 2008, and the Mars Science Lander mission for 2011. He is the deputy program scientist for Constellation - the NASA program for future human exploration of the Moon and Mars.
Tom McKeag is the founder of BioDreamMachine, a nonprofit educational institution dedicated to bringing bio-inspired design education to K12 schools (www.BioDreamMachine.org). He established the nation's first public elementary school course in biomimicry in 2006, and still teaches the subject through the State of California's Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) program in the Dixie school district, Marin County, California. Tom teaches bio-inspired design to graduate and undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley and the California College of the Arts in San Francisco where he is a Senior Lecturer. He is a member of the Biomimicry Institute's Educational Advisory Board. He writes a regular blog about biomimicry at www.greenerdesign.com.
Helene Mialet has held positions at Cornell University, Harvard University and Oxford University where she ran the program in Science Studies; she has also held post-doctoral fellowships at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University under the auspices of the Marie Curie Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship, sponsored by the European Union for extremely promising young scholars. She has published widely on subjectivity, agency, innovation and cognition. Her most recent book is entitled L'Entreprise Cr�atrice, (Paris: Herm�s-Lavoisier, 2008), which is an ethnographic study of practices and processes of invention in an applied research laboratory in a multinational oil company (Total); this book was a finalist for the Prix ADVANCIA for the best book published in French on Entrepreneurship and Innovation in 2008. She has just completed a new book entitled Hawking Incorporated, Stephen Hawking and the Anthropology of the Knowing Subject (University of Chicago Press, 2012). This work provides an ethnographic study of `abstraction' and formalism, focusing on the case of Stephen Hawking as a means of exploring larger questions having to do with singularity, identity, distributed agency, subjectivity, corporeality (and/or the mind/body problem), socio-technical networks and scientific practice. She is currently working on a new project concerned with the study of new networks of knowledge production and expertise constituted by `laypersons' (e.g., electronic lists organized around specific themes like parents of children with juvenile diabetes).
Hana Mori-Bottger is Assistant Professor in the Architecture and Community Design program at USF. She teaches physics, design, structural analysis and construction materials courses for architecture students, and has created the Architectural Engineering Minor program. Hana's research interests involve low-cost structural engineering techniques for earthen structures, such as the use of reinforcement to allow energy dissipation and inherent warning mechanisms during seismic activity.
Luke Muehlhauser joined the Singularity Institute in 2011 as a researcher, and was shortly thereafter appointed Executive Director. He has published dozens of articles on technological forecasting, intelligence explosion theory, and the cognitive science of rationality. Previously, he interviewed dozens of scientists and philosophers for his podcast Conversations from the Pale Blue Dot, taught classes for the Center for Applied Rationality, and has worked both as a fashion consultant and as an information technologies consultant. He is currently developing several papers, including a survey of proposals for dealing with superhuman AI.
Deborah Munk is the director of the Artist in Residence Program at SF Recycling & Disposal, Inc. and has spent the last eight years working with artists who make art out of garbage. She was the assistant editor of "Parallels and Intersections, Women Artists in California" published by UC Press, in 2002 and is a proud graduate of San Francisco State University with a Masters in Educational Technology focusing on art and media. Deborah also manages the Educational Learning Center at SF Recycling & Disposal where she teaches children and adults the importance of sustainability and recycling.
Vijaya Nagarajan is is an Associate Professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies and the Program in Environmental Studies at the University of San Francisco. She teaches courses in Hinduism, Religion and Environment, Spiritual Autobiography of Place, among others. Vijaya received her Ph. D. from the University of California, Berkeley in South Asian Languages and Literatures, with an emphasis in Art History and Anthropology, and has been teaching at USF since 1997. Her research focus has been on the South Indian women's ritual design tradition of the kolam, an ephemeral ritual art performed daily in Tamil Nadu with rice flour. She has received numerous grants and fellowships including the Fulbright-Hays Dissertation Fellowship, American Institute of Indian Studies, the NEH Chair in the Humanities and the Davies Chair (at USF). Her forthcoming book, Feeding a Thousand Souls: Women, Ritual and Ecology in southern India-the Kolam (Oxford University Press) will be exploring the kolam through various disciplines: anthropology, art history, medieval Tamil literature, and mathematics.
