![Derrick Adams](http://digitalcommons.risd.edu/questioningaesthetics_images/1013/thumbnail.jpg)
Derrick Adams is a multidisciplinary New York–based artist with practices rooted in Deconstructivist philosophies and the formation and perception of ideals attached to objects, colors, textures, symbols and ideologies. His focus is on fragmentation and manipulation of structure and surface – exploring shape-shifting forces of popular culture and its counter balances in our lives. Adams’ creative process is invested in ideas charging formal constructs working in 2D, 3D and performative realms. Medium works its own favor as a formal language, communicating and exploring ideas of self image and forward projection. Learning functions as both subject and object, deriving from impressionable experiences associated with iconography from American culture, television programming and interest in the institutional critique of cultural perspectives in contemporary art. Shedding light on persuasive, performative and often duplicitous identities, as well as on architectural objects and history, his work explores the relationship between man and monument as they coexist in the landscape as representations of one another. His collage works on paper create minimal geometric constructions of angular human figures that seemingly live both in a state of deconstruction at the same time as if in the process of being built. Architectural processes and their different presentation strategies are important in Adams’ work: footprints, floor plans, elevation sections, visual renderings and the constructed object, act as various developmental states and approaches and serve as a comparative investigation into the physical construction of the figure.
Adams received his MFA from Columbia University and BFA from Pratt Institute and is a Skowhegan and Marie Walsh Sharpe alumnus. He is a recipient of a 2009 Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, and is an honored finalist for the 2011 William H. Johnson Prize. Exhibition and performance highlights include: MoMA PS1 Greater New York 2005, PERFORMA 05, Brooklyn Museum Open House, The Kitchen NYC 2010, The Bearden Project at the Studio Museum in Harlem 2011/12, a four-night solo performance in BAM’s new Fisher Theater in September 2012, and a solo exhibition at Galerie Anne de Villepoix, Paris, 2013, Other exhibitions and performances include Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art, as well as The Shadows Took Shape, both at The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2013; a performance project at Salon 94, New York, in collaboration with the Calder Foundation for Performa ’13; and a solo exhibition at Hales Gallery, London, 2013.
www.derrickadams.com
Arnold Berleant, Philosophy [emeritus], Long Island University
Arnold Berleant is active both in philosophy and music. As a philosopher, he is Professor (Emeritus) of Philosophy at Long Island University and Past President of the International Association of Aesthetics. He is the author of books and articles in philosophy, particularly in aesthetics, environmental aesthetics, and ethics. In music he is active as a pianist and composer. His compositions are mainly for solo instruments, chamber combinations, and voice.Sense perception lies at the etymological core of aesthetics (Gr. aisthesis, perception by the senses), and is central to aesthetic theory, aesthetic experience, and their applications. Berleant finds in the aesthetic a source, a sign, and a standard of human value. It is basic in the two areas in which he has mainly worked: philosophy, especially the philosophy of the arts and environmental aesthetics, and music.
Berleant's philosophical ideas develop out of a radical interpretation of experience influenced by the non-foundational naturalism of pragmatism and the undivided directness of existential phenomenology. In art and environment this leads to an emphasis on the engagement and continuity of active appreciation. In ethics it recognizes the provisionality and contextual character of value. In metaphysics it accepts the multiple realities and fluidity that come from the rejection of hierarchy. In social philosophy it stresses the formative power of cultural forces and the interpenetration and connectedness of community.
http://www.autograff.com/berleant/
Dr. Stefano Bloch, Presidential Diversity Fellow in Urban Studies, Brown University
Dr. Stefano Bloch conducted six years of ethnographic research on the LA-based graffiti community for his dissertation, The Changing Face of Wall Space (2012). As a former graffiti writer himself, he was able to rely on unprecedented access to some of the most guarded and prolific graffiti writers and street artists whose interviews helped inform his study of aesthetic responses to neighborhood restructuring and redevelopment in Los Angeles between 1940 and 2012.
