Janet Abrams is a visual artist and writer, who produced the WWW Drawing Project, including the video that will be shown at the Thinking through Drawing symposium, as Special Projects Director for the Stuckeman School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at Penn State University, in 2012-13.
Alarm Will Sound is a 20-member ensemble dedicated to the creation, performance, and recording of today’s music. It is an advocate for innovative work by established and emerging composers, especially works that incorporate theatrical and multimedia elements by choreographers, visual artists, designers, and directors. It fosters the education and professional development of young musicians through residencies, master classes, readings and workshops. With the goal of cultivating a diverse and sophisticated audience, the ensemble brings intelligence and a sense of adventure to the rich variety of musical expression in the contemporary world. Alarm Will Sound will be artists in residence at the Met in the 2013-14 season. The residency will feature four performances, including site-specific collaborations with Kate Soper, Nigel Maister, and John Heginbotham Dance that will explore and exploit various gallery spaces. There will also be a series of residency activities throughout the year, when museum patrons can encounter contemporary music in relationship to the Met’s collection.
Yoon Bahk is a designer and an educator in London who specializes in design thinking and visual scribing. A native of South Korea, Yoon spent a good portion of her formative years in the US and UK. She was trained as an industrial designer at KAIST (2006) in South Korea and received her Masters from the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London in Innovation Design Engineering (2008). Her background and education allows her to be not only bilingual but also multicultural and interdisciplinary enabling her to weave between the social spaces between cultures, disciplines including design and engineering, and commercial and academic worlds. In 2011, Yoon set up Studio Jammo Ltd. She has worked for companies such as Unilever, Pepsico, Barry Callebaut, LG and etc. Yoon has always been passionate about doodling and this had led her to a career in graphic facilitation as part of Studio Jammo’s main activity. After meandering through various creative careers, in 2012 Yoon returned to the Royal College of Art, as a tutor in IDE leading the 1st year of the MA course and running various workshops around the world using collaborative learning and design methods.
Jonathan Berger’s “dissonant but supple” (New York Times) compositions integrate science and human experience, i.e., what does a cancer cell or golf swing sound like? And why does a song make us cry? Berger is the Denning Family Provostial Professor in Music at Stanford University, where he teaches composition, music theory, and cognition at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). He was the founding co-director of the Stanford Institute for Creativity and the Arts (SICA, now the Stanford Arts Institute) and founding director of Yale University’s Center for Studies in Music Technology. Referred to as “lush and inviting” by the San Francisco Chronicle, Berger’s music ranges from vocal, orchestral, and chamber works to electroacoustic constructions. He was featured as composer-in-residence at Spoleto Festival USA (2010) with a version of the harrowing and chilling Theotokia (written for Dawn Upshaw), based on Berger’s recent research into auditory hallucinations. His chamber opera Visitations premiered in April, and Livia Sohn’s performance of his violin concerto, Jiyeh, paired with that of Benjamin Britten, was released in June on Harmonia Mundi’s Eloquentia label
Simon Betts is currently Dean of College Wimbledon College of Art. He studied painting at Sheffield Polytechinic and later completed his MA in painting at Chelsea College of Art & Design. He worked in further education for a number of years as course director foundation at Kensington & Chelsea College London, before becoming course leader foundation at Wimbledon in 2003. His drawing research interest is centered on drawing pedagogy and developing courses that promote new approaches to teaching and learning for drawing across disciplines. He co-authored with Professor Stephen Farthing and Kelly Chorpening the Drawing qualifications for the University of the Arts London. He recently led a team to develop the newly validated cross disciplinary MA Drawing course which, based at Wimbledon College of Art, begins this academic year. He has been an external examiner at a number of Colleges in the UK, and in 2005 was a foundation course consultant at the Shanghai Institute of Visual Art, Fu Dan University, China. He has recently been offered an International Visiting Fellowship by RMIT Melbourne, Australia, to work with their Pharmacutetical and Chemistry Faculty to develop on-line drawing modules to support learning in the sciences. As a painter he has exhibited widely in the UK and Europe. Group shows include: perpetuum mobile The Gallery at APT London,(2008), The John Moores Liverpool 19 (1995), Kunstbrucke 2, galerie Parterre, Berlin Germany. Solo shows included Radical surface, De Ploeghis Gallery Gronningen, The Netherlands. Betts also selected and Curated OUTBOUND 1 & 2, two residencies and exhibitions of 6 students from 5 London art colleges at Richter Werkatelier, Den Helder, The Netherlands in 2008. The working title for Simon’s presentation is: The Purpose of Drawing; New approaches for teaching across disciplines.
