Visual Arts

Devi Peacock

Founder and Executive Director of Peacock Rebellion

Devi Peacock is a South Asian non-binary storyteller, performing artist and community organizer based in Oakland, California. At the time of this interview, they were the founding Artistic and Executive Director of Peacock Rebellion, an Oakland-based BIPOC, queer- and trans-led arts organization, as well as the co-organizer of the Liberated 23rd Ave. cultural land trust in Oakland. They additionally were an organizer at the Queer Cultural Center, home of the National Queer Arts Festival and a cultural equity Fellow with Emerging Arts Professionals and the Community Arts...

Shari Paladino

ARC Fellow, Artist, Designer, and Educator

Shari Paladino is an artist, designer and educator in the San Francisco Bay Area. She has exhibited work at the Berkeley Art Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Richmond Art Center. She attended University of California, Berkeley, earning her bachelor’s degree in art education and disability studies, as well as a master’s degree in fine arts. Shari developed curriculum for UC Berkeley’s Department of Art Practice in conjunction with the Jacobs Center for Design and Innovation. She continues to teach at UC Berkeley and California College of the Arts....

Trevor Paglen

Artist, Geographer, and Author

Trevor Paglen lives and works in New York, NY. As an artist, filmmaker, investigator, technologist, and theorist, Paglen asks questions around vision, perception, materiality, and aesthetics. His wide-ranging oeuvre includes work on artificial intelligence and computer vision, aerospace technology, secrecy and conspiracy, experimental landscapes, speculative fiction, nuclear histories, notional archaeology, psychological operations, and the Weird.

Paglen has photographed secret military bases from enormous distances, tracked classified satellites and objects of...

Julian Oliver

Critical Engineer, Educator, Artist, and Activist

Julian Oliver is a Critical Engineer, educator, artist, and activist. His work has been exhibited at numerous museums, festivals and galleries worldwide, among them Transmediale, Ars Electronica, the Vienna Biennale, the Frankfurter Kunstverein, and the Japan Media Arts Festival. Lectures related to his work and ideas have been presented at many conferences and universites internationally, including The Chaos Communication Congress, Tate Modern, Princeton University, and the ZKM in Karlsruhe.

Julian has received several awards, most notably the distinguished Golden...

Shannon Jackson

Former ARC Director, Professor of the Arts & Humanities, Department Chair of History of Art, and former Associate Vice Chancellor for the Arts + Design

Shannon Jackson is the Cyrus and Michelle Hadidi Professor of the Arts & Humanities, Department Chair of History of Art, and former Associate Vice Chancellor for the Arts + Design. Jackson’s research focuses on two overlapping domains: 1) collaborations across visual, performing, and media art forms and 2) the role of the arts in social institutions and in social change. Her most recent books are Back Stages: Essays Across Art, Performance, and the Social (Northwestern University Press, 2022), and The Human Condition: Media Art from the Kramlich Collection (Thames...

Greg Niemeyer

ARC Fellow, Data Artist, Co-Founder of BCNM, Professor of Media Innovation, an Director of the Art Practice Graduate Program at UC Berkeley

Greg Niemeyer is a data artist and Professor of Media Innovation in the Department of Art Practice at UC Berkeley. He's the former director and co-founder of the Berkeley Center for New Media. He started out with studies in Classics and Photography in Switzerland and switched to new media when he moved to the Bay Area in 1992.

He received his MFA from Stanford University in New Genres in 1997. Since childhood, Niemeyer was fascinated with making mirrors, and he still makes mirrors: media which allow us to see things from a new point of view, a point of view that is...

Fred Wilson

2002/3 ARC Artist-in-Residence, Fine Artist

Fred Wilson is renowned for his interdisciplinary practice that challenges assumptions of history, culture, race, and conventions of display. By reframing objects and cultural symbols, he alters traditional interpretations, encouraging viewers to reconsider social and historical narratives.

Wilson’s early work was directed at marginalized histories, exploring how models of categorization, collecting, and display exemplify fraught ideologies and power relations inscribed into the fabric of institutions. His groundbreaking and historically significant exhibition...

David Wilson

Paper & Performance-based Artist

David Wilson is an artist based in Oakland, CA. He creates observational drawings based in direct experiences with landscape and orchestrates site-based gatherings that draw together a wide net of artists, performers, filmmakers, chefs, and artisans into collaborative relationships. He organized the experimental exhibition The Possible at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and received the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's 2012 SECA Art Award. He has exhibited his work with SFMOMA, was included in the 2010 CA Biennial at the...

Matthew Mullins

ARC Fellow and Painter

Matthew Mullins earned his master’s in Fine Arts from UC Berkeley, where he graduated Magna Cum Laude with Department Distinctions. While at UC Berkeley, he received the prestigious Eisner Prize for Visual Art and was named as a Fellow of the Arts Research Center. He taught Painting, Drawing, and Introduction to Visual Thinking at UC Berkeley and also worked as a professional artist before moving to an earthship in the quiet and rugged desert near Abiquiu, NM. Matt is a practicing artist and is represented by several art galleries, including Form & Concept (Santa...

Susannah Sayler & Edward Morris (Sayler/Morris)

Photography, Video, Writing, and Installation Artist Duo

Susannah Sayler and Edward Morris (Sayler/Morris) work with photography, video, writing, and installation to examine our changing notions of nature, culture, and ecology. Their work is often place-based and focused on historical research. They were jointly awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2023.

Their work has been exhibited broadly in the U.S. and internationally, including at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, the Kunsthal in Rotterdam, the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Belvedere Museum, the Museum of Capitalism and the Southeast Center for...