Visiting Artist/Writer/Curator/Lecturer

M. NourbeSe Philip

Poet, Novelist, Playwright, and Lawyer

M. NourbeSe Philip was born in Tobago. A poet, novelist, playwright, and lawyer, NourbeSe Philip holds a BSC in Econ as well as an MS in Political Science from the University of the West Indies, and a law degree from the University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada.

NourbeSe Philip has published four books of poetry, including Zong! (Wesleyan University Press, 2008), She Tries Her Tongue; Her Silence Softly Breaks (Casa de las Americas, 1988), winner of the Casa de las Americas prize; Salmon Courage (Williams Wallace Inc....

Jenna Wortham

Journalist

Jenna Wortham (they/them), also known as J Wortham, is a sound healer, reiki practitioner, herbalist, and community care worker oriented towards healing justice and liberation.

J is also a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, and co-host of the podcast...

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, ...

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...

Robert Wilson

Experimental Theater Stage Director & Playwright

Born in Waco, Texas, Robert Wilson is among the world’s foremost theater and visual artists. His works for the stage unconventionally integrate a wide variety of artistic media, including dance, movement, lighting, sculpture, music and text. His images are aesthetically striking and emotionally charged, and his productions have earned the acclaim of audiences and critics worldwide. After being educated at the University of Texas and Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute, Wilson founded the New York-based performance collective “The Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds” in the mid-1960s, and...

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...

David Wilson

Paper & Performance-based Artist

David Wilson is an artist based in Oakland, CA. He creates observational drawings based in direct experiences with landscape and orchestrates site-based gatherings that draw together a wide net of artists, performers, filmmakers, chefs, and artisans into collaborative relationships. He organized the experimental exhibition The Possible at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and received the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's 2012 SECA Art Award. He has exhibited his work with SFMOMA, was included in the 2010 CA Biennial at the...

Zouhair Mussa

Community organizer and Multi-Disciplinary Artist

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 with the aid of his artistic expression. Zouhair was a 2019 Oakland Youth Poet Laureate Finalist.

Angie Wilson

Interdisciplinary Artist

Angie Wilson is an interdisciplinary artist working in textile-based sculpture, installation, social practice, interiors, and costume design. She is interested in the intimacy of textiles – as protective, sheltering, comforting, and expressive. Textiles as clothing and domestic objects signify identity, hold memory, and tell stories. Angie references weaving as a powerful metaphor for interconnectivity - of the universe, our communities, our bodies, and minds. In her work, she opens space for the narrative power of textiles to illustrate the interconnectivity and...