Angie Brew is a drawing teacher and practitioner, currently researching enactive observational drawing methods and pedagogy for her doctorate. Her art practice explores secular approaches to death, and drawing for well-being. She leads a community project Drawing Growthin Brixton, London and teaches privately. She also works for ArtsExpress, a community arts education charity. She founded and directsThinking through Drawing, International Drawing and Cognition Research and 123 Draw with Michelle Fava and Andrea Kantrowitz.
Roberto Casati is a tenured senior researcher with the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS-EHESS-ENS). Based in Paris, France, he has worked on various research projects in philosophy and the cognitive sciences, and has taught or been a research fellow at several universities, among which the State University of New York at Buffalo, the University IUAV-Venice, the University of Turin, and Columbia University. His books, some of which have been translated in many languages, include Holes and other superficialities (MIT Press 1994, with Achille Varzi), La philosophie du son (Philosophy of Sound, with J. Dokic, 1994), The Shadow Club (Knopf 2002), and Contre le colonialisme numérique (Albin Michel 2013). http://www.shadowes.org Simon Downs studied illustration (of a particularly traditional school). The evolution of the computer aided design sphere caused him to rethink this traditional practice. In turn he became a digital illustrator, digital animator, interaction and multimedia designer and editorial designer. He worked in London, designing for the finance and publishing sectors. In the year 2000 he became a university lecturer, which caused another round of reflection, a process which continued in 2003 when he joined Loughborough University as a lecturer and design researcher. Simon has been an editor with the journal TRACEY since 2003, founded the political visual culture journal The Poster with Intellect Books in 2009 (as Lead Editor), wrote the book The Graphic Communication Handbook in 2011 for Routledge (in which year he also won the Loughborough University Lecturer of the Year award). He writes on visual communication systems (including drawing), is a Director of the Drawing Research Network and is a trades union representative for the UCU union. Michelle Fava is a visual artist, teacher and researcher based at Loughborough University where she lectures in Fine Art, and is a member of the Design Education Research Group. She holds an MA in Contemporary Visual Arts from Falmouth University (2005). Her current doctoral research investigates the cognitive functions underpinning drawing, and the contemporary educational relevance of observational practices. Michelle has worked with UK schools and colleges to innovate curricula and teaching methods, and foster communities for pedagogic research and innovation. In 2011, together with Angie Brew and Andrea Kantrowitz, she established 123 Draw, the International Drawing and Cognition Research Group, and the Thinking through Drawing symposium series. 123 Draw are currently editing a forthcoming publication Drawing in STEAM and a special issue of TRACEY, the journal of drawing and visualization research.
Natasha Freedman is a creative director working across the arts sector. She directed Complicite’s research and education programme for many years and worked closely with the Laboratoire d’Etude du Mouvement, investigating the relationships between form, the body, colour and space. She has delivered workshops on ‘active looking’ at the National Gallery for over 9 years focusing on detailed observation of the movement and narratives of the body in space and in the frame to deepen engagement with paintings in the collection and in temporary exhibitions. She has delivered projects for the RCA, Tate (adult programme) and Central St Martin’s (post graduate animation) and directed learning and engagement programmes for the Royal Academy of Arts and the Institute of Making. She is currently Director of Learning and Engagement for The Mosaic Rooms.
Vinod Goel originally trained as an architect. However, unable to develop the skills to sketch, draw and visualize in three dimensions, and mesmerized by several books by Nicholas Negroponte, he stepped outside of the field to try and figure out the relationship between mind and design. He eventually ended up at Berkeley where he studied philosophy, computer science, and psychology and completed an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in cognitive science. Thereafter he completed a postdoc at the NIH in cognitive neuroscience. Since then has been a professor of cognitive neuroscience at York University in Toronto, and also held visiting posts at University College London, the University of Aberdeen, the University of Hull, University of Sussex, University of Queensland, le Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (France), and the Max Planck Institute (Berlin). His main research interests are the cognitive and neural basis of real-world reasoning and problem-solving (particularly design).