His work has been published in the journals City, Radical History Review, and the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research in which he has a forthcoming article discussing the several motivations graffiti writers have for "bombing" murals. His chapter "Challenging the Defense of Graffiti, in Defense of Graffiti" appears in the soon-to-be released Routledge Handbook of Graffiti and Street Art (ed. by J. Ross), and he is currently working on a full length autoethnographic monograph focusing on how graffiti writers as members of a transgressive subculture contribute to urbanism. He currently has an article under review with the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography arguing for the adoption of what he calls "place-based elicitation" when conducting interviews with members of criminalized subcultures, and has two works in progress, the first of which looks at the relationship between incidents of graffiti and violent crime in Providence (co-authored with Dr. Yesim Sungu-Eryilmaz), and a second looking at the wide applicability of vaguely written Gang Enhancement Legislation.
Dr. Bloch has appeared in the documentaries on contemporary graffiti and street art Bomb It! (2008) and Vigilante, Vigilante (2011), and currently teaches "Crime and the City," "Bottom-up Urbanism," and "Critical Urban Theory" at Brown University where he is a Presidential Diversity Postdoctoral Fellow in the Urban Studies Program.
research page: https://vivo.brown.edu/display/sebloch
scholarly papers: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=1828782
Emily Brady, Geography, University of Edinburgh
Emily Brady is Professor of Environment and Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. Her research interests span aesthetics and philosophy of art, environmental ethics, eighteenth-century philosophy, Kant, and animal studies. Her philosophical approach moves between the historical and contemporary, seeking to reinterpret past thinking about nature and environment for a contemporary context. She is especially interested in trying to understand the character of aesthetic experience and judgment, the role of imagination in that experience, and how aesthetic and moral values interact.
Brady’s publications include: The Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature (2013); Aesthetics of the Natural Environment (2003), and as co-editor, Aesthetic Concepts: Essays After Sibley (2001); Humans in the Land: The Ethics and Aesthetics of the Cultural Landscape (2007); and Human-Environment Relations: Transformative Values in Theory and Practice (2012). One of her current projects is a co-authored book exploring the aesthetics of landscapes and environments modified by humans, Aesthetics Between Nature and Culture.
http://bradyphilosophy.com/about/
Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art History, University of California - Berkeley
Julia Bryan-Wilson is Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests include questions of artistic labor, craft histories, performance, feminism, and queer theory. She has held grants from the Getty, the Clark Art Institute, the Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation, and the Center for Craft, Creativity, & Design, among others. Her book Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (2009) was named a “best book of the year” by Artforum, and her article “Invisible Products” won the 2013 Art Journal Award. She has two books forthcoming: one on recent textiles(University of Chicago Press), and one entitled Art in the Making, co-authored with Glenn Adamson (Thames & Hudson).
http://arthistory.berkeley.edu/person/1639580-julia-bryan-wilson
Maureen Connor, Art (emerita), Queens College of the City University of New York
Maureen Connor’s work combines installation, video, interior design, ethnography, human resources, feminism, and radical pedagogy. Current projects include Dis-con-tent, a series of community events in NYC that considers the human story behind certain medical advances, particularly how they impact the poor, people of color and women and Employment Relationships, a collaboration with Wroclaw Museum of Contemporary Art, Poland which continues the work of Personnel, her ongoing project about democracy in the workplace (since 2000), and the Institute for Wishful Thinking (IWT) the collective she co-founded in 2008. Both Projects produce interventions that explore the attitudes and needs of individuals and institutions. Since 2012 she has been co-facilitating the Pedagogy Group, a group of art educators who meet to share syllabi and readings and to consider how to embody progressive politics in art education.In April, 2015, the IWT presented Awkward Moments in Columbia in an interactive installation created as artists in residence the city of Columbia, South Carolina’s annual film festival, Indie Grits as a commentary on the monuments in this historic Southern city that have been erected to historical figures with questionable histories (or worse). (Subsequent events in Charleston and Columbia, South Carolina and other cities in the South have begun to bring more attention to these problematic monuments.)
The IWT has also produced projects for the It’s The Political Economy Stupid, Austrian Cultural Forum, NY; Momenta Art, Brooklyn and Periferic 8 Biennial, Iasi, Romania; among others. In 2010 they created the winning proposal for the Peace Pentagon, SOS Peace Pentagon, which addressed the question ‘how can a building mobilize for Peace and Justice?’ Their 2011 project, Artists in Residence for the US Government (self declared) was also part of the Connor’s survey exhibition Contradictions, at Akbank Sanat in Istanbul, with work from 1978-2012.