Julie Newdoll is a painter who merges life science, mythology and culture. Her artwork has been featured on over 20 journal covers in the last few years, and is in collections world wide, including several universities. Newdoll, who studied microbiology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and medical illustration at the University of California at San Francisco, runs the "Brush with Science" Gallery in Menlo Park.
Steven Oscherwitz is a digital media artist, an art and science historian and an educator who most recently taught "Comparative History of Ideas" at the University of Washington.
Bob Ostertag has published 21 CDs of music, two movies, two DVDs, and three books. He has performed at music, film, and multi-media festivals around the globe. His radically diverse collaborators include the Kronos Quartet, avant garder John Zorn, heavy metal star Mike Patton, jazz great Anthony Braxton, transgender chanteuse Justin Bond, and others. He is rumored to have connections to the shadowy media guerrilla group The Yes Men. In March 2006 Ostertag made all of his recordings available as free digital downloads. He has a new book in press about labor organizing in Nevada, and is working on another about the construction of human identities through technology. He is currently Professor of Cinema and Technocultural Studies and Music at the University of California at Davis.
Chris Palmer is a Fine Artist who has specialized in traditional and modern geometric art, textile design, traditional ornament and folding. After four years teaching Digital Fabrication in schools of architecture in Chicago (IIT) and the University of Colorado at Boulder he now works with Rob Bell in a design build studio in San Francisco CA. He is a member of an international design team doing architectural ornament in middle eastern styles for the American Institute of Mathematics Research Conference Center in San Jose.
Jennifer Parker is an Associate Professor of Art and Digital Arts and New Media at the University of California Santa Cruz. Her research is rooted in sculpture, interactive and kinetic art, and cross-disciplinary and collaborative research. Current and past projects explore new methodologies for art making that engage art and science thinking. She is co-founder and director of The OpenLab Network at UCSC and has been working with Barney Hyanes since 2008 developing the SonicSENSE interactive art platform. She has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally. Local venues include Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SF Camerawork; The Lab; Gray Area Foundation for the Arts; Kala Art Institute; and ZER01:10SJ Biennial.
Kris Paulsen is a PhD candidate in Rhetoric with a designated emphasis in New Media at the University of California, Berkeley. She received a dual BA in the History of Art and Semiotics from Brown University. Her work focuses on intersections of technology and the arts from the 19th century to the present. She is currently finishing her dissertation, 3Real Time over Real Space: Artists in the Telecommunications Network�- a study of liveness, remote witnessing, and telepresence in the arts from the 1960s to the present.
Christine Peterson is the co- founder and President of Foresight Institute, a public interest group that educates the community and policymakers on coming powerful technologies such as nanotechnology. She also serves on the Advisory Board of the International Council on Nanotechnology and the Editorial Advisory Board of NASA's Nanotech Briefs. Her work is motivated by a desire to help Earth's environment and traditional human communities benefit from advances in technology. She coauthored Unbounding the Future: the Nanotechnology Revolution (1991) and Leaping the Abyss: Putting Group Genius to Work (1997).
Kavita Philip is Associate Professor at UC Irvine's Program in Women's Studies. Her research interests are in technology in the developing world; transnational histories of science and technology; gender, race, globalization and postcolonialism; environmental history; and new media theory.
Frank Pietronigro is an interdisciplinary artist and author, an Associate Fellow at the Studio For Creative Inquiry, College of Fine Arts, Carnegie Mellon University, and the co-founder and director of the Zero Gravity Arts Consortium. In 1998 he pioneered "drift paintings" where his body floated within a three-dimensional painting in zero gravity aboard NASA's KC135 turbojet. The Zero Gravity Arts Consortium, founded in 1999, is a space arts organization dedicated to fostering greater access for artists to zero gravity space through international partnerships with space agencies.
Sheila Pinkel is a Professor of Art at Pomona College where she has worked since 1986. She has exhibited and spoken nationally and internationally. Most recently she co-curated the exhibition "In Transition Russia 2008" in Ekaterinberg and Moscow, Russia, and participated in a symposium with this title.