Tara Geer got her BA from Columbia University with a double major in Art and Art History, she graduated Magna Cum Laude & Phi Beta Kappa. She went back to Columbia with a Teaching Fellowship to get a MFA. She has been drawing and teaching drawing for the nearly 2 decades since. She has also worked at WNYC, the NY public radio station, writing and producing culture pieces for “Morning Edition,” “Studio 360,” Leonard Lopate and other national radio shows. She taught art in the in every borough of NYC, every age, in public and private school, frequently using Visual Teaching Strategies. Recently she has been drawing and teaching private classes out of her studio in Harlem and teaching drawing classes at Columbia. The private students range from advanced drawers working on specific projects, professionals in the arts having blocks, to kids with delays working on perceptual challenges. She has been to several residencies at MacDowell and Denniston Hill and shows her work in galleries, including Tibor de Nagy, The Drawing Center registry and the Four Seasons Hotel in Wyoming. She will have a solo show at the Outpost this winter. She received the Loius Sudler Prize for excellence in the Arts and the Joan Sovern prize. Mehrdad Hadighi completed his post-professional studies at Cornell University and holds a professional degree in architecture and a degree in studio art from the University of Maryland. His scholarly work focuses on drawing parallels between 20th century art, theory and criticism and the constructive principles of architecture. Hadighi’s premiated design competition entries include the Studentenheim + Bauernmarkt, Glockengasse, Public Space in the New American City, Atlanta, Berlin Alexanderplatz Design Competition, Austrian Cultural Institute in Manhattan, and the Peace Garden Design Competition. He has produced site specific installations for galleries in Washington, DC, Buffalo, Ithaca and New York City, and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. The Architectural League of New York selected Hadighi as one of the six notable “Young Architects” in their “Young Architects Forum” series. Hadighi has been selected as one of “25 most intriguing, innovative and intrepid architects, from all over the world” by Wallpaper* magazine; and as one of “10 Young Firms Reshaping the Globe” by the Architectural Record magazine in their Design Vanguard issue. His work is the subject of a monograph by SHARESTAN, and his most recent work has been featured in the following books: Conversions; Small Structures, Green Architecture; Xs Green: Big Ideas, Small Buildings; Extensions and Renovations; Up, Down, Across: Domestic Extensions; House Plus, New House Design; and Architecture In Detail.
Andrea Kantrowitz is an artist, teacher and doctoral candidate at Teacher’s College, Columbia University, where she is doing research on the cognitive dimensions of contemporary artists’ drawing practices. She holds a B.A in Art and Cognition from Harvard University and a MFA in Painting from Yale, teaches foundation drawing at Pratt Institute, and is an adjunct professor in the graduate program in art education at the College of New Rochelle. She has also worked for many years as a teaching artist in the New York City public schools have been involved in multiple local and national research projects. Her research examines the cognitive interactions underlying contemporary artists’ drawing practices. Her own art work has been exhibited nationally and is represented by Kenise Barnes Fine Art in Larchmont NY.
Sabiha Keskin was born in 1955 in Tekirdag, Turkey. In 1974, she graduated from Istanbul Robert College which was considered to provide the best American education in Turkey. She was awarded with Fulbright and TUBITAK grants. She had acceptances from Stanford and Rochester Universities. She preferred to have a medical career in Turkey. In 1980, Keskin was graduated from the Cerrahpasa Medical Faculty in Istanbul Turkey. In 1986 she had her Pediatrics, and in 2002 her Pediatric Neurology expertise at the same Faculty. In 1992, at the Medical College of Wisconsin in the U.S.A, in addition to her studies on epilepsy, she took part in the studies on the intrauterine cocaine-exposed infant’s behavior. In 2000, she took A.B.A. courses at the Florida Technical Institute. She became one of the leading scientific figures in her country on child development regarding mother-child behavior. She introduced an intervention for a secure mother-child attachment relationship at an International Scientific Congresses. Dr Keskin is the author of 13 books on child development that are best-seller sources of the Turkish mothers nationwide as well as doctors and trainers. One of the books is on the development of children’s drawings. She gave consulting to several sources among which Britannica Discovery Library For Children, Kindergarten Journals, Child theaters, Turkish animated film scenarios.
Cyra Levenson, Ed.M., is Associate Curator of Education at the Yale Center for British Art. Prior to Yale, Ms. Levenson held positions at the Seattle Art Museum and the Rubin Museum of Art focused on gallery interpretation. She has worked closely with schools and teachers throughout her career and has conducted research and published on the topic of visual literacy and creativity in museum practice. Ms. Levenson is also the co-curator of the upcoming exhibition, Figures of Empire: Slavery and Portraiture in Atlantic Britain and is author of the article, “Re-presenting Slavery: Underserved Questions in Museum Collections”. Ms. Levenson has a degree in Art Education from Teachers College, Columbia University and has been working in the field of museum education for 15 years.
