Visiting Artist/Writer/Curator/Lecturer

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...

Erika Balsom

Film Scholar, Critic, and Reader in Film Studies at King’s College London
Erika Balsom was a Visiting Scholar Panel Participant at the "Curating People" Symposium at the Arts Research Center on April 28, 2011.

Erika Balsom is a Reader in Film Studies at King’s College London, focusing on the histories, aesthetics, and politics of nonfiction cinemas.

She has published extensively on the intersections of art and the moving image, often focusing on questions of technological change and/or examining the relationship between artistic practices and their institutional contexts.

She is the author of TEN SKIES (2021), An...

Horace D. Ballard

Curator of American Art at Harvard Art Museums
Horace D. Ballard gave a Visiting Curator Lecture at the Arts Research Center on Feburary 27, 2020.

Horace D. Ballard (he/they) investigates the art, ideas, and visual cultures of the United States and the Americas. His research interests include the legibilities of gender and race in 18th- and 19th-century portraiture, colonial men’s fashion, and the visual and material cultures of religion. Before arriving at the Harvard Art Museums, Ballard held positions in the curatorial, education, and interpretation departments of the Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA...

Cameron Awkward-Rich

Visiting Writer
Cameron Awkward-Rich was a Visiting Writer Panel Participant at the Celebrating Cave Canem Conversation at the Arts Research Center on October 20, 2021.

Cameron Awkward-Rich is a black, trans writer & educator, currently living in Northampton, MA. His first collection of poetry, Sympathetic Little Monster (Ricochet Editions, 2016), was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. His second collection, Dispatch, was the winner of the 2018 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice award & was published by Persea Books in December,...

Tarek Atoui

Artist, Composer
Tarek Atoui gave a Visiting Artist Lecture at the Arts Research Center on March 9, 2015.

Tarek Atoui is an artist and composer working within the realm of sound performance and composition. His work challenges traditional ways of perceiving sound and focuses on the medium’s ability to act as a catalyst for human interaction, while exploring its relation to current social, historical and political realities. Atoui’s work often revolves around large-scale, collaborative performances that stem from extensive research into music history and anthropology. He engineers...

Neda Atanasoski

Neda Atanasoski is Professor and Chair of the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at University of Maryland
Neda Atanasoski was a Visiting Scholar Panel Participant at the Art as Critique Conference at the Arts Research Center on March 1, 2019.

Neda Atanasoski is Professor and Chair of the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies. She is the author of Humanitarian Violence: The U.S. Deployment of Diversity(University of Minnesota Press, 2013) and Surrogate...