Visiting Lecturer

Knut Ove Arntzen

Theatre Critic and Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Bergen

Knut Ove Arntzen, was since 1983 assistant and later associate professor at the former Institute for theatre studies, now the Section for theatre studies at the Institute for Cultural Studies and Art History at the University of Bergen, Norway. He has been a free lance theatre critic at the paper Arbeiderbladet in Oslo, 1976-1986, and has benn in the function of a scientific consultant to the Bergen International Theatre. He was participating in planning and running the Drama Course at the Writing Academy of Hordaland County in Bergen and taught as at the director´s course...

Sigrun Åsebø

Professor of Art History at University of Bergen

Sigrun Åsebø works as an Associate Professor of Art History at the Department of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic Studies at the University of Bergen. Her research interests are feminist historiography and theory, and questions of gender, sexualities, women artists from modernity until today, and gender, diversity in art museums and curating. She is the co-founder of the “Network for Gender and Diversity in Nordic and Baltic Art Museums”, and is currently engaged in the project “The Feminist Legacy in Art Museums (FLAME)”, where she works on textiles practices and...

Dena Beard

Director of the Leonard & Claire Tow Center for the Performing Arts Brooklyn College

Dena Beard is director of the Leonard & Claire Tow Center for the Performing Arts at Brooklyn College. She was Executive Director of The Lab in San Francisco from 2014–2023 and Assistant Curator at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive from 2007–2014. Beard has organized hundreds of projects with artists such as Lutz Bacher, Sadie Barnette, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Ellen Fullman, Dora García, Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork, Anna Halprin, Asher Hartman, Annea Lockwood, Barry McGee, Silke Otto-Knapp, Brontez Purnell, Wadada Leo Smith, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

Roberto Bedoya

Cultural Affairs Manager for the City of Oakland

Roberto Bedoya is the Cultural Affairs Manager for the City of Oakland, where he recently shepherded its Cultural Plan, Belonging in Oakland: a Cultural Development Plan. Throughout his career, Bedoya has consistently supported artist-centered cultural practices and advocated for expanded definitions of inclusion and belonging in the cultural sector. His essays, “U.S. Cultural Policy; Its Politics of Participation, Its Creative Potential;” “Creative Placemaking and the Politics of Belonging and Dis-Belonging;” and “Spatial Justice: Rasquachification, Race and the City,”...

Lisa Bielawa

Composer, Producer, and Performer

Composer, producer, and vocalist Lisa Bielawa is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow and a Rome Prize winner in Musical Composition, who takes inspiration for her work from literary sources and close artistic collaborations. She is the recipient of the 2017 Music Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters and a 2020 OPERA America Grant for Female Composers. She was named a William Randolph Hearst Visiting Artist Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society for 2018 and was Artist-in-Residence at Kaufman Music Center in New York for the 2020-2021 season. In 1997, Bielawa co-...

Sven Åge Birkeland

Artistic & Managing Director of Norway's BIT Teatergarasjen

Sven Åge Birkeland was the artistic and managing director of Norway's oldest and most prestigious international theatre, BIT Teatergarasjen, the dance biennial Oktoberdans and the theatre biennial Meteor. In addition, he was sought after as a curator and advisor for programs of festivals and venues, within Norway as well as internationally. In that capacity he influenced the curatorial processes and development of many performing arts programs across the globe with his distinct vision, taste and unique sense for new artistic potential.

His work for the Norwegian...

Lisa Blackmore

Researcher, Curator, and Educator

Lisa Blackmore is a researcher, curator and educator, working with art and water cultures in Latin America. Since 2018, she has been directing entre—ríos, a platform whose collaborative methodologies (re)connect diverse communities to bodies of water through curatorial, editorial and pedagogical projects. She is a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at UC Berkeley and Senior Lecturer in Art History and Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Essex, UK. In 2023, she was a British Academy Mid-Career Fellow for her...

Iain Boal

Social Historian of Science and Technics

Iain Boal is a social historian of science and technics, affiliated with the University of California and Birkbeck College, London. He is associated with Retort, a group of writers, artists and artisans based for two decades in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is particularly interested in the relations between art, science, and representation. He is a founder of the new field of agnotology (a term he coined), the systematic study of ignorance and the long shadows cast by enlightenment. With James Brook he edited Resisting the Virtual Life: The Culture and...

Natasha Boas

Contemporary Art Curator, Writer, Critic

Natasha Boas is a French-American contemporary art curator, writer, and critic. She has taught art history and curatorial studies at Yale, Stanford, and the San Francisco Art Institute. Her exhibition on the Modernist Algerian artist, Baya MahieddineBaya: Woman of Algiers in 2018 at the Grey Art Gallery at New York University garnered her international critical attention. In 2017 she was featured in Lynn Hershman Leeson's...

Kevin Bott

Community-Based Theater Artist, Scholar

Kevin Bott is a community-based theater artist and scholar whose interests lie at the intersection of healing, freedom, justice, and movement-building, as well as in the mutually supportive relationship between individual excellence and collective creation. Bott is the founder and artistic director of Ritual4Return, which he began developing in 2008. His 2010 doctoral dissertation is entitled “A Ritual for Return: Investigating the Process of Creating an Original Rite of Passage with Formerly Incarcerated Men.” The study examines the artist’s own ethical decision making...