Visiting Artist/Writer/Curator/Lecturer

Jonah Bokaer

Choreographer, Media Artist
Jonah Bokaer was a Visiting Artist Panel Participant at the Making Time: Art Across Gallery, Screen and Stage Screening at the Arts Research Center on April 20, 2012.

Jonah Bokaer has cultivated a new form of Choreography merged with Visual Art & Design. American & Middle Eastern, he has deeply interwoven an international career as an exhibiting museum artist; with a touring multi-ethnic dance company; with a nonprofit practice that has succeeded in delivering 4 arts facilities for younger artists.

Natasha Boas

Contemporary Art Curator, Writer, Critic
Natasha Boas was a Visiting Lecturer who lectured at the Thinking Through the Arts and Design at Berkeley Spring 2017 Lecture Series and Art of Cultural Criticism Fall 2016 Lecture Series.

Natasha Boas is a French-American contemporary art curator, writer, and critic. She has taught art history and curatorial studies at Yale, Stanford, and the San Francisco Art Institute. Her exhibition on the Modernist Algerian artist, Baya MahieddineBaya: Woman of Algiers in 2018 at the...

Iain Boal

Social Historian of Science and Technics
Iain Boal gave a Visiting Lecturer Lecture at the Arts Research Center on Feburary 1, 2017.

Iain Boal is a social historian of science and technics, affiliated with the University of California and Birkbeck College, London. He is associated with Retort, a group of writers, artists and artisans based for two decades in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is particularly interested in the relations between art, science, and representation. He is a founder of the new field of agnotology (a term he coined), the systematic study of ignorance and the long shadows cast by...

Lisa Blackmore

Researcher, Curator, and Educator
Lisa Blackmore gave a Visiting Lecturer Lecture at the Arts Research Center on November 14, 2024.

Lisa Blackmore is a researcher, curator and educator, working with art and water cultures in Latin America. Since 2018, she has been directing entre—ríos, a platform whose collaborative methodologies (re)connect diverse communities to bodies of water through curatorial, editorial and pedagogical projects. She is a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at UC Berkeley and Senior Lecturer in Art History and Interdisciplinary Studies...

Kaylan Black

2021 and 2022 Oakland Vice Youth Poet Laureate
Kaylan Black gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in April 2023, part of the Spring 2023 Flash Reading Series.

Kaylan Black, 2021 and 2022 Oakland Vice Youth Poet Laureate and a member of the National Society of High School Scholars. At the time of her Flash Poetry reading in April 2023, she had been accepted into 3 colleges early as a 17 year-old and Senior at Oakland Charter High School. She has been on the African American Honor Roll and Achievement, Honor Roll, and a Junior Community Organizer with ACCE.

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...