Visiting Artist/Writer/Curator/Lecturer

Devi Peacock

Founder and Executive Director of Peacock Rebellion

Devi Peacock is a South Asian non-binary storyteller, performing artist and community organizer based in Oakland, California. At the time of this interview, they were the founding Artistic and Executive Director of Peacock Rebellion, an Oakland-based BIPOC, queer- and trans-led arts organization, as well as the co-organizer of the Liberated 23rd Ave. cultural land trust in Oakland. They additionally were an organizer at the Queer Cultural Center, home of the National Queer Arts Festival and a cultural equity Fellow with Emerging Arts Professionals and the Community Arts...

Cecilia Palmeiro

Writer, Activist, and Adjunct Professor of Contemporary Latin American Studies and Gender Theory at NYU in Buenos Aires

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, and queer feminist theorist.

Palmeiro received her MA and PhD from Princeton University -Department of Spanish and Portuguese (2009) and a repatriation postdoctoral degree from CONICET- University of Buenos Aires (2012...

Trevor Paglen

Artist, Geographer, and Author

Trevor Paglen lives and works in New York, NY. As an artist, filmmaker, investigator, technologist, and theorist, Paglen asks questions around vision, perception, materiality, and aesthetics. His wide-ranging oeuvre includes work on artificial intelligence and computer vision, aerospace technology, secrecy and conspiracy, experimental landscapes, speculative fiction, nuclear histories, notional archaeology, psychological operations, and the Weird.

Paglen has photographed secret military bases from enormous distances, tracked classified satellites and objects of...

Samuel Otter

Literary Critic, Professor of English at UC Berkeley

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 has published Melville’s Anatomies (California, 1999), an analysis of how Melville, in his long fiction of the 1840s and 1850s,...

Matthew Olzmann

ARC Fellow and Assistant Professor of English & Creative Writing at Dartmouth

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 Foundation and Kundiman, among others. He teaches at Dartmouth College and in the MFA...

Julian Oliver

Critical Engineer, Educator, Artist, and Activist

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 in Karlsruhe.

Julian has received several awards, most notably the distinguished Golden...

Geoffrey G. O’Brien

Poet and Professor of Poetry at UC Berkeley

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: Ashbery, Donnelly, O’Brien (2012), and he collaborated with poet Jeff Clark on 2A (2006).

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Ayodele Nzinga

Actress, Director, Playwright, Poet, Dramaturg, Performance Consultant, Educator, Community Advocate, and the Director of the Lower Bottom Playaz, Inc

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 BlacSpace Collective. She is the Executive Director of the Black Arts Movement Business District Community Development Corporation, of...

Kim Nguyen

Curator and Head of Programs at the CCA Wattis Institute

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 appeared in exhibition catalogues and periodicals nationally and internationally, with recent texts in catalogues published by the Vancouver Art...

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...