Visiting Scholar

Imanuel Schipper

Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Physical Performance at the Estonian Academy of Nusic and Theatre

Imanuel Schipper holds MAs in theatre and dance studies and in acting. He has been working as a dramaturg for many years with the well-known German Performance group, Rimini Protokoll with whom, he has developed a contemporary way of documentary theatre as intervention, as political think tanks.

He has been a deputy professor, senior lecturer, senior researcher at different universities and art academies in Germany, Switzerland and other countries in the field of performance studies, cultural theory and art theory. He works and publishes widley on the interface...

Susan Schweik

Associate Dean of Arts and Humanities and Emeritus Professor in the English Department at UC Berkeley
Susan Schweik was a Visiting Scholar Panel Participant at the City, Arts and Public Spaces Conversation at the Arts Research Center on April 28, 2011.

Susan Schweik's last book was The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public. She is completing a book tentatively titled Unfixed: How the Women of Glenwood Asylum Overturned Ideas about IQ, & Why You Don't Know About Their Work. A recipient of Berkeley's Chancellor's Award for Advancing Institutional Excellence and U.C.'s Presidential Chair in Undergraduate Education , she was involved with the...

Tonika Sealy-Thompson

Ambassador of Barbados to Brazil
Tonika Sealy-Thompson was a Visiting Scholar Panel Participant at the Movement as Research Lecture at the Arts Research Center on October 18, 2017.

Tonika Sealy-Thompson is a diplomat, academic, social justice and education activist from Barbados. She was appointed ambassador to Brazil in 2019, and also now serves concurrently as Barbados’ Ambassador to Argentina, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay. Her research explores the links between the women in politics and performing arts across three locations: Barbados, the Bay Area and Brazil. In order to take up the appointment...

Nizan Shaked

Professor at California State University, Long Beach and Art Historian

Nizan Shaked is Professor of Contemporary Art History, Museum and Curatorial Studies at CSULB. Her book The Synthetic Proposition: Conceptualism and the Political Referent in Contemporary Art (Manchester University Press, 2017) is a winner of the 2019 Smithsonian American Art Museum Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art; a 2015 Wyeth Foundation for American Art College Art Association Publication Award, and was supported by a DAAD grant for research at the Adrian Piper Foundation, Berlin, in 2012. Her manuscript...

Edward Shanken

Art Historian and Professor of Digital Art and New Media at UC Santa Cruz
Edward A. Shanken was a Visiting Scholar Panel Participant at the Questioning Aesthetics Symposium at the Arts Research Center on March 13, 2015.

Edward A. Shanken writes and teaches about the entwinement of art, science, and technology with a focus on interdisciplinary practices involving new media. He is Professor at UC Santa Cruz, where he has served as Director of the Digital Arts and New Media (DANM) MFA program. Prior academic posts include: Associate Professor, Digital + Media MFA program at RISD; Associate Professor, DXARTS Ph.D. program at University of Washington...

Solmaz Sharif

Poet and Professor of English at UC Berkeley
Solmaz Sharif gave a Visiting Writer/Scholar Talk at the Arts Research Center on February 22, 2024.

Born in Istanbul to Iranian parents, Solmaz Sharif is the author of Customs (Graywolf Press, 2022) and Look (Graywolf Press, 2016), a finalist for the National Book Award. She holds degrees from U.C. Berkeley, where she studied and taught with June Jordan’s Poetry for the People, and New York University. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, The Paris Review, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, the New...

Shayna Silverstein

Scholar, Artist, and Associate professorof Performance Studies & Middle Eastern and North African Studies at Northwestern University
Shayna Silverstein gave a Visiting Scholar Lecture at the Arts Research Center on February 19, 2020.

Shayna Silverstein is an associate professor in the Department of Performance Studies and a faculty member of the Middle Eastern and North African Studies program at Northwestern University. Her teaching and scholarship broadly examine the politics and aesthetics of sound, movement, and performance in contemporary SWANA/Middle Eastern cultural production.

Silverstein's first book, Fraught Balance: The Embodied Politics of Dabke Dance Music in Syria, will be...

Henriette Slorer Jacobsen

Dancer and Professor at the Norwegian Theatre Academy
Henriette Slorer Jacobsen was a Visiting Scholar Panel Participant at the Nordic Time Zones Symposium at the Arts Research Center on March 26, 2014.

Henriette Slorer Jacobsen is a Norwegian dancer. She was educated at Den Norske Opera's Ballettskole and the Norwegian Academy of Ballet. Later, she was employed as an aspirant at the National Ballet and has worked freelance in Oslo with, among others, Lise Eger and Odd Johan Fritzøe, and she has appeared in the short film Exit by Marit Schade Ødegaard. From 1996 she was employed...

Daniel Leeman Smith

Director, Playwright, Dramaturg, Producer, and Program Manager of NYU's Creative Career Hub
Daniel Leeman Smith gave a Visiting Writer/Scholar/Director Talk at the Arts Research Center on April 10, 2024. Daniel Leeman Smith is a proud two-spirit citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. He is a New York City based director, playwright, dramaturg, producer, and theatre educator whose work is positioned at the intersection of art, education, community, and activism, focusing on Native joy.

Recent credits include Stories of the Land (Dramaturg, Long Wharf Theatre), Chicago: Pigeon (Dramaturg, New Native Play Festival, Yale Indigenous Performing...

SA Smythe

Writer, Artist, and Assistant Professor of Black European Cultural Studies in the Department of African American Studies at UCLA
SA Smythe gave a Visiting Writer/Scholar Lecture at the Arts Research Center on September 13, 2018.

SA Smythe is a blktrans nonbinary theorist, multi-instrumentalist, transmedia storyteller, and educator currently based in Tkaronto and Rome. Smythe’s antecartographic practice conjures black belonging and is concerned with the thrival of our relations beyond every border. They weave blktrans poetics, performance, light sculptures, sound composition, photography, and found footage/archival ephemera. Smythe’s transmedia work has been featured...