Leonard Pitt is an actor, author and teacher. He originally studied mime in Paris with Etienne Decroux in the 1960s and settled in Berkeley in 1970. He has performed and taught around the world. He currently operates The Flying Actor Studio in San Francisco offering a one-year conservatory program in the art of physical theatre. He has written three books about Paris, Walks Through Lost Paris, Paris a Journey Through Time, and Paris Postcards, the Golden Age, plus A Small Moment of Great Illumination about the life of Valentine Greatrakes, a 17th century Irish healer.
Martin Pohl is an experimental physicist who has worked on major particle physics experiments at particle accelerators for 35 years, exploring the structure of matter, elementary forces, space and time. He also contributes to space-borne experiments measuring cosmic particles to investigate their nature as well as their sources. He is interested in the contributions of science to culture and its interaction with other cultural activities: "A major point of contact between fundamental physics and the arts ought to be that neither scientists not artists should ever expect anything but the unexpected".
June Power has degrees in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley and University College London. She has published numerous research papers in the area of distributed systems and has been invited to speak on this topic at several universities. She is also the co-founder of Altor Systems, a company that has developed, patented and licensed technology for 3D applications, including games.
Phillip Prager has recently completed his PhD at the Cambridge University Digital Studio and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Minerva Foundation in Berkeley. His work relates scientific research on creativity and play to the historical and digital avant-garde.
Paul Rabinow, Professor of Anthropology at U.C. Berkeley, Director of the Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory (ARC), and former Director of Human Practices for the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC), is the author of "Designing Human Practices: An Experiment with Synthetic Biology " (2012); "The Accompaniment: Assembling the Contemporary" (2011); "Marking Time: On the Anthropology of the Contemporary" (2007); "Anthropos Today: Reflections on Modern Equipment" (2003); "Essays on the Anthropology of Reason" (1996); "Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology" (1993); "French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment" (1989); and "The Foucault Reader" (1984). A former lecturer at the �cole Normale Superieure (1997) in Paris, he was named Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government in 1998 and was awarded the visiting Chaire Internationale de Recherche Blaise Pascal at the �cole Normale Superieure for 2001-2.
Gertrude Reagan was born in Washington, DC in 1936, and spent her early years in the Southern Appalachians where her father was doing geology. She moved to California in 1954. In 1956, Gyorgy Kepes' book "The New Landscape" celebrated images from science as art. It validated images like her father's geologic maps as subjects for her work. Myrrh began mining science and natural patterns for art ideas by finding analogs in crafts media for natural patterns. In 1981, she founded YLEM: Artists Using Science and Technology, which held forums and had a publication for 28 years. She now conducts a special interest group in patterns in nature and visual math.
Robert Rich has released over 30 albums in the last three decades, mostly instrumental electronic music. He became somewhat notorious for performing all-night Sleep Concerts in the '80s. He studied for a year at Stanford's CCRMA while getting a degree in Psychology, and now tours occasionally, creates sound design for films and electronic instruments, and has begun teaching courses on audio mastering and studio engineering. More at http://robertrich.com.
Richard Rinehart is a digital media artist and Digital Art Curator at the UC Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive. He is Associate Director for Public Programs of the Berkeley Center for New Media. Rinehart's papers, projects, and more can be found on his website
Phil Ross is an artist, curator, and educator who places natural systems within frames of social and historic contexts. Phil's living artworks are grown into being over the course of several years, integrating traditional manufacturing techniques with practices and technologies from disparate fields. His recent work includes a trilogy of documentary videos on microorganisms, and the growing of a building composed of living fungus. Phil currated an exhibition on biotechnology for the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in 2007, and is the founder and director of CRITTER, a science and art salon located in San Francisco's Mission District.
Warren Sack is a software designer and media theorist whose work explores theories and designs for online public space and public discussion. He is Associate Professor of Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz and earned a B.A. from Yale College and an S.M. and Ph.D. from the MIT Media Laboratory. Warren's writings on new media and computer science have been published widely and his art work has been shown internationally.
