Visiting Artist/Writer/Curator/Lecturer

Sherwin Bitsui

Writer, Poet, and Professor of English at Northern Arizona University
Sherwin Bitsui gave a Visiting Writer Reading and Lecture at the Arts Research Center on September 5, 2024.

Sherwin Bitsui, a Diné (Navajo) from the Navajo Reservation in White Cone, Arizona, received an AFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts Creative Writing Program. He is the author of the poetry collections Dissolve (2018), Flood Song (2009), and Shapeshift (2003).

Steeped in Native American culture, mythology, and history, Bitsui’s poems reveal the tensions in the...

Dodie Bellamy

Novelist, Poet, and Essayist
Dodie Bellamy gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in April 2022, part of the Spring 2022 Flash Reading Series.

Dodie Bellamy is a novelist, poet, and essayist with an extensive body of work that includes many books and a handful of chapbooks. Her writing is known for its genre-bending approach, focusing on feminism, sexuality, cultural artifacts, and all things queer. She champions the vulnerable, the fractured, the disenfranchised, and the troubled. Bellamy believes that the spiritual and the political can be discovered in the most unexpected places...

Sven Åge Birkeland

Artistic & Managing Director of Norway's BIT Teatergarasjen
Sven Åge Birkeland was a Visiting Lecturer Panel Participant at the Nordic Time Zones Conference at the Arts Research Center on March 26, 2014.

Sven Åge Birkeland was the artistic and managing director of Norway's oldest and most prestigious international theatre, BIT Teatergarasjen, the dance biennial Oktoberdans and the theatre biennial Meteor. In addition, he was sought after as a curator and advisor for programs of festivals and venues, within Norway as well as internationally. In that capacity he influenced the curatorial processes and development of many performing...

Lisa Bielawa

Composer, Producer, and Performer
Lisa Bielawa was a Visiting Lecturer Panel Participant at the Re-staging / Re-construction / Re-enactment Symposium at the Arts Research Center on August 13, 2012.

Composer, producer, and vocalist Lisa Bielawa is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow and a Rome Prize winner in Musical Composition, who takes inspiration for her work from literary sources and close artistic collaborations. She is the recipient of the 2017 Music Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters and a 2020 OPERA America Grant for Female Composers. She was named a William Randolph Hearst Visiting Artist...

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

Poet
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center on April 26, 2021.

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge was born in Beijing, the daughter of a Chinese mother and an American father who was the son of Dutch immigrants. Her mother was a mathematician, and her maternal grandmother received a college education in prerevolutionary China. Her father was employed at the American Embassy in Chungking, and later pursued Far Eastern studies at Harvard University. Her family moved to the United States when she was a year old. She earned a BA from Reed College...

JD Beltran

Artist/Filmmaker, Inventor, Journalist, Writer, Designer, Educator, Creativity Cheerleader, and Founder/Director of Center for Creative Sustainability
JD Beltran was a Visiting Curator Panel Participant at the "ART/CITY" Symposium at the Arts Research Center on March 16, 2012. JD Beltran is an award-winning creative, journalist, and policymaker with extensive experience in design & technology, sustainability, culture, and art. She is the Founder & Director of the Center for Creative Sustainability consultancy in San Francisco and is a professor in Design at San Francisco State University. Beltran's work has won myriad awards, having been exhibited worldwide including at the Walker Art Center, the...

Roberto Bedoya

Cultural Affairs Manager for the City of Oakland
Roberto Bedoy was a Visiting Lecturer Panel Participant at the Urban Ghosts Conversation on January 17, 2017.

Roberto Bedoya is the Cultural Affairs Manager for the City of Oakland, where he recently shepherded its Cultural Plan, Belonging in Oakland: a Cultural Development Plan. Throughout his career, Bedoya has consistently supported artist-centered cultural practices and advocated for expanded definitions of inclusion and belonging in the cultural sector. His essays, “U.S. Cultural Policy; Its Politics of Participation, Its Creative Potential;” “Creative Placemaking and...

Dena Beard

Director of the Leonard & Claire Tow Center for the Performing Arts Brooklyn College
Dena Beard gave a Visiting Lecturer Lecture at the Arts Research Center on March 8, 2017.

Dena Beard is director of the Leonard & Claire Tow Center for the Performing Arts at Brooklyn College. She was Executive Director of The Lab in San Francisco from 2014–2023 and Assistant Curator at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive from 2007–2014. Beard has organized hundreds of projects with artists such as Lutz Bacher, Sadie Barnette, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Ellen Fullman, Dora García, Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork, Anna Halprin, Asher Hartman, Annea Lockwood, Barry McGee,...

John Perry Barlow

Poet, Essayist, Cattle Rancher, Cyberlibertarian Political Activist, and Former Lyricist for the Grateful Dead
John Perry Barlow gave a Visiting Writer Lecture at the Arts Research Center on September 8, 2014. In 1990, John Perry Barlow co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a nonprofit based in the U.S. that provides legal aid to defend individuals and new technologies from what it considers to be misdirected legal threats. His writing about the impact of the Internet has influenced people’s thinking since the network’s earliest days. His essays for Wired, The New York Times, Communications of the ACM and other publications have been vital to the public...

Ferran Barenblit

Director of the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona
Ferran Barenblit was a Visiting Curator Panel Participant at the Making Time: Art Across Gallery, Screen and Stage Screening at the Arts Research Center on April 21, 2012.

Ferran Barenblit, who was born in Argentina, is a renowned curator and museum director with an extensive career, having led three prestigious art institutions in the last twenty years.

His first position as director was between 2002 and 2008 at CASM (Centro de Arte Santa Mónica de Barcelona), a laboratory for experimentation and new artistic productions. This was followed, in the period 2008-2015...