Scholar

Shannon Steen

Associate Professor the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley

Shannon Steen writes and teaches about a variety of topics, but primarily about performance in its social and political contexts. Her book The Creativity Complex: Art, Tech, and the Seduction of an Idea will be published with the University of Michigan Press in 2023. Prior to that she authored ...

Eric Stanley

Chair in LGBT Equity and Associate Professor in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley

Eric A. Stanley is the Haas Distinguished Chair in LGBT Equity and an associate professor in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley where they are also affiliated with the Program in Critical Theory.

Eric’s first manuscript Atmospheres of Violence: Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable (Duke 2021) argues racialized anti-trans/queer violence is...

Juliana Spahr

Poet, Critic, Editor, and Professor and Unit Chair of Arts & Humanities at Mills College at Northeastern University

Juliana Spahr is a poet & scholar of 20th c. literature. Her poetry moves between lyricism, explanatory prose, and theoretical discussion. In her most recent book, That Winter The Wolf Came, concerns global struggle, especially those located at the intersection of ecological and economic catastrophe. Previous to this, she has published four full-length collections of poems and two books of prose that might be memoirs. Dr. Spahr’s scholarly work is about literature’s complicated role in political movements.

Patricia Smith

ARC Fellow, Poet, Spoken-Word Performer, Playwright, Author, Writing Teacher, and Former Journalist.

Patricia Smith is the 2021 recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for Lifetime Achievement, presented by the Poetry Foundation, and a 2022 inductee of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. She is the author of nine books of poetry, includingUnshuttered (Feb 2023);Incendiary Art, winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the 2018 NAACP Image Award, and finalist for the2018 Pulitzer...

Daniel Leeman Smith

Director, Playwright, Dramaturg, Producer, and Program Manager of NYU's Creative Career Hub
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 Arts Program), Diné Nishłį (i am a sacred being) Or A Boarding School Play (Director, Alter Theater...

Solveig Øvstebø

Executive Director and Chief Curator at the Astrup Fearnley Museet

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 co-curated numerous exhibitions, including Looking is Political: Nairy Baghramian; Bojan Sarcevic; and Ane Hjort Guttu (2009); Sergej Jenssen; Leibhaftige Malerei Jxxxa: and Jutta Koether (2008); The Absence of Mark Manders; Center of Gravity: Runa...

Pamela Sneed

Poet, Performance Artist, Actress, Activist, and Professor of Visual Arts at Columbia University

Pamela Sneed is a New York–based poet, performer, and visual artist. She is the author of Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom Than Slavery (Holt, 1998), KONG and Other Works (Vintage Entity Press, 2009), Sweet Dreams (Belladonna*, 2018), and Funeral Diva, published by City Lights in Oct 2020. Funeral Diva was featured in The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, Literary Hub, Artnet, and more. Funeral Diva won the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry....

Mary Ann Smart

ARC Fellow, Musicologist, and Professor in the Department of Music at UC Berkeley

Mary Ann Smart's research has focused on social dimensions of opera in nineteenth-century Europe. Her first book, Mimomania: Music and Gesture in Nineteenth-Century Opera(link is external) (2004), drew on textual sources (treatises on acting, staging manuals) and musical evidence to suggest close ties between musical patterns and physical gesture in repertory stretching from the...

SA Smythe

Writer, Artist, and Assistant Professor of Black European Cultural Studies in the Department of African American Studies at UCLA

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 internationally in collaborative and solo performance exhibitions, film and multimedia installations,...

Sunny A. Smith

Dean of Fine Arts and Professor of Sculpture at CCA

Sunny A. Smith (they/them) is a queer trans* non-binary artist, time traveler, and practical animist based in Yelamu and Huchiun a.k.a. the San Francisco Bay Area, on unceded Ohlone territory.

Smith has presented their work at museums such as SFMOMA, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, The Arts Club of Chicago, and S!GNAL Center for Contemporary Art, P.S.1/MoMA, Palais de Tokyo, the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, MASS MoCA, and The Tang Museum. Smith has lectured at art schools and research universities internationally, as well as at MOMA, the Whitney...