Visiting Artist/Writer/Curator/Lecturer

Siren Leirvåg

Professor of Middle East Studies at the University of Oslo

Siren Leirvåg (born 1962) works at the Department of Cultural Studies and Oriental Languages at the University of Oslo. She graduated as Cand. Philol in Theater Studies from the University of Bergen in 1989 and has taught and supervised theater studies at several Norwegian educational institutions and has also worked as an examiner for several years. She has written textbooks and published articles on performing arts in national and international books and journals. Leirvåg is currently working on a book about Stein Bugge, the Bergen theater ideologist, director and...

Constance Lewallen

Former Adjunct Curator at University of California Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Constance Lewallen (1939–2022) was an American curator. She was known for her support of Conceptual art and West Coast artists. Lewallen was born and raised in New York City. She received her BA from Mount Holyoke College and her MA from California State University, San Diego. She was an adjunct curator at the University of California, Berkeley, Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. In 1996 she curated Jay DeFeo: Selected Works 1952-1989 for Moore College of Art in Philadelphia, which traveled to the UC Berkeley Art Museum. As senior curator at BAM she...

Muriel Leung

Author and Faculty in the School of Critical Studies at CalArts

Muriel Leung is the author of the forthcoming novel-in-stories How to Fall in Love in a Time of Unnamable Disaster (W.W. Norton & Company) and several collections that include Imagine Us, The Swarm (Nightboat Books), Bone Confetti (Noemi Press), and ...

André Lepecki

Professor of Performance Studies at New York University and Associate Dean in the Center for Research and Study at the Tisch School of the Arts

André Lepecki works and researches at the intersection of critical dance studies, curatorial practice, performance theory, contemporary dance and visual arts performance. Selected curatorial work includes Chief Curator of the festival IN TRANSIT (2008 and 2009 editions) at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. Co-curator of the archive Dance and Visual Arts since 1960s for the exhibition MOVE: choreographing you, Hayward Gallery (2010). Curator of the lecture series Points of Convergence: performance and visual arts (2014) and Off-Hinge Off Center: alternative histories of...

Raina J. León

Poet, Writer, and Former Professor of Education at Saint Mary’s College of California

Raina J. León, PhD is Black, Afro-Boricua, and from Philadelphia (Lenni Lenape ancestral lands). She is a mother, daughter, sister, madrina, comadre, partner, poet, writer, and teacher educator. She believes in collective action and community work, the profound power of holding space for the telling of our stories, and the liberatory practice of humanizing education. She seeks out communities of care and craft and is a member of the Carolina African American Writers Collective, Cave Canem, CantoMundo, Macondo. She is the author of black god mother this...

Việt Lê

Artist, Writer, Chair of Graduate Visual and Critical Studies Program and an Associate Professor of History of Art and Visual Culture at California College of the Arts

Việt Lê is an artist, writer, and curator whose work over the past twenty years examines spiritualities, trauma, representation and sexualities with a focus on Southeast Asia and its diasporas, as well as intersectional coalitions. Dr. Lê is the author of Return Engagements: Contemporary Art’s Traumas of Modernity and History in Sài Gòn and Phnom Penh (Duke University Press, June 2021). Arguing for an ethics of return, this book is a political-...

Thomas Jean Lax

Writer and Curator in the Department of Media and Performance at MoMA

Thomas Jean Lax is a curator and writer specializing in black art, queer study and performance. At the Museum of Modern Art, they organized the exhibition Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces (2022) about the gallery, founded by Linda Goode Bryant in 1974 where “blackness existed in the presence of black folks rather than in the absence of whiteness.”...

Fernando Luiz Lara

Architect, Author, and Professor of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania's Weitzman School of Design

Fernando Luiz Lara works on theorizing spaces of the Americas with an emphasis on the dissemination of design ideas beyond the traditional disciplinary boundaries. Framed by decolonial theories, Lara has written widely about issues that pertain to the built environment of our continent.

His latest publications include Street Matters: A Critical History of 20th Century Urban Policy in Brazil (with Ana Paula Koury, 2022);...

Stan Lai

Playwright and Theater Director

One of the most celebrated voices in the contemporary Chinese theatre, Stan Lai has been called "The best Chinese language playwright and director in the world." (BBC) "The preeminent Chinese playwright and stage director of this generation." (China Daily) "Asia's top theatre director." (Asiaweek) "The most celebrated Chinese language playwright and director in the world and his body of work - which to date includes over 35 original plays - has redefined how we think about the art form itself. " (Broadway World) In his “Foreword” to Selected...

Tony Labat

Multimedia Artist, Installation Artist, and Former Professor in the Department of Performance and Video at the San Francisco Art Institute

With ironic wit and incisive social critique, Tony Labat's provocative, nonlinear narrative collages confront cultural identity, loss and displacement. Adopting an irreverent, often subversive stance, Labat represents the experience of difference and marginalization from the mediated position of the "outsider," and deconstructs the codes by which the mass media reinforces cultural mythologies. In his idiosyncratic pastiches of performance, appropriated imagery and unexpected visual metaphors, Labat uses disguise, theatricality, storytelling and role-playing as narrative...