Tanu Sankalia, Assistant Professor in the Department of Art + Architecture at the University of San Francisco, is currently at work on a book project that examines slots or interstitial spaces in San Francisco-the subject of an exhibition, The Urban Unseen, he curated last February. He teaches classes in architecture, urban design and city planning, and has worked as an architect and urban designer in Mumbai and San Francisco.
Piero Scaruffi is a cognitive scientist who has lectured in three continents and published several books on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science, the latest one being "The Nature of Consciousness" (2006). He pioneered Internet applications in the early 1980s and the use of the World-Wide Web for cultural purposes in the mid 1990s. His poetry has been awarded several national prizes in Italy and the USA. As a music historian, he has published ten books, the latest ones being "A History of Rock and Dance Music" (2009) and "A History of Jazz Music" (2007). He has also written extensively about cinema, literature and the visual arts. An avid traveler, he has visited 121 countries of the world.
Victoria Scott strives to understand the transformation of matter and energy as it flows from one state into another. Working with electronic media, sculpture and social relations, she creates site-specific installations, digital prints, objects and audio works. Her recent projects include constructing 3D paper representations of objects that exist both in simulated environments and real life. She is also developing a series of batteries that are charged by human emotional energy. Scott Kildall is a cross-disciplinary artist working with video, installation, prints, sculpture and performance. He gathers material from the public realm as the crux of his artwork in the form of interventions into various concepts of space. Zer01 Artists in Residence.
Derek Sears is a teacher and researcher who has spent his career studying meteorites and their relationship to asteroids. He is best known for his application of thermoluminescence to the study of meteorites, but has also worked on water on Mars and the composition and spectral properties of asteroids. For 14 years he was part of the preliminary examination team for Antarctic meteorites and between 1992 and 2002 he was editor of Meteoritics and Planetary Science. He has published three books on meteorites. He is a research scientist at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California.
Carlo Sequin has been a professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley since 1977. His research interests lie in the fields of Computer Graphics, Virtual Environments, and Computer Aided Design Tools. He has built CAD tools for the layout of integrated circuits, for the conceptual phase in architectural design, for the design of mechanical systems, and -- most recently -- for artists who create abstract geometrical sculptures.
Audrey Shafer (Stanford Univ) is Professor of Anesthesia, Stanford University School of Medicine/VA; staff anesthesiologist, Palo Alto Veterans Affairs Health Care System; and Director, Arts, Humanities and Medicine Program, Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics http://bioethics.stanford.edu/arts/. Born in Philadelphia, she studied at Harvard, Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania for biochemistry, medicine and anesthesia training, respectively. She is associate editor, Medical Humanities - BMJ and poetry editor, Journal of Medical Humanities. She co-directs the scholarly concentration in Biomedical Ethics and Medical Humanities, teaches creative writing for medical students, and strives to create an environment at the medical school which encourages creative exploration, collaboration and scholarly work in medical humanities. She is a founding member of Stanford Pegasus Physician Writers. Her poetry appears in numerous journals and anthologies and she is the author of The Mailbox (Random House, 2006), a story about posttraumatic stress disorder in Vietnam veterans. "From [the] knockout opening, first-time novelist Audrey Shafer builds a story finely balanced between mystery. and meditation -- on loneliness, love and what a boy really needs to make a life." The Washington Post
Shan Shan Sheng has artworks installed in four of the world's tallest buildings, as well as other major works of architecture. Born in Shanghai, Sheng came to United States in 1982 to pursue her academic and artistic interests by attending Mount Holyoke College and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and continued to Harvard University as an artist-in-residence for two years. Now she lives and works in San Francisco. In 1989, she was an official artist for the Asian Art Festival in Chicago. She has spent the last 18 years working in the public art field. She has now completed over 25 large-scale projects in the states of California, Arizona, Massachusetts, Florida, New Mexico, Utah, Ohio, Texas, Oklahoma and the cities of Chicago,Miami, Denver, Nashville, Cleveland and Charlotte as well as the international cities of Shanghai, Beijing, Taipei, Hong Kong, London and Venice. Her public art project "Ocean Wave" at port of Miami was awarded the best public art project by Americans for the Arts in 2007. In 2009, Sheng's artwork "Bamboo Forest" at a high speed train station in Taiwan was awarded the best public art project. Sheng has held over thirty one-woman shows in Europe, Asia and America. Most recently, her "Open Wall" project was included in the 53rd Venice Biennale. In 2010 this project was exhibited at the Shanghai World Expo. Her works appear in selected public collections around the world including Harvard University, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, China National Art Museum, Beijing, Shanghai International Convention Center, Amoco Building in Chicago, Art Museum of South Texas, Berengo Collection, Venice, Italy and Shanghai Art Museum.
