Visiting Artist/Writer/Curator/Lecturer

Samuel Otter

Literary Critic, Professor of English at UC Berkeley
Samuel Otter was a Visiting Scholar Panel Participant at the Conjoined Histories Symposium at the Arts Research Center on March 9, 2011.

Samuel Otter has taught in the English Department at the University of California at Berkeley since 1990. He served as department chair from 2009 to 2012. His research and teaching focus on nineteenth-century United States literatures. He is particularly interested in the relationships between literature and history, the varieties of literary excess, and the ways in which close textual interpretation also can be deep and wide.

He...

dg nanouk okpik

IPL Fellow and Poet
dg was an Indigenous Poetics Lab Fellow in Spring 2024.

dg nanouk okpik is an Iñupiaq-Inuit poet from south-central Alaska. Her debut collection of poetry, Corpse Whale (2012), received the American Book Award (2013). Since then, her work has been published in several anthologies, including New Poets of Native Nations (2018) and the forthcoming Infinite Constellations: An Anthology of Identity, Culture, and Speculative Conjunctions (2023). With her new collection Blood Snow,...

Julian Oliver

Critical Engineer, Educator, Artist, and Activist
Julian Oliver gave a Visiting Artist Lecture at the Arts Research Center on November 2, 2015.

Julian Oliver is a Critical Engineer, educator, artist, and activist. His work has been exhibited at numerous museums, festivals and galleries worldwide, among them Transmediale, Ars Electronica, the Vienna Biennale, the Frankfurter Kunstverein, and the Japan Media Arts Festival. Lectures related to his work and ideas have been presented at many conferences and universites internationally, including The Chaos Communication Congress, Tate Modern, Princeton University, and the ZKM...

Matthew Olzmann

ARC Fellow and Assistant Professor of English & Creative Writing at Dartmouth
Matthew Olzmann was an ARC Fellow in 2022 with the Poetry & the Senses initiative.

Matthew Olzmann was born in Detroit. He received a BA from the University of Michigan–Dearborn and an MFA from Warren Wilson College. He is the author of Constellation Route (Alice James Books, 2022); Contradictions in the Design (Alice James Books, 2016); and Mezzanines (Alice James Books, 2013), winner of the 2011 Kundiman Poetry Prize.

Olzmann has received fellowships from the Kresge Arts...

Geoffrey G. O’Brien

Poet and Professor of Poetry at UC Berkeley
Geoffrey G. O’Brien gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in April 2021, part of the Spring 2021 Flash Reading Series.

Poet Geoffrey G. O’Brien was educated at Harvard University and the University of Iowa. He is the author of several poetry collections, including Experience in Groups (2018), People on Sunday (2013), Metropole (2011), Green and Gray (2007), and The Guns and Flags Project (2002). His work is part of Three Poets...

Ayodele Nzinga

Actress, Director, Playwright, Poet, Dramaturg, Performance Consultant, Educator, Community Advocate, and the Director of the Lower Bottom Playaz, Inc
Ayodele Nzinga gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in April 2023, part of the Spring 2023 Flash Reading Series.

Ayodele Nzinga is a multi-hyphenated artist; a brilliant actress, producing director, playwright, poet, dramaturg, performance consultant, educator, and community advocate. She is the director of the Lower Bottom Playaz, Inc., Oakland's oldest North American African Theater Company and founder of Lower Bottom Playaz Summer Theater Day Camp. She is co-founder of Janga’s House a Black Women Arts collective and a founding member of...

Kim Nguyen

Curator and Head of Programs at the CCA Wattis Institute
Kim Nguyen was a Visiting Curator Panel Participant at the Feminist Curatorial Practices Roundtable at the Arts Research Center on April 11, 2018.

Kim Nguyen is a curator and writer based in San Francisco, where she is Curator and Head of Programs at the CCA Wattis Institute. Nguyen was formerly director and curator of Artspeak, an artist-run non-profit in Vancouver, Canada. Between 2011 and 2016 she presented exhibitions and publications with Alex Da Corte, Valérie Blass, Yuji Agematsu, Abigail DeVille, Aaron Flint Jamison, and Danh Vo, among many others. Her writing has...

Adam Nilsen

Senior Lecturer in the Lurie College of Education at San Jose State
Adam Nilsen gave a Visiting Scholar Lecture at the Arts Research Center on February 24, 2016.

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...

Maggie Nelson

Writer and Professor of English at the University of Southern California
Maggie Nelson gave a Visiting Writer Lecture/Conversation at the Arts Research Center on January 30, 2017.

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...

Zouhair Mussa

Community organizer and Multi-Disciplinary Artist
Zouhair Mussa gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in April 2022, part of the Spring 2022 Flash Reading Series.

Zouhair Mussa is a Sudanese/Nubian-American community organizer and multi-disciplinary artist from West Oakland. His art is based on the life he has lived and aims at addressing that which is detrimental to him and his community. He seeks to shed light on injustices that plague the places he calls home. He uses his art to remember the fallen and dreams of healing the struggle. Most importantly, he wants to uplift and inspire change...