Personnel and related projects have been produced for a diverse group of venues that include the CCA Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw as part of Winter Holiday Camp; the School of Art and Design, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Disonancias: Collaborations Between Artists and Companies, San Sebastian, Spain; Health and Safety, Wyspa Art Institute, Gdansk, Poland among others.
Teaching at Queens College, CUNY since 1990, she is now Emerita Professor of Art. In 2010 she co-founded Social Practice Queens, an MFA in Social Practice Art at Queens College in collaboration with the Queens Museum.
Also known for her sculpture and video installation from the 1980s and '90s, Connor has been included in numerous publications and exhibited widely in national and international venues such as KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Museum of Modern Art, New York; MAK, Vienna; Porticus, Frankfurt; ICA, Philadelphia; Armand Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and the Whitney Biennial, among many others.
www.maureenconnor.net
www.theiwt.com
A.W. Eaton, Philosophy, University of Illinois at Chicago
A.W. Eaton is an Associate Professor. She received her Ph.D. from The University of Chicago in both philosophy and art history in 2003. She works on topics in feminism, aesthetics and philosophy of art, value theory, and Italian Renaissance painting. Her special interests include the epistemological and ontological status of aesthetic value, the relationship between ethical and artistic value, feminist critiques of pornography, representations of rape in the European artistic tradition, and artifact teleology (for more details and publications, see https://sites.google.com/site/eatonaw/ and https://uic.academia.edu/AnneEaton). Professor Eaton was a Laurence Rockefeller Fellow at Princeton's Center for Human Values in 2005-6. She is the editor of the Aesthetics & Philosophy of Art section of Philosophy Compass: http://philosophy-compass.com/sections/aesthetics-and-philosophy-of-art/
Elinor Fuchs, Dramaturgy [emerita], Yale School of Drama
Elinor Fuchs is a dramaturg and theater theorist whose teaching and writing on drama and theatre are informed by Aristotle, Romantic theory, Hegel, the avant-garde, and postmodern and postdramatic theory. She is the author or editor of five books, including The Death of Character: Reflections on Theater After Modernism, winner of the George Jean Nathan Award in Dramatic Criticism, Land/Scape/Theater co-edited with Una Chaudhuri, and Making an Exit, a family memoir which has led to many speaking invitations on issues of dementia and aging. She has published numerous scholarly articles in anthologies and journals as well as theater criticism in The Village Voice and American Theatre. Her documentary play, Year One of the Empire: A Play of American War, Politics, and Protest, written with historian Joyce Antler, received its premiere in Los Angeles, winning the Drama-Logue “Best Play” Award, and was produced in New York in 2008. She has taught at Harvard, Columbia, Emory, New York University, the Institut für Theatrewissenschaft of the Free University in Berlin, and has also offered dramaturgical workshops in Europe and the U.K. She has been the recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship for independent study, a Bunting fellowship, and a fellowship in Age Studies at the Center for 20th Century Study of the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. She holds a PhD from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and is now Professor Emerita of Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism of the Yale School of Drama, where she taught from 1987 to 2015.
http://drama.yale.edu/facstaff/elinor-fuchs
An Interview with Elinor Fuchs (youtube)
Alison Gwilt, Fashion and Sustainability, Sheffield Hallam University
Dr. Alison Gwilt is a fashion design researcher, author and consultant. She explores and promotes a range of innovative design methods and approaches that enable the fashion and textiles community, from educators, to producers, and consumers, to adopt more sustainable and ethical practices and principles. Her work focuses on the use of positive/sustainable design interventions and user-centred approaches that challenge the current production and consumption paradigm. Alison has published widely in the field of sustainability and fashion and her books include Shaping Sustainable Fashion (2011), A Practical Guide to Sustainable Fashion (2014) and Fashion Design for Living (2015).
Alison has a Ph.D from RMIT University, Melbourne and a BA (Hons) Fashion & Textiles Design from Central St Martins College of Art in London. She has worked in design education in the UK, New Zealand and Australia and currently holds the post of Reader in Fashion and Sustainability in the Art and Design Research Centre at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. She is an advisor to the not-for-profit organisations Redress (Hong Kong), and the Ethical Fashion Forum in the UK.
