Creative Writing

Linda Haverty Rugg

Author and Professor at the Scandinavian Department at UC Berkeley

As a professor, Linda Haverty Rugg's research has long focused on issues related to self-construction and self-representation, particularly in textual autobiography and visual media. Authorship is another strong allied research interest, with special attention to the authorships and authorial personae of August Strindberg, Mark Twain, Ingmar Bergman, and a range of art cinema directors who perform as authors. In addition to her interest in autobiographical studies, Rugg has drawn inspiration for her research from two of the courses she teaches: “Ecology and Culture in...

Scott Tsuchitani

Artist and Scholar

Scott Tsuchitani (he/they) is a San Francisco-based visual and media artist and feminist cultural studies scholar. Scott’s art practice-as-research explores how tactical public and online art intervention can transform racial common sense, with a focus on the public museum. His interventions have impacted racial discourse through the generation of dialogue and debate in social and mainstream media, as well as academic press. Scott’s work has been shown in museums and galleries in 12 states, presented in Europe and Asia, and published in academic books and journals in...

Suzanne Lacy

Artist and Professor at USC Roski School of Art and Design

Suzanne Lacy is renowned as a pioneer in socially engaged and public performance art. Her installations, videos, and performances deal with sexual violence, rural and urban poverty, incarceration, labor and aging. Lacy’s large-scale projects span the globe, including England, Colombia, Ecuador, Spain, Ireland and the U.S.

In 2019 she had a career retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and at Yerba Buena Art Center. Her work has been reviewed in major periodicals and books and she exhibits in museums across the world. Also known for her writing, Lacy edited ...

Judith Rodenbeck

Professor at University of California, Riverside and Art Historian

Judith Rodenbeck received her Ph.D. in Art History from Columbia University in 2003. She has taught at UCR since 2014; before joining MCS she was on the faculty at Sarah Lawrence College, in Bronxville, NY. Her first book Radical Prototypes: Allan Kaprow and the Invention of Happenings (MIT, 2011) explores the emergence of performance and intermedia in the American fine arts of the 1950s. She is currently working on several book-length projects: a longitudinal study of the intersections between what Marcel Mauss called “techniques of the body”...

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...

Jennifer Doyle

Professor of English at University of California, Riverside

Jennifer Doyle is a Professor of English and Cooperating Faculty in Art. She is the author of Shadow of My Shadow (2024), Campus Sex/Campus Security (2015),Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art (2013) and Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire (2007). She is co-editor of Pop Out: Queer Warhol (1996).

She and Jeanne Vaccaro (University of Kansas) are the co-curators of Scientia Sexualis, an exhibition for ICA LA which will run from early...

Alexandro Segade

Interdisciplinary Artist & Assistant Professor of Art at UCSD

Xandro Segade is an interdisciplinary artist whose queer world-building projects propose speculative group identities. Often working in collectives, Segade makes spaces for critical play, using collaboration to complicate utopian impulses with radical ambivalence. Segade’s practice traces connections across performance, writing and drawing, making video, installation, theater, sculpture, music, costumes and comics that defy genre distinctions, subverting contextual frameworks, disrupting the political imagination.

Segade’s multimedia science fiction performance...

Chiyuma Elliott

Former ARC Director, Professor of African American Studies

Chiyuma Elliott is Associate Professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her scholarly work and teaching focus on poetry and poetics and African American intellectual history from the 1920s to the present. Elliott was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, and Assistant Professor of English, Creative Writing, and African American Studies at the University of Mississippi. A Cave Canem Alumni Fellow, she has also received fellowships from the American Philosophical Society, the James Irvine Foundation, and the Vermont Studio Center. She...

Bonnie Begusch

2009 ARC Fellow

Bonnie Begusch (b. 1981 in Oakland, USA) works primarily with time-based media and text. After studying Media Art and Literature at UCLA, she received her MFA in Fine Art from the University of California, Berkeley. Her work has been screened and exhibited at numerous venues including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Berkeley Art Museum; Sterling Music Room, New York; SF Film Society, San Francisco; KARST, Plymouth; RUA RED, Dublin; Exile, Berlin; Institute for Contemporary Art, Zagreb; Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne;...

Nima Bassiri

Social Theorist, Historian & Philosopher of the Human Sciences, and Assistant Professor of Literature at Duke University

Nima Bassiri is a social theorist, historian, and philosopher of the human sciences, and an assistant professor at Duke University, where he teaches in the Program in Literature, Duke’s interdisciplinary humanities and cultural studies program. He is also the co-director of Duke’s Institute for Critical Theory, where he convenes the Critical Theory Workshop.

His first book, Madness and Enterprise (University of Chicago Press), explores how turn-of-the-century psychiatrists across Europe and North America deployed an economic style of reasoning to resolve...