Visiting Artist/Writer/Curator/Lecturer

JD Beltran

Artist/Filmmaker, Inventor, Journalist, Writer, Designer, Educator, Creativity Cheerleader, and Founder/Director of Center for Creative Sustainability
JD Beltran is an award-winning creative, journalist, and policymaker with extensive experience in design & technology, sustainability, culture, and art. She is the Founder & Director of the Center for Creative Sustainability consultancy in San Francisco and is a professor in Design at San Francisco State University. Beltran's work has won myriad awards, having been exhibited worldwide including at the Walker Art Center, the San Francisco MOMA, Ars Electronica in Austria, The Getty Center, The Kitchen, New York, and the MIT Media Lab. Her work was...

Roberto Bedoya

Cultural Affairs Manager for the City of Oakland

Roberto Bedoya is the Cultural Affairs Manager for the City of Oakland, where he recently shepherded its Cultural Plan, Belonging in Oakland: a Cultural Development Plan. Throughout his career, Bedoya has consistently supported artist-centered cultural practices and advocated for expanded definitions of inclusion and belonging in the cultural sector. His essays, “U.S. Cultural Policy; Its Politics of Participation, Its Creative Potential;” “Creative Placemaking and the Politics of Belonging and Dis-Belonging;” and “Spatial Justice: Rasquachification, Race and the City,”...

Bruce Beasley

Sculptor

Bruce Beasley was born in Los Angeles in 1939. A typical hot rod loving teen raised in West Los Angeles, he graduated from University High School then headed for Dartmouth as a Freshman to study rocket engineering. After taking one of the few art classes Dartmouth offered, Beasley knew that his calling was art. He transferred to the University of California, Berkeley to study sculpture, and while still an undergrad, Beasley’s very early work titled Tree House, from the Cast Iron series, was selected for inclusion in the influential exhibition...

Dena Beard

Director of the Leonard & Claire Tow Center for the Performing Arts Brooklyn College

Dena Beard is Director of the Leonard & Claire Tow Center for the Performing Arts at Brooklyn College. She received her M.A. in Art History, Theory, and Criticism from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was previously Executive Director of The Lab in San Francisco and Assistant Curator at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.

John Perry Barlow

Poet, Essayist, Cattle Rancher, Cyberlibertarian Political Activist; Former Lyricist for the Grateful Dead
In 1990, John Perry Barlow co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a nonprofit based in the U.S. that provides legal aid to defend individuals and new technologies from what it considers to be misdirected legal threats. His writing about the impact of the Internet has influenced people’s thinking since the network’s earliest days. His essays for Wired, The New York Times, Communications of the ACM and other publications have been vital to the public discourse. He was probably best-known as a lyricist, essayist and cyberlibertarian, but he was also a...

Ferran Barenblit

Museum Director

Ferran Barenblit, who was born in Argentina, is a renowned curator and museum director with an extensive career, having led three prestigious art institutions in the last twenty years.

His first position as director was between 2002 and 2008 at CASM (Centro de Arte Santa Mónica de Barcelona), a laboratory for experimentation and new artistic productions. This was followed, in the period 2008-2015, by the direction of the CA2M of the Community of Madrid, a museum located in the metropolitan area of the capital that combines an ambitious program with an intense...

Horace D. Ballard

Curator of American Art at Harvard Art Museums

Horace D. Ballard (he/they) investigates the art, ideas, and visual cultures of the United States and the Americas. His research interests include the legibilities of gender and race in 18th- and 19th-century portraiture, colonial men’s fashion, and the visual and material cultures of religion. Before arriving at the Harvard Art Museums, Ballard held positions in the curatorial, education, and interpretation departments of the Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA); Yale University Art Gallery; the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design (RISD...

Ivanie Aubin-Malo

Dancer, Choreographer, Curator

Wolastoq and Quebecois dancer, choreographer and curator Ivanie Aubin-Malo invests herself in projects that reflect on ecology and human ethics regarding our environment. She has also danced Fancy Shawl, a powwow style, since 2015, connecting with the spirit of transformation and celebrating women’s audacity. Her artistic research as a creator aims to shed light on the beauty of the Wolastoqey language and its relation to the land and the body. Ivanie additionally contributes to connecting Indigenous movement-based artists in order to break isolation,...

Tarek Atoui

Artist, Composer

Tarek Atoui is an artist and composer working within the realm of sound performance and composition. His work challenges traditional ways of perceiving sound and focuses on the medium’s ability to act as a catalyst for human interaction, while exploring its relation to current social, historical and political realities. Atoui’s work often revolves around large-scale, collaborative performances that stem from extensive research into music history and anthropology. He engineers complex and inventive instruments, arranges and curates concerts, performances, listening...

Knut Ove Arntzen

Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Bergen, Theatre Critic

Knut Ove Arntzen, was since 1983 assistant and later associate professor at the former Institute for theatre studies, now the Section for theatre studies at the Institute for Cultural Studies and Art History at the University of Bergen, Norway. He has been a free lance theatre critic at the paper Arbeiderbladet in Oslo, 1976-1986, and has benn in the function of a scientific consultant to the Bergen International Theatre. He was participating in planning and running the Drama Course at the Writing Academy of Hordaland County in Bergen and taught as at the director´s course...