Sheffield Hallam University: http://www.shu.ac.uk/research/c3ri/people/dr-alison-gwilt
Personal website: www.alisongwilt.com
Patricia Johanson, Artist, NYC
For the past forty years Patricia Johanson’s multidisciplinary designs have combined art, ecology, landscaping, and functional infrastructure. During the 1960’s Johanson worked for Joseph Cornell and Georgia O’Keeffe, exhibited "Minimal" paintings and sculpture, and designed a series of 150 gardens for HOUSE & GARDEN magazine. During the early 1970's she created large-scale sculpture interwoven with forests, and site designs for Mitchell/Giurgola buildings at Yale University, Columbus, Indiana, and Con Edison’s Indian Point Nuclear Generating Facility in Peekskill, New York.
Johanson graduated from Bennington College (1962), Hunter College (M.A., 1964), and City College of New York, School of Architecture (B. Arch, 1977). She received an honorary doctorate from Massachusetts College of Art in 1995.
From 1981 to 1986 Johanson created Fair Park Lagoon in Dallas, a municipal flood basin considered one of the earliest ecological artworks, where sculpture serves as causeways, bridges, seating, and islands that bring people into contact with living natural communities. “Endangered Garden”, a linear park along San Francisco Bay (1987) incorporates tidal sculpture, butterfly meadow, and habitat restorations into the image of the endangered San Francisco Garter Snake, which in turn becomes a one-third mile baywalk coinciding with the roof of a transport-storage sewer.
Other large-scale projects include “Park for the Amazon Rainforest” in Obidos, Brazil that reveals forest stratification (1992), and Nairobi River Park, Kenya, featuring sculpture that filters polluted river water (1995). In 1996 Johanson created an ecological master plan for Ulsan Grand Park, a 912-acre site within Korea’s major industrial city. “The Rocky Marciano Trail”, Brockton, Massachusetts (1997) combines restructured streets, magnet sites, and ecological and sculptural playgrounds with flood control and watershed restoration. “Millenium Park” in Seoul, Korea (1999) transforms the world’s largest landfill into a sculptural guardian figure, whose terraced landscape provides human recreation, as well as urban wildlife habitat.
More recently Johanson designed a small urban garden for the French government (2000) and “The South Ninth Street Corridor” (2001), a sculptural path, bike trail, and functional amenities within the drainage medians along U.S. 81 in Salina, Kansas. “Ellis Creek Water Recycling Facility” (2001), a 272-acre wetlands park in Petaluma, California, processes sewage into drinking water, and Johanson’s sculptural dam and highway crossing in Salt Lake City (2003) won the Utah Governor’s Grand Achievement Award for Planning and Design. Her latest projects include a storm water purification garden along Lake Superior in Duluth (2004), and a reclaimed coal-mining site for Marywood University in Scranton, Pennsylvania (2008).
Johanson has been a keynote speaker for the International Federation of Landscape Architects; her work has been seen in over 150 exhibitions worldwide; and her writings have been translated into eleven languages. She is author of “Architecture as Landscape” (Princeton Architectural Press, 1985), CREATIVE SOLUTIONS TO ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS (1992), "Preserving Biocultural Diversity in Public Parks" (1996), "The City as an Ecological Art Form" (1998), and “Reconnecting the Biological Commons” (2015).
Caffyn Kelley’s biography, ART AND SURVIVAL: PATRICIA JOHANSON’S ENVIRONMENTAL PROJECTS was published in 2006, and a two-volume study by Xin Wu, PATRICIA JOHANSON’S HOUSE AND GARDEN COMISSION: RECONSTRUCTION OF MODERNITY (2008) is available from Harvard University Press. More recent books include A FIELD GUIDE TO PATRICIA JOHANSON’S WORKS by Sue Spaid (2012) and Xin Wu’s PATRICIA JOHANSON AND THE REINVENTION OF PUBLIC ENVIRONMENTAL ART (2013).
