Visiting Artist/Writer/Curator/Lecturer

Alex Donis

Visual Artist

Alex Donis is a Los Angeles-based artist whose work examines and redefines the boundaries set within religion, politics, race, and sexuality. Interested in toppling societies’ conventional attitudes, his work is often influenced by a tri-cultural (Pop, Latino, and Queer) experience. He has worked extensively in a variety of media including painting, installation, photography, video, and works on paper.

He was born in 1964 in Chicago, IL and was educated at a Catholic school in East Los Angeles, an east-coast prep school in Massachusetts,...

Derrick Duren

Curator

Derrick Duren is a senior transfer student at UC Berkeley completing a double major in Media and American Studies. Derrick has dedicated much of their extracurricular time to social justice education and advocacy through their experiences as Multi-Cultural Awareness Chair and as a curator for Multi, their inaugural art showcase for students of color at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Derrick currently serves as a Development Assistant & Honorary Student Committee member at the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive. As a summer fellow,...

Leslie St Dre

Artist, Organizer, Educator

Leslie St Dre (formerly Dreyer) is an artist, organizer and educator dedicated to building joyfully militant and intersectional movements for land and housing justice. They’ve spent the past decade honing a tactical arts organizing practice utilizing integrated narrative and media strategies. This work merges popular education, on-the-ground organizing, direct action, performance and visual art towards specific goals to change our collective situation. The actions become ephemeral multigenerational community spaces where unhoused and housed...

Natalie Diaz

Mojave American poet, Language Activist, Former Professional Basketball player, Educator

Natalie Diaz was born in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian community. She earned a BA from Old Dominion University, where she received a full athletic scholarship. Diaz played professional basketball in Europe and Asia before returning to Old Dominion to earn an MFA. She is the author of the poetry collections Postcolonial Love Poem (2020), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; and When My Brother Was an Aztec (2012), which New York Times...

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Natalie Diaz, and Aja Monet

April 12, 2021
Menat Allah El Attma
Poetry Reading featuring Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Natalie Diaz, and Aja Monet

How does my body make room for
another who perceives my senses?
—Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge

A video call screenshot showing six people waving and smiling, with backgrounds including bookshelves, shoji screens, and modern wall art.

...

Susana de Sousa Dias

Independent Filmmaker

Susana de Sousa Dias' cinematic works explore the dialectics of history and memory, questioning established regimes of visibility with a focus on the archive. Her works have been presented both in art venues and film festivals such as the Berlinale, Documenta, and Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art, among others.

She received a FIPRESCI Award and the Grand Prix Cinéma du Réel for her film 48. She was guest artist at the Flaherty Seminar in 2012 and delivered the 2019 Les Blank Lecture at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.

While at...

Apsara DiQuinzio

Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at Nevada Museum of Art

Apsara DiQuinzio is senior curator of contemporary art at the Nevada Museum of Art, where she oversees the contemporary program. Over the course of DiQuinzio’s twenty-year career as a curator, she has organized over fifty exhibitions of art, including solo exhibitions with leading contemporary artists such as Michael Armitage, Trisha Donnelly, Vincent Fecteau, Arthur Jafa, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Otobong Nkanga, Christina Quarles, R.H. Quaytman, and Paul Sietsema, among many others. Previously, she was the senior curator of modern and contemporary art and Phyllis C. Wattis...

T.J. Demos

Art Historian, Cultural Critic

T. J. Demos is the Patricia and Rowland Rebele Endowed Chair in Art History in the Department of the History of Art and Visual Culture, at University of California, Santa Cruz, and founding Director of its Center for Creative Ecologies. Demos is the author of several books, including Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today (Sternberg Press, 2017); Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology (Sternberg Press, 2016); The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary...

Jen Delos Reyes

Artist, Educator Community Arts Organizer

Jen de los Reyes was born in the city of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, and educated first in its local music scene of the mid-90’s infused with the energy of Riot grrrl and DIY, and then in its university. [1] How she works today is rooted in what she learned in her formative years as a show organizer, listener, creator of zines, and band member. Graduate work at the University of Regina made the space possible for her to see her work as an organizer as a key component of her continued creative work.

Jen de los Reyes is a 'farmer of sorts and an artist of sorts'[2],...

Fall 2024 Artist-in-Residence Amanda Strong, with Visiting Artist Bracken Hanuse Corlett

Fall 2024 ARC Artist-in-Residence Amanda Strong with Visiting Artist Bracken Hanuse Corlett October 30 - Nov 1, 2024

Presented by the Arts Research Center in collaboration with the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, and co-sponsored by the Berkeley Center for New Media...

Amanda Strong will be the Arts Research Center's Artist-in Residence for fall 2024. She is a Michif (Metis) interdisciplinary artist with a focus on filmmaking, stop motion animations and media art. Currently based on unceded Coast Salish territories also known...