Scholar

Isabel Allende, in Conversation

November 5, 2025
Read more about Isabel Allende's work on her website, here.

Ted Purves

Artist, Writer, and Founder of the Social Practice Program at CCA
Ted Purves was a Visiting Artist Panel Participant at the Questioning Aesthetics Symposium at the Arts Research Center on March 13, 2015. If you are interested in contacting this artist, please find them on their website.

Ted Purves was an independent artist, editor, and curator. His work has been exhibited and published in many venues and journals throughout California, as well as in New York, Boston, Albany and several cities in Germany. Purves has won funding from the Creative Work Fund in San Francisco and the Headlands Center for the Arts and been an artist-in-...

D.A. Powell

Poet and Professor at the University of San Francisco
D. A. Powell gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in April 2021, part of the Spring 2021 Flash Reading Series. If you are interested in contacting this artist, please find them on their website.

Born in Albany, Georgia, D. A. Powell earned an MA at Sonoma State University and an MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His first three collections of poetry, Tea, (1998), Lunch (2000), and Cocktails (2004), are considered by some to be a trilogy on the AIDS epidemic. Lunch...

Benjamin Piekut

Associate Professor of Music at Cornell University
Benjamin Piekut was a Visiting Scholar Panel Participant at the Amateurism Across the Arts Conference at the Arts Research Center on March 9, 2018. If you are interested in contacting this artist, please find them on their website.

Benjamin Piekut studied music and philosophy at Hampshire College before pursuing his M.A. in composition at Mills College, where he studied with Alvin Curran and Pauline Oliveros. After a stint in the critical studies/experimental practices program at the University of California, San Diego, he completed his Ph.D. in historical musicology at...

Michael Pollan

Journalist and Professor of Non-Fiction at Harvard University
Michael Pollan gave a Visiting Writer Lecture at the Arts Research Center on April 24, 2009. If you are interested in contacting this artist, please find them on their website.

For more than thirty years, Michael Pollan has been writing books and articles about the places where the human and natural worlds intersect: on our plates, in our farms and gardens, and in our minds. Pollan is the author of eight books, six of which have been New York Times bestsellers; three of them (including his latest, How to Change Your Mind) were immediate #1 New York Times bestsellers....

Beth Piatote

ARC Director, 2020 ARC Fellow – Poetry and the Senses

Beth Piatote is a creative writer, playwright, and scholar. She is the author of two books, including the mixed-genre collection, The Beadworkers: Stories (Counterpoint 2019), which was long-listed for the Aspen Words Literary Prize and the PEN/Bingham Prize, and short-listed for the California Independent Booksellers Association “Golden Poppy” Prize for Fiction. The Beadworkers was named the winner of the 2020 Electa Quinney Award for Published Stories. Her full-length play...

Katie Peterson

Poet and Director of the Graduate Creative Writing Program at UC Davis
Katie Peterson gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in April 2022, part of the Spring 2022 Flash Reading Series. If you are interested in contacting this artist, please find them on their website.

Katie Peterson is the author of Fog and Smoke, published by FSG in early 2024. Poems from the collection have appeared in the Atlantic, the New Republic, the New York Review of Books, and the Yale Review, among other publications. Her previous book, Life in a Field (2021) is a collaboration with the...

Brittany Perham

Author and Professor of Creative Writing at Stanford University
Brittany Perham gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in April 2021, part of the Spring 2021 Flash Reading Series. If you are interested in contacting this artist, please find them on their website.

Brittany Perham's most recent book, Double Portrait (W.W. Norton, 2017), was selected by Claudia Rankine for the Barnard Women Poets Prize and was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award. She is also the author of The Curiosities (Free Verse Editions, 2012); and, with Kim Addonizio, the collaborative word/art...

Cecilia Palmeiro

Writer, Activist, and Adjunct Professor of Contemporary Latin American Studies and Gender Theory at NYU in Buenos Aires
Cecilia Palmeiro was a Visiting Scholar Panel Participant at the Amateurism Across the Arts Conference at the Arts Research Center on March 9, 2018. If you are interested in contacting this artist, please find them on their website.

Cecilia Palmeiro is one of the founders of the transformative Latin American feminist movement Ni Una Menos, or “Not One Woman Less,” which organizes to end femicide and gender-based violence. The Ni Una Menos collective has been supported by Global Fund for Women since 2017. She is also a writer, literary critic, performer, feminist activist,...

Solveig Øvstebø

Executive Director and Chief Curator at the Astrup Fearnley Museet
Solveig Øvstebø was a Visiting Curator Panel Participant at the Feminist Curatorial Practices Roundtable Conversation at the Arts Research Center on April 11, 2018. If you are interested in contacting this artist, please find them on their website.

Born in Chicago, Illinois in 1973, Solveig Øvstebø undertook post-graduate studies in art history at the University of Bergen and was the former Director of Bergen Kunsthall, developing it into one of the main contemporary art institutions in Norway, with a focus on production, research and discourse.

She has curated and...