Johanson’s project drawings and models are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art, New York, Storm King Art Center, Dallas Museum of Art, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. and Dumbarton Oaks Contemporary Landscape Design Collection. Awards include two Guggenheim Fellowships, NEA Fellowship, Townsend Harris Medal from City College of New York, Gold Medal from the Accademia Italia delle Arti, and Utah Governor’s Grand Achievement Award for Planning and Design.
www.patriciajohanson.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patricia_Johanson
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZWJSyuzHBQ
Amelia Jones, Critical Studies, University of Southern California
Amelia Jones is the Robert A. Day Professor in Art and Design and Vice-Dean of Critical Studies. Trained in art history, film theory, and performance studies, and widely read in philosophy and identity theory, Jones is known for her work elaborating a queer, anti-racist, feminist history and theory of modern and contemporary Euro-American visual arts, including performance, film, video, and installation. Her current research addresses the confluence of “queer,” “feminist,” and “performance” in the visual arts.
A curator and performance programmer, her recent publications include Perform Repeat Record: Live Art in History (2012), co-edited with Adrian Heathfield, a single authored book Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts (2012), the edited volume Sexuality (2014), and, co-edited with Erin Silver, Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories (forthcoming). Her exhibition Material Traces: Time and the Gesture in Contemporary Art took place in 2013 in Montreal and she is organizing two major international performance events for 2015-16 school year, Trans-Montréal (at McGill University) and Live Artists Live (at USC), both pivoting around issues of performance and cultural / historical translation and transfer. Other recent publications explore the ideological implications of claims of presence in performance and visual art discourse (in TDR), the usefulness of new materialist theory to the study of performative art practices (also in TDR), and numerous articles addressing the work of artists previously marginalized from art discourse and institutions (including Ulay, Senga Nengudi, Faith Wilding, and Martha Wilson).
http://dornsife.usc.edu/ase/ase-affiliatedfaculty-amelia-jones/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amelia_Jones
Michael Kelly, Philosophy, The University of North Carolina at Charlotte; Editor-in-Chief, Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (Oxford University Press); Founder & President, Transdisciplinary Aesthetics Foundation
Michael Kelly is Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte; Editor-in-Chief of the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (Oxford UP, 2014, 2nd edition); author of A Hunger for Aesthetics: Enacting the Demands of Art (Columbia UP, 2012) and Iconoclasm in Aesthetics (Cambridge UP, 2003); Co-Editor of Action, Art, History: Engagements with Arthur C. Danto (Columbia UP, 2007); and former Executive Director of the American Philosophical Association and former Managing Editor of the Journal of Philosophy. He is also the Founder of the Transdisciplinary Aesthetics Foundation, which organizes and supports the international Questioning Aesthetics Symposium series (http://transaestheticsfoundation.org). Currently, he is working on the aesthetics and politics of contemporary social-practice art, as well as on the intersection between transdisciplinary aesthetics and artistic research.
Steven Lubar, American Studies, History, and History of Art and Architecture, Brown University
Steven Lubar is a professor in the departments of American studies, history, and the history of art and architecture at Brown University. Before coming to Brown he worked for twenty years as a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. At Brown he has been director of the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology and the John Nicholas Brown Center for the Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage. He’s interested in the public humanities, museum curatorship, and the history of museums. He recently won a Guggenheim Fellowship to write a book on museum work, past, present, and future. He’s on twitter @lubar. His website is stevenlubar.net. More information and a cv is available at Brown’s faculty site.
Jonathan Maskit, Philosophy, Denison University
Jonathan Maskit is Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy (on-going) at Denison University, where he also teaches in the Environmental Studies Program. He recently concluded a five-year stint as the Director of Denison’s Philosophy, Politics, and Economics Program. His research and teaching are concentrated in aesthetics as well as environmental, continental, and political philosophy. He is particularly interested in questions having to do with the aesthetics of everyday life and the aesthetics of human environments. His research in everyday aesthetics (and related areas) has focused not on producing a general theory of the aesthetic as found in everyday life, but in investigating how aesthetic and environmental considerations often come into conflict and how best to resolve those conflicts. His research on environmental aesthetics has largely focused on the aesthetics of postindustrial sites, although he has also published on the implicit universalism in most literature in the field. In addition to these areas of research, Dr. Maskit also has long-standing interests in environmental philosophy in general, particularly as approached from the perspective of continental philosophy.