Sharon Siskin's artwork has been featured in numerous publications and received numerous awards. She was the Artist in Residence at San Francisco Recycling & Disposal, Inc. in the summer of 2004 and has taught at University of San Francisco, the Graduate Department of Arts and Consciousness at John F. Kennedy University, California College of Arts and Crafts, San Francisco Art Institute, California State University East Bay, University of New Mexico and at several California Community Colleges. She is a long-time board member of WEAD (Women Environmental Artists Directory.)
Renetta Sitoy was born in New York, NY and graduated in 2007 with an MFA in Design + Technology from the San Francisco Art Institute, where she was the recipient of the San Francisco Art Institute MFA Fellowship from 2005 to 2007. Using media that include video and animation to examine the human condition, her work has explored topics such as the alteration of time and space, perception, memory, dreams, and the effects of technology on human behavior. Her work has been shown in Atlanta, Baltimore, New York City, Los Angeles, Athens, Greece, Varna, Bulgaria, Budapest, Hungary, and throughout the Bay Area. She is currently working on a documentary about the French born, Oakland based electronic music artist Laetitia Sonami. She lives and works in the Bay Area.
Daniel Small is a Los Angeles-based artist, writer, and researcher. His work has been exhibited internationally and his 2011 project The Circumference is Everywhere was included at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa Japan. His project Third Person Eclipse was shown in the Iraqi Embassy in Pankow Berlin as part of the ongoing project Des Chapitres Du Conflit, a collection of interventions that address and inhabit the former Iraq Embassy to East Germany. In his project Partially Recovered, he resurrected an erased image from a hard drive as a large scale photorealist Jacquard tapestry that will be exhibited in the Gruuthuse Museum that houses the largest collection of tapestries from the 14th and 15th century in Brugge, Belgium where it was produced. Excavation II is a triangulation of past, present and future that proposes a full excavation of the remains of Cecil Demille's 1923 film set of The Ten Commandments that was the largest film set ever built and mimics ancient Egyptian artifacts.
Bill Smart is an associate professor of computer science at Washington University in St. Louis, where he works on problems in robotics, machine learning, and brain-machine interfaces. He is currently on sabbatical at Willow Garage, Inc., a very unusual robotics company in Menlo Park. He is currently looking at how to make humans and robots interact more naturally and effectively.
Alvy Ray Smith is is the cofounder of Pixar and a pioneer of computer graphics. He was present at Xerox PARC for the invention of the personal computer, then at the New York Institute of Technology where the vision of the first digital movie was conceived, then Lucasfilm, where he was its first director of computer graphics. HIs second startup company was sold to Microsoft, where he was the first Graphics Fellow. He has received two technical Academy Awards, and holds four patents. He created and directed the Genesis Demo in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. The made a short piece with artist Ed Emshwiller, Sunstone, part of MOMA's collection. He hired Pixar's star animator, John Lasseter, and directed him at Lucasfilm in The Adventures of Andre & Wally B. He was responsible at Lucasfilm/Pixar for the Academy-Award winning Disney animation production system CAPS. As a regent of the National Library of Medicine, he helped initiate the Visible Human Project. He helped argue the progressive scan format into the national HDTV standard. He has a PhD from Stanford in computer science and an honorary doctorate from New Mexico State University. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He has published widely in theoretical computer science and computer graphics, and is currently writing a book about the pixel and modern media.
