Scholar

Shannon Jackson

Former ARC Director, Professor of the Arts & Humanities, Department Chair of History of Art, and former Associate Vice Chancellor for the Arts + Design

Shannon Jackson is the Cyrus and Michelle Hadidi Professor of the Arts & Humanities, Department Chair of History of Art, and former Associate Vice Chancellor for the Arts + Design. Jackson’s research focuses on two overlapping domains: 1) collaborations across visual, performing, and media art forms and 2) the role of the arts in social institutions and in social change. Her most recent books are Back Stages: Essays Across Art, Performance, and the Social (Northwestern University Press, 2022), and The Human Condition: Media Art from the Kramlich Collection (Thames...

Cynthia Wu

Professor of Gender Studies & Asian American Studies at Indiana University Bloomington

Cynthia Wu is an interdisciplinary scholar with intellectual origins in literary and cultural criticism. Their work focuses on how racialized masculinities are produced through investments in physical or psychosocial difference, queerness, and non-normative affiliations. Their first two monographs, Chang and Eng Reconnected: The Original Siamese Twins in American Literature and Culture and Sticky Rice: A Politics of Intraracial Desire, examine Asian American men’s unexpected intimacies in the face of pressures that dictate conformity, respectability, and...

Alva Noë

ARC Fellow, Philosopher, and Professor of Philosophy at UC Berkeley

Alva Noë is a writer and a philosopher living in Berkeley and New York. He works on the nature of mind and human experience. He is the author of Action in Perception (MIT Press, 2004); Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2009); ...

Adam Nilsen

Senior Lecturer in the Lurie College of Education at San Jose State

Adam Nilsen was the head of education and interpretation at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at UC Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford’s Graduate School of Education in 2015 in Learning Sciences and Technology Design. He holds a B.A. from Stanford and an M.A. from New York University in Anthropology. His professional background is in museum education. As a researcher at the Oakland Museum of California, he curated exhibits with themes including migrant labor history, LGBTQ history, and Californians’ recollections of the 1960s and 1970s. His...

Winnie Wong

Associate Professor in the Department of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley

Winnie Wong is an associate professor in the Department of Rhetoric. Her research is concerned with the history and present of artistic authorship, with a focus on interactions between China and the West. Her theoretical interests revolve around the critical distinctions of high and low, true and fake, art and commodity, originality and imitation, and, conceptual and manual labor, and thus her work focuses on objects and practices at the boundary of these categories. Her first book, ...

Tiffany Ng

ARC Fellow, Associate Professor of Carillon, and University Carillonist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Tiffany Ng is an associate professor of carillon and university carillonist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. An energetic advocate of diversity in contemporary music, she has premiered or revived over sixty pieces by emerging and established composers from Augusta Read Thomas to Yvette Janine Jackson, pioneered models for interactive “crowdsourced” carillon performances and environmental-data-driven sound installations with Greg Niemeyer, Chris Chafe, Ed Campion, Ken Goldberg, John Granzow, and Laura Steenberge, and through her composer collaborations...

Maggie Nelson

Writer and Professor of English at the University of Southern California

Poet, scholar, and nonfiction writer Maggie Nelson earned a PhD in English literature at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Her work is often described as genre crossing or hybrid; she has noted her interest in poet Eileen Myles’s idea of “vernacular scholarship,” adding, “I need to talk back, or talk with, theorists and philosophers in ordinary language, to dramatize how much their ideas matter to me in my everyday life.” Nelson’s book Bluets (2009) is perhaps her most well-known work mix of...

Greg Niemeyer

ARC Fellow, Data Artist, Co-Founder of BCNM, Professor of Media Innovation, an Director of the Art Practice Graduate Program at UC Berkeley

Greg Niemeyer is a data artist and Professor of Media Innovation in the Department of Art Practice at UC Berkeley. He's the former director and co-founder of the Berkeley Center for New Media. He started out with studies in Classics and Photography in Switzerland and switched to new media when he moved to the Bay Area in 1992.

He received his MFA from Stanford University in New Genres in 1997. Since childhood, Niemeyer was fascinated with making mirrors, and he still makes mirrors: media which allow us to see things from a new point of view, a point of view that is...

Myra Melford

Avant-garde Jazz Pianist, Composer, and Professor of Composition and Improvisational Practices at UC Berkeley

For nearly two decades, as a Professor of Composition and Improvisational Practices at UC Berkeley, Myra Melford has pursued a philosophy that honors jazz and new-music traditions while emphasizing emerging developments in musical technique, theory, technology and performance.

The pianist, composer, bandleader and professor Myra Melford—whom the New Yorker called “a stalwart of the new-jazz movement”—has spent the last three decades making original music that is equally challenging and engaging. Culling inspiration from a wide range of sources including the blues of...

Pauline Malefane

Actress, Singer, Musical Director of the Isongo ensemble, and Senior Lecturer Classical Voice at the University of Cape Town

Pauline Malefane is co-founder and co-Music Director of Isango Ensemble. She has worked with members of the company since 2000. She is also an advocate for The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. She saw world-wide success playing the role of Carmen, both on stage and in the Golden Bear-winning feature film U-Carmen eKhayelithsa, for which she won a Golden Thumb from Roger Ebert. She was awarded the Best Actress Award at the South African Film & Television Awards for the film Son of Man. She made her Proms debut at London’s Albert Hall in 2006 with the...