Visiting Artist/Writer/Curator/Lecturer

Trajal Harrell

Dancer and Choreographer

Trajal Harrell gained international recognition for creating a series of works that bring together the tradition of voguing - a modern dance style developed in the late 1980s from the Harlem ballroom scene - with early postmodern dance. He is considered to be one of the most important choreographers working in contemporary dance today. In his latest work, the artist combines theoretical ideas from voguing with gestures formal ideas that deriveg from Butoh dance, which was conceived in Japan during the late 50’s and early 60’s. Weaving the links between two seemingly...

Joy Harjo

Performer, Writer of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, and 23rd U.S. Poet Laureate

Joy Harjo was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and is a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. She earned her BA from the University of New Mexico and MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Harjo draws on First Nation storytelling and histories, as well as feminist and social justice poetic traditions, and frequently incorporates indigenous myths, symbols, and values into her writing. Her poetry inhabits landscapes—the Southwest, Southeast, but also Alaska and Hawaii—and centers around the need for remembrance and transcendence. She once commented, “I feel strongly that I have...

Ellen Hargis

Soprano specializing in Early Music

Soprano Ellen Hargis is one of America’s premier early music singers, specializing in repertoire ranging from ballads to opera and oratorio. She has worked with many of the foremost period music conductors of the world, including Andrew Parrott, Gustav Leonhardt, Daniel Harding, Paul Goodwin, John Scott, Monica Huggett, Jane Glover, Nicholas Kraemer, Harry Bickett, Simon Preston, Paul Hillier, Craig Smith, and Jeffery Thomas. She has performed with The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, The Virginia Symphony, Washington Choral Arts Society, Long Beach Opera, CBC Radio Orchestra...

Hou Hanru

International Art Curator and Critic

Hou Hanru’s prolific curatorial work addresses contemporary practice and the conditions of artists living in the diaspora from the perspective of cultural hybridity. Hou gained international attention with Cities on the Move (1997-2000), a traveling exhibition he curated with Hans Ulrich Obrist, which emphasized the ways in which Asian contemporary artists have dealt with rapid changes in urban lifestyles and values. He has also curated many seminal exhibitions in Europe, the U.S., and Asia, including international biennials in Shanghai (2000),...

Cheryl Haines

Principal of Haines Gallery and Founding Executive Director of the FOR-SITE Foundation

For more than 30 years, Cheryl Haines has developed exhibitions and site-specific public programs that have exposed new audiences to contemporary art and advanced the discourse surrounding what she describes as “art about place.” Through the FOR-SITE Foundation and her gallery, Haines presents provocative exhibitions by artists working across a wide range of media, as well as public, site-specific commissions on a national scale.

In 2003, Ms. Haines established the FOR-SITE Foundation to foster the creation, presentation, and public understanding of place-based art...

Joanna Haigood

Co-founder of Zaccho Dance Theatre

Since 1979 Joanna Haigood has been creating work that uses natural, architectural, and cultural environments as points of departure for movement exploration and narrative. Her stages have included grain terminals, a clock tower, the pope’s palace, military forts, and a mile of urban neighborhood streets in the South Bronx. Her work has been commissioned by many arts institutions, including Dancing in the Streets, Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, Walker Arts Center, SF Exploratorium Museum, National Black Arts Festival, and Festival d'Avignon. She has also been honored...

Raquel Gutiérrez

Critic, Essayist, Poet, Performer, and Educator

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Raquel Gutiérrez is a critic, essayist, poet, performer, and educator. Gutiérrez's first book Brown Neon (Coffee House Press) was named as one of the best books of 2022 by The New Yorker and listed in The Best Art Books of 2022 by Hyperallergic...

Yi Gu

Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art and Visual Culture at University of Toronto

Yi Gu is an associate professor of modern and contemporary art and visual culture, with a focus on Asia, especially China. Her current research interests lie in the agrarian imaginary and various extractive regimes including those of historical socialism. Her previous work examines epistemic shifts and perception, landscape and nation-building, and Chinese photography. Her book Chinese Ways of Seeing and Open-Air Painting (Harvard University Press Asia Center, 2020) points out an ocular turn of China’s twentieth century as a foundation for a...

Silvia Gruner

Multimedia Artist

Working in diverse media, Mexico City based Silvia Gruner (born 1959) examines the body as a depository of memory and various cultural traditions. Often using her own body, Gruner explores multiple readings of the female body as it has traditionally been used to define spiritual, sexual, and national identity. Her work has additionally involved the symbolic reinterpretation of everyday domestic and work objects, transforming the quotidian into fetishistic objects of cult or magic.

She has held solo exhibitions at Espace d’art Yvonamor-Palix, Paris; the Museum of...

Talinn Grigor

Professor of Art History Modern, Contemporary Global Architecture, and Art Critical and (post)Colonial Theory at UC Davis

Talinn Grigor’s research focuses on 19th- and 20th-century art and architectural histories through the framework of postcolonial and critical theories, grounded in Iran, Armeno-Iran, and Parsi India. Her books include a winner of the Saidi-Sirjani Book Award from the Association of Iranian Studies, The Persian Revival: The Imperialism of the Copy in Iranian and Parsi Architecture (Penn State Univ., 2021); Contemporary Iranian Art: From the Street to the Studio (Reaktion, 2014); and Building Iran: Modernism,...