Christina Smolke is an Associate Professor at Stanford University in the Department of Bioengineering. Christina's research program focuses on developing modular genetic platforms for programming information processing and control functions in living systems. She has pioneered the design and application of RNA molecules that process and transmit user-specified input signals to targeted protein outputs, thereby linking molecular computation to gene expression. These technologies are leading to transformative advances in how we interact with and program biology, providing access to otherwise inaccessible information on cellular state, and allowing sophisticated exogenous and embedded control over cellular functions. Her laboratory is applying these technologies to addressing key challenges in cellular therapeutics, targeted molecular therapies, and green biosynthesis strategies. Her research has been recognized with a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, a Beckman Young Investigator Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, World Technology Network Award in Biotechnology, and TR35 Award.
Tami Spector is a Professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of San Francisco and serves on the Board of Leonardo. She has a strong interest in the intersections of chemistry and art and aesthetics and has published a number of papers related to these topics. She is currently serving as a guest editor for an on-going special section of Leonardo on nanoscience/technology and art and welcomes comments and/or submission on this topic from the audience.
Kal Spelletich is the founder of Seemen, an interactive machine art performance collective, has collaborated with Survival Research Labs and countless others from rock bands to scientists, politicians, NASA, Hollywood television and filmmakers. For 28 years he has been experimenting with interfacing humans and technology to put people in touch with intense real life experiences and to empower them. Kal's work is always interactive, requiring a participant to enter or operate the piece, often against their instincts of self-preservation. He works on the waterfront of San Francisco scouring junkyards and dumpsters for industrial items whose technology can be reapplied. He curates art exhibits and is involved in political activism.
Julianne Stafford was the co-founder of a private consulting firm for investing in natural resources and have a long and varied musical backgrounds in classical and popular music. Stafford also perform with the Left Bank trio and Fiume di Musica.
Cindy Stokes is a photographer and systems biology consultant living and working in the Bay Area. She focuses closely on the curious details of the world, having fun with structural and spatial complexity and ambiguity in her abstracts and still-lifes.
David Stork is Chief Scientist of Ricoh Innovations and was Visiting Lecturer at Stanford University, where he has taught "Light, Color and Visual Phenomena," "Pattern Classification," "Optics, perspective and Renaissance painting," and other courses. He holds 35 patents and his five books include Seeing the Light: Optics in Nature, Photography, Color, Vision and Holography with D. Falk and D. Brill and Pattern Classification (2nd ed.) with R. Duda and P. Hart and the forthcoming Computer image analysis in the study of art with Jim Coddington. He has taught the first courses in this new field, and lectured at the National Gallery London, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Wadsworth Atheneum, Museum of Modern Art, The Louvre, Venice Biennale, and other museums.
Melanie Swan is the principal of MS Futures Group, a futurist, hedge fund manager, and founder of citizen science organization DIYgenomics. Her educational background includes an MBA in Finance and Accounting from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and a BA in French and Economics from Georgetown University. Melanie enjoys kick-boxing, independent film, and international travel.
Leila Takayama is is a research scientist at Willow Garage, studying human-robot interaction. She holds a PhD and MA in Communication from Stanford University (2008) as well as BAs in Psychology and Cognitive Science from UC Berkeley (2003). The work she is presenting is from her doctoral dissertation on Throwing Voices: Investigating the Psychological Effects of the Spatial Location of Projected Voices, which won the Nathan Maccoby dissertation award. http://www.leilatakayama.org
Nomi Talisman is an Israeli-born artist who earned her MFA and photography, video and electronic arts from Mills College. She has exhibited her work in four continents. She was chosen to be the first artist to be working on a new series of online works commissioned by the Magnes Museum in Berkeley (2008-09).
James Thompson is a graduate from the Design Program of Stanford University. James Thompson holds an AS in engineering from Shepherd University and a BS in aerospace engineering from the University of Virginia.
An award-winning author, filmmaker and new media consultant, Andrew Todhunter did undergraduate work in the humanities at the American University of Paris, received his BA in Ancient History from UC Berkeley and later studied film production at NYU's Graduate Department of Film and Television. He is the author of three books, including the PEN USA Literary award-winning A Meal Observed, and dozens of articles for national publications including National Geographic, The Atlantic and The Wall Street Journal, among others. He has worked on numerous film projects, including productions for Lucasfilm and National Geographic Television. Todhunter teaches writing at Stanford University through the Department of Biology and the Program in Writing and Rhetoric, and co-directs The Senior Reflection, a creative capstone course series for scientists in the arts.
