Visiting Artist/Writer/Curator/Lecturer

Emiliano Valdés

Curator, Editor, Cultural Producer
Emiliano Valdés gave a Visiting Curator Lecture at the Arts Research Center on September 19, 2017.

Emiliano Valdés (Guatemala, 1980) is Chief Curator at the Medellin Museum of Modern Art. Until recently, he was Associate Curator for the 10th Gwangju Biennale (South Korea) and Co-Director of Proyectos Ultravioleta (Guatemala), a multifaceted platform for experimentation in contemporary art based in Guatemala City. Prior to that, he was the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Curatorial Fellow at dOCUMENTA(13) and Curator/Head of Visual Arts at the Centro Cultural de España en...

Luis Valdez

Playwright, Director
Luis Valdez gave a Visiting Lecturer Talk at the Arts Research Center on November 18, 2014.

Luis Valdez is regarded as one of the most important and influential American playwrights living today.His internationally renowned, and Obie award-winning theater company, El Teatro Campesino (The Farm Workers’ Theater) was founded by Luis in 1965 – in the heat of the United Farm Workers (UFW) struggle and the Great Delano Grape Strike in California’s Central Valley.His involvement with Cesar Chavez, the UFW and the early Chicano Movement left an indelible mark that remains...

Tourmaline

Artist, Filmmaker, Activist, Editor, and Writer
Tourmaline gave a Visiting Artist Lecture at the Arts Research Center on March 5, 2020.

Tourmaline is an artist, filmmaker, writer, and activist whose practice highlights the experiences of Black, queer, and trans communities and their capacity to impact the world. Her films and photographs rewrite mainstream narratives and cultural histories to initiate a paradigm shift and imagine a more pleasure-filled future. Tourmaline’s practice invites us to fundamentally reshape our beliefs about what is possible.

Tourmaline lives and works in...

Rirkrit Tiravanija

Contemporary Artist
Rirkrit Tiravanija gave a Visiting Artist Lecture at the Arts Research Center on February 23, 2015.

Rirkrit Tiravanija is a contemporary Thai artist who pioneered the Relational Aesthetics movement. By deconstructing the concept of art into its basic components, the artist focuses on the interactions between people and their surroundings rather than aesthetic objects. “My starting point was the search for my identity in foreign places, in places where I am estranged from myself,” he has explained. Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1961, he grew up in multiple...

David Thomson

Film Critic and Historian
David Thomson gave a Visiting Scholar Lecture at the Arts Research Center on September 29, 2016.

David Thomson is a British film critic and historian based in the United States, and the author of more than 20 books. His reference works in particular — Have You Seen...?: A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films (2008) and The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (6th edition, 2014) — have been praised as works of high literary merit and eccentricity. Benjamin Schwarz, writing in The Atlantic Monthly, called him "probably the greatest living film critic and historian" who "...

Linda Tillery

Singer, Percussionist, Producer, Songwriter, and Music Arranger
Linda Tillery was a Visiting Artist Panel Participant at the The Old World in the New Conference at the Arts Research Center on August 28, 2006.

Linda Tillery first came to prominence as the lead singer in San Francisco group The Loading Zone from 1968 to 1969. She recorded her debut album for CBS Records, and worked as a studio musician through much of the 1970s, playing drums on albums by Santana, Mary Watkins, and Teresa Trull. She became a producer and staff artist at Olivia Records late in the decade, and released a second full-length album on the label in 1978....

Sarah Thornton

Writer, Ethnographer, and Sociologist of Culture
Sarah Thornton was a Visiting Writer Panel Participant at the Art of Cultural Criticism Lecture Series at the Arts Research Center on November 10, 2016.

Sarah Thornton is a sociologist who writes about art, design and people. She is the author of four critically acclaimed books. A Canadian who went to the UK on a Commonwealth Scholarship, Thornton was once hailed as “Britain’s hippest academic.” Now based in San Francisco, Thornton is better known as “the Jane Goodall of the art world.”

Thornton’s latest book Tits Up explores the universal truths of mammary...

The Yes Men

Activist Duo
The Yes Men gave a Visiting Artist Performance at the Arts Research Center on March 2, 2016.

The Yes Men are a culture jamming activist duo and network of supporters created by Jacques Servin and Igor Vamos Through various actions, the Yes Men primarily aim to raise awareness about problematic social and political issues. To date, the duo have produced three films: The Yes Men (2003), The Yes Men Fix the World (2009), and The Yes Men Are Revolting (2014). In these films, they...

Estelle Tarica

Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture at UC Berkeley
Estelle Tarica was a Visiting Scholar Panel Participant / Moderator at the Memory Paths and Fragments from the Past Talk at the Arts Research Center on March 6, 2024.

Estelle Tarica (PhD Comparative Literature, Cornell, 2000) is Professor of Latin American Literatures and Cultures in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and a former Chair of the Latin American Studies Program at UC Berkeley. She is the author of The Inner Life of Mestizo Nationalism (University of Minnesota Press, 2008), concerning the discourse of indigenismo and mestizaje in Mexico, Peru and Bolivia...

Joel Tan

Playwright and Dramatist
Joel Tan was a Visiting Writer Panel Participant at the Impact in the Arts Think Tank Conference at the Arts Research Center on January 17, 2014. Joel Tan is a Singaporean playwright based in London and Singapore. Recent work in the UK includes No Particular Order at Theatre503; When The Daffodils at the Orange Tree Theatre; Living Archive at the Royal Court; Ghosts in the Blood for Audible UK; Overheard, and Augmented Chinatown with Chinese Arts Now. He is under commission with the Royal Court, Headlong Theatre, and the...