Dr. Maskit is currently on leave from Denison University. He is a visiting scholar at the Excellence Cluster for Normative Orders at Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany. While in Germany he is working on a monograph bringing together many of the above-mentioned strands of his work under the title Everyday Aesthetics and the Problem of Consumption. This book begins with the argument that environmental philosophers would be better served focusing on aesthetics and politics than on ethics. The aesthetics that are most in need of consideration, however, are not those of the natural world, but the aesthetics of everyday life. The great question that needs to be answered is not “why should we care about nature?”, but “how should we (recognizing important differences between societies and cultures) live, given that we care about ourselves and some of us about nature too?".
In addition to this project, Dr. Maskit is editing a volume, commissioned by Rowman & Littlefield, International on Continental Philosophy and the Environment. This project brings together leading scholars from North America and Europe contributing chapters both on English-language environmental philosophy grounded in European philosophical traditions as well as those reflecting environmental philosophy being done in Europe today. Dr. Maskit is also editing a special issue of The Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology on urban aesthetics.
Dr. Maskit has previously been a visiting scholar at Potsdam University (Germany) and at the University of Connecticut. He has presented at conferences throughout North America and Europe and has presented invited colloquia at (amongst others) Binghamton University, the University of Leipzig (Germany), Durham University (UK), Ryerson University (Canada), Edinburgh University (UK), Loyola Marymount University, and the Estonian Academy of the Arts.
http://denison.academia.edu/JonathanMaskit
Uri McMillan, English, University of California - Los Angeles
Uri McMillan is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. He holds joint appointments in the Departments of African-American Studies and Gender Studies, respectively, as well as an active affiliation with the Center for Performance Studies. In the 2013-2014 academic year, he held a Career Enhancement Fellowship for Junior Faculty from the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship Foundation. He earned my Ph.D. from the combined program in Afro-American Studies and American Studies at Yale University. McMillan is a cultural historian who researches and writes in the interstices between black cultural studies, performance studies, queer theory, and contemporary art. His first book, Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance (NYU, 2015) is on black performance art, objecthood, and avatars staged by black women artists. He has published articles on performance art, digital media, hip-hop, photography, and nineteenth-century performance cultures in varied arenas such as articles on Joice Heth and Nicki Minaj in Women and Performance: a journal of feminist theory, as well as articles in Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, and e-misferica. Outside of academia, he has given several talks at museums in the United States, including MoMA PS1 and The Hammer Museum. He has also written for several arts publications: Flow (2008), Re:Collection (2010), Evidence of Accumulation (2011), and Studio Magazine, all published by the Studio Museum of Harlem.
http://urimcmillan.com/
Adrian Parr, Architecture & Sociology, University of Cincinnati
Adrian Parr is the Chair of Taft Faculty and Director of the Charles Phelps Taft Research Center, Professor Adrian Parr is an internationally recognized environmental, political, and cultural theorist. She holds a joint appointment in the Department of Political Science and the School of Architecture and Interior Design. Her research focuses on environmental politics, water access, and the built environment. In 2011 Parr received the distinguished Rieveschl Award for Scholarly and Creative Work. In 2013 she and Prof. Dion Dionysiou, also with the University of Cincinnati, were appointed as UNESCO Co-Chairs of Water Accessibility and Sustainability.
Dr. Parr has authored four books, edited three anthologies, and published numerous chapters in books and journal articles. Her most recent publications include: The Wrath of Capital: Neoliberalism and Climate Change Politics (Columbia University Press), Hijacking Sustainability (MIT Press), and New Directions in Sustainable Design, edited with Michael Zaretsky (Routledge). She is one of the founding editors of the online peer review journal Drain: Journal of Contemporary Art and Culture. Reviews of her work have appeared in the Guardian, The Chronicle, Deleuze Studies, Radical Philosophy, the Electronic Green Journal, Spontaneous Generations, and the American Book Review. She has been invited to speak on her work at Cornell University, the University of California Berkeley, Duke University, Harvard University, William and Mary College, the Ohio State University, the University of New South Wales, Shanghai University, Calgary University, the University of Uppsula, Arup Engineers Shanghai, ZKM Germany, WCPO Nightly News, and the Fresh Outlook Foundation.