Jonathan Trent is the lead scientist on Project OMEGA (Offshore Membrane Enclosures for Growing Algae)-a system to produce microalgae for biofuels, food, and fertilizer, while treating wastewater, sequestering carbon, and promoting environmentally sustainable aquaculture. Jonathan has conducted research in microbiology and molecular biology at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Germany, the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, the University of Paris (Orsay) in France, and at the Boyer Center for Molecular Medicine at Yale Medical School in the USA. He moved to Argonne National Laboratory to study environmental bioremediation, before going to NASA Ames Research Center, where he is currently working. At NASA he has contributed in the fields of Astrobiology and Bio-Nanotechnology and, in 2007, he founded GREEN (Global Research into Energy and the Environment at NASA), which ultimately led to Project OMEGA. In addition to his position at NASA, Jonathan is an Adjunct Professor in the Engineering Department at UC Santa Cruz and a Fellow of the California Academy of Sciences.
Meredith Tromble is an artist and writer whose areas of interest include creative process and interdisciplinary research. She is the author of Art & Shadows, a series of essays on contemporary in light of contemporary research, funded by the Art Writers Grant Program of the Andy Warhol Foundation. In addition to her work as an Associate Professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Studies at the San Francisco Art Institute, she is currently collaborating with Dawn Sumner of the University of California, Davis on a virtual installation, Take Me Me To Your Dream (Dream Vortex).
Niki Ulehla is is a puppetmaker and goldsmith. She was born in Tennessee and moved 17 times before coming to California in 1997. She received a BA in Drawing and Painting from Stanford University. After completing her degree she studied marionette making in the Czech Republic and goldsmithing in San Francisco. Her jewelry has been shown in the Bay area and across the US. She has been building marionettes (including but not limited to George Washington, the Chicken, the Crow and the Crowmonster) since 2000 and performing with them and other collaborators throughout the SF Bay area and in the Czech Republic.
Liena Vayzman s hybrid practice incorporates photo-based and curatorial projects. Vayzman co-curated "Chance Operations" and "Night Light: An Evening of Luminous Environments". She organized "Captured Accidents: Valencia Street Live," an interactive media project by digital artist Tim Thompson at Artists Television Access (ATA) and "HOME: The Aesthetics and Politics of Home in Contemporary Art" at Root Division. Vayzman started the bands Jerk Alert and I Like Action! and is currently at work on "The Lemon Tree Project, a yearlong photographic and narrative collaboration with a fruit tree in Oakland CA, and a book project on food and agriculture in contemporary art. In 2008-09, she taught in the Photography Program at San Jose State University.
Victoria Vesna (UCLA) is a media artist, professor at the department of Design & Media Arts at the UCLA School of the Arts, director of the UCLA Art & Science center and the UC Digital Arts Research Network. Her work explores how communication technologies affect collective behavior and how perceptions of identity shift in relation to scientific innovation. Victoria has exhibited her work in solo exhibitions worldwide, and is the recipient of many grants, commissions and awards. Her most recent installations (Blue Morph, Mood Swings and Water Bowls) aim to raise consciousness around the issues of our relationship to natural systems. She published an edited volume, "Database Aesthetics: Art in the age of Information Overflow" (2007), and is co-authoring "Context Providers: Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts" (2010).
After an extensive career in strategy and business consulting for the technology industry, for the past several years Gian Pablo Villamil has been working with notable artists to bring to life complex technology-based artworks.
Indre Viskontas straddles the line between music and neuroscience, holding a Master of Music degree in Voice Performance from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience from UCLA. An affiliate of the Memory and Aging Center at UCSF, she continues to publish research related to memory and creativity. An active Bay Area performer, she is the co-founder and Director of Opera on Tap: San Francisco, an opera company whose mission is to change the perception of opera as elitist and stuffy by producing high quality performances in unusual venues. She is also the co-founder and leader of Vocallective, a collective of singers and instrumentalists dedicated to the art of vocal chamber music. Passionate about bringing science to the public, she co-hosted a 6-episode docuseries on the Oprah Winfrey Network called Miracle Detectives, in which she represented the scientific side of a believer-scientist team investigating real claims of miracles. She continues to educate and provoke the lay public via her blog (www.indreviskontas.com/blog/blog.html), as a host of the podcast Point of Inquiry (http://www.pointofinquiry.org/) and via public speaking appearances.
Wayne Vitale is a composer, performer, author, teacher, recording engineer, and instrument conservator in the field of Balinese music. He is the director of Gamelan Sekar Jaya (www.gsj.org), an ensemble of sixty musicians and dancers that has achieved an unparalleled international reputation for its cross-cultural creative work. As a composer, he has created numerous works for gamelan that have directly impacted the evolution of Balinese kebyar music. His recording label, Vital Records (www.vitalrecords.ws), releases critically acclaimed CDs of Balinese music. He has also devoted himself to the metallic art of gamelan tuning, grinding and filing his way throughout the US and Europe to restore Balinese instruments.
Mark Wagner is a digital and traditional artist, and educator. Wagner moved from art school at Pratt Institute in Brookln NY to the high desert plains of New Mexico in the mid 80's. He's been involved in Native American Indian ceremony for over 30 years. He has been involved in the film industry as a concept artist and consultant, in addition to his work as graphic designer, illustrator, author, musician, and fine artist. He is currently working with the Smithsonian Institution, Museum of Natural History where the Paleo Indian department is featuring his artwork throughout their new web site. Wagner worked at Pixar Studios on the new Disney feature film John Carter, and has worked on other films; Terminator 3, DreamKeeper, and The Book of Stars. Wagner is also an internationally know street painter and chalk drawing artist. He founded the 501(c)3 nonprofit Drawing on Earth that inspires art and creativity in youth and communities around the world. Their first project set a Guinness World Record for the largest chalk drawing. Their current project is an Global Illustrated Story.
Steve Wilson is a San Francisco author, artist and art professor who explores the cultural implications of emerging technologies and scientific research. His interactive installations & performances have been shown internationally in galleries and art shows. He won a Rockefeller New Media Fellowship and the Prize of Distinction in Ars Electronica's international competitions for interactive art and several honorary mentions. He is also author of many books and articles including Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology. (MIT Press, 2002)
Ian Winters is an SF video/media artist working at the intersections of performance, architectural form, and technology and time-based media to explore the complex relations between physicality, technology, and place, often in collaborations with composers and choreographers to create both staged and open-ended media environments through performance, visual and acoustic media. Winters trained in photography, video/film and performance at SMFA-Boston and Tufts University, and post-graduate training in architecture.Full bio at www.ianwinters.com/bio.html.
Imin Yeh (San Francisco, CA) is fresh off of an Irvine Fellow at the Lucas Artist Programs of Montalvo Art Center. She is a recipient of the 2009 Barclay Simpson MFA Award, the San Francisco Foundation's Murphy and Cadogan Fellowship (2008) and the Yozo Hamaguchi Endowed Scholarship in 2007. BA, University of Wisconsin, Madison; MFA, California College of the Arts.
Stella Zhang was born in Beijing, China. She learned painting from her father the acclaimed brush painter Ping Zhang who was a professor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. She attended the Central Academy of Fine Arts for high school. She then matriculated to the Central Academy of Fine Arts for college where she received her BFA in Chinese Brush Paining in 1989. She moved to Japan in 1990 where she studied Japanese Painting at Tama Fine Art University and later at Tokyo Art University where she earned her MFA in Japanese Painting in 1996. She has lived in the United States since 2003. In the past 20 years, her work has been exhibited in Chinese, Japanese and American galleries and museums. Her work has been included in fine arts collections in many countries. She has published four books.
Thomas Zimmerman is an inventor and educator, exploring the frontiers of human-computer interaction at the IBM Almaden Research Center. His 30+ patents cover position tracking, user input, wireless communication, music training, biometrics and encryption. His Data Glove invention established the field of Virtual Reality, selling over one million units. His electric field PAN invention, developed with Professor Neil Gershenfeld at the MIT Media Lab, sends data through the human body. He also founded and directs the Extreme Science Program at the Latino College Preparatory Academy (LCPA) in East San Jose.

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