http://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-wrath-of-capital/9780231158282
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/hijacking-sustainability
Yuriko Saito, Philosophy, Rhode Island School of Design
Yuriko Saito, born and raised in Japan, has been teaching philosophy at RISD since 1981. In addition to introductory philosophy courses, she regularly teaches ecological responsibility in art and design, Japanese aesthetics, everyday aesthetics and philosophy of nature. Her Everyday Aesthetics was published by Oxford University Press (2008, paperback edition 2010). Her works in aesthetics also appear in numerous academic journals and she has lectured widely on the subject, including in Finland, China and Japan. She serves as Associate Editor of an online journal, Contemporary Aesthetics, as well as Editorial Consultant for British Journal of Aesthetics, Editorial Advisory Board member for Environmental Ethics, and Consultant for “Artification and Its Impact on Art” Project (funded by the Finnish government). She is a past recipient of RISD's John R. Frazier Award for Excellence in Teaching.
Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento, Founder of the Art & Law Program, Fordham University
Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento is an artist, writer, teacher and lawyer interested in the relationship between art and law. He received his BA in Art from the University of Texas-El Paso and an MFA in Art from the California Institute of the Arts. He was a Van Lier Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program in Studio Art in 1997, and received his J.D. from Cornell Law School in 2006.
In 2003 he attended Cornell Law School as an art project and he is currently completing the manifestation of this project as well as two projects on the how we experience law, i.e.- how law becomes visible. His art projects have been shown nationally and internationally, and he has lectured and performed in a wide range of institutions, including Harvard University, Cornell Law School, Yale Law School, Columbia Law School, Fundación Cisneros, UC Irvine, Institut Universitaire de Varenne (Paris 16), Cour de Cassation, Paris, and Brown University, among others. He has also published essays and projects in Law Text Culture, Unbound: Harvard Journal of the Legal Left, Canceled: Alternative Manifestations and Productive Failures, Texas A&M Law Review, Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, Perspecta: The Yale Architectural Journal, The New York Times, and Art Asia Pacific.
In 2010, Sarmiento founded the Art & Law Program, a semester-long seminar series with a theoretical and philosophical focus on the effects of law and jurisprudence on cultural production and reception. He currently teaches contemporary art and law at Fordham Law School.
For more information please view: sergiomunozsarmiento.com
T’ai Smith, Art & Art History, University of British Columbia, University of British Columbia - Vancouver
T’ai Smith is assistant professor in the Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. Author of Bauhaus Weaving Theory: From Feminine Craft to Mode of Design (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), her articles have appeared in Art Journal, Art Practical, Grey Room, Journal of Modern Craft, Texte zur Kunst, and Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung. Working on the relation between diagrams and management in art, design, media theory, and philosophy, she is currently drafting a new book, tentatively titled Frock Coats and Capital: The Fashion Economy Before and After Marx.
https://ubc.academia.edu/TaiSmith
Brian Soucek, Law, University of California - Davis
Brian Soucek is a graduate of Boston College (B.A., Philosophy and Economics); Columbia University (Ph.D., Philosophy), where he was awarded the Core Preceptor Prize for his teaching; and Yale Law School (J.D.), where he was Comments Editor for the Yale Law Journal, a Coker Fellow in Procedure and won the Munson Prize for his work in the school’s immigration clinic. Prior to law school, Soucek taught for three years in the Humanities Collegiate Division and Philosophy Department at the University of Chicago, where he was Collegiate Assistant Professor and Co-Chair of the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts. After law school, he clerked for the late Mark R. Kravitz, United States District Judge for the District of Connecticut, and the Hon. Guido Calabresi of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. In addition to book chapters and articles in the philosophy of art, Soucek’s legal publications include work on asylum law, the due process values embodied in contemporary courthouse art, the quasi-precedential force of copying and pasting in unpublished appellate opinions, discrimination claims brought by plaintiffs perceived to be gay, and the intersection of federalism and equality concerns in United States v. Windsor. Uniting many of these projects is an overarching concern for the role appearances play throughout the law, particularly in two areas that Soucek teaches at UC Davis School of Law: anti-discrimination law and civil procedure.
Legal Scholarship at SSRN
https://law.ucdavis.edu/faculty/soucek/