Rebecca McGinnis is the Museum Educator overseeing Access and Community Programs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. She and her colleagues are recognized internationally for their pioneering programs for visitors with disabilities. With artist-educators Pamela Lawton and Deborah Lutz she developed Thinking Through Drawing, a drawing class for adults who are blind or partially sighted, offered monthly since 2008. A display of work from the class is currently on view in the Ruth and Harold D. Uris Center for Education at the Met. In 2011 she received the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Award for Excellence in Accessibility Leadership and the American Council of the Blind Achievement Award in Audio Description for Museums. Her publications include Art and the Alphabet: A Tactile Experience (with Ileana Sanchez), an innovative children’s book combining braille, tactile pictures, and images of works of art from the Metropolitan Museum; “Enabling Education: Including People with Disabilities in Art Museum Programming” in From Periphery to Center: Art Museum Education in the 21st Century, ed. Pat Villenueve, National Art Education Association, 2007; “Developing Museum Programs for People with Autism” in Understanding Students with Autism through Art, ed. Beverly Levett Gerber and Julia Kellman, National Art Education Association, 2010; “Learning in Art Museums: Cognition and Visual Impairment” in Journal of the Sciences and Arts, Mita Society for the Sciences and Arts, Keio University, Tokyo, number 14, 2010; and “Islands of Stimulation: Perspectives on the Museum Experience, Present and Future” in The Multisensory Museum: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Touch, Sound, Smell, Memory, and Space, ed. Nina Levent and Alvaro Pascual Leone, AltaMira Press, forthcoming. Rebecca is co-convenor with Art Beyond Sight of the bi-annual Multimodal Approaches to Learning conference (2005, 2007, 2009, 2012). She is an adjunct lecturer in the Museum Studies MA Program at Johns Hopkins University, teaching Accessibility in the Museum, a course she developed. She co-chaired the New York Museum Access Consortium from 2000-2012. Her international experience includes directing access audits and training for over fifty museums in the United Kingdom and in the United States, and major collaborations with the British Museum and National Portrait Gallery in London. Rebecca has worked at the Royal National Institute for the Blind and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. In addition to MA degrees in History of Art (NYU) and Museum Studies (University of Leicester), she is a doctoral candidate in Cognitive Psychology pursuing research relating to visual impairment and mental imagery at Teachers’ College, Columbia University.
Julia Midgley is Reader in Documentary Drawing at Liverpool School Art & Design. She practices as as a reportage and documentary artist. Her work serves as a narrative, documentary and archive of 21st century life with a focus on war artists and surgery. Her drawings of 20th Century medicine were exhibited at The Royal College of Surgeons. Julia was the DLA Piper Artist in Residence for the new Art & Design Academy at Liverpool John Moores University. Other residencies and commissions included the Royal Liverpool University Hospital Trust; the Royal Liverpoool & Broadgreen University Hospital; Blackpool Pleasure Beach; Granada Television; Arts Council Art 04 conference and the Stonehenge Riverside Project. More recently she has been making drawings of delegates talking about drawing at drawing conferences! Over decades of practice Julia’s drawings tell of personal journeys. She has drawn a kidney transplant from mother to son; witnessed the excavation of mutilated sacrificial skeletons at Stonehenge; been surrounded by Vikings at Blackpool Pleasure Beach, and stood amongst banks of astonished photographers at Bechers Brook waiting for horses to thunder by. web.me.com/barbara.griffin/sketchlincoln/julia_midgley.html
Chris Moffett is a philosopher of educational aesthetics and a founding member of ARE (aestheticrelationalexercises.com) exploring the moving traces of embodied practice. Currently in New York City, he works with the aesthetics of urban and academic ambulations. He moves with others. Jane Nisselson is the founder of the film production studio Virtual Beauty, whose Webby-nominated short films focus on the intersection of design, science, and engineering. She received her M.S. from the MIT Media Lab. Short documentaries include online video series for the Corning Museum of Glass and Popular Mechanics. Recent projects include a National Science Foundation funded viral video “Explaining Diagrams.” The WWW Drawing workshop video, directed by Jane Nisselson, documents 30 architecture and landscape architecture students creating three vast hand-drawings over a weekend at the Stuckeman School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, Penn State University. Architects Michael Webb, Mark West, and James Wines led the group drawing sessions. The event was organized by Mehrdad Hadighi, Department Head, Professor, and Stuckeman Chair of Integrative Design and Janet Abrams, Director of Special Projects.
Morgan O’Hara was raised in post-war Japan. Her practice researches the vital movement of living beings through drawing. In 1989 she began working in international performance art festivals, did her first site specific wall drawings and began the practice of aikido, a Japanese martial art. O’Hara lives in New York and works internationally. She teaches master classes in drawing and the psychology of creativity in international institutions. Important residencies include MacDowell Colony, New Hampshire; Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Macau Museum of Art, China; Nha San Studio Hanoi, New Space Arts Foundation Hue, and Zero Space Saigon,Vietnam; Aomori Contemporary Art Center, Japan; Guapamacataro, Michoacan, Mexico. Recipient of fellowships from Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Gottleib Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, among others. Selected public collections include: National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, California; Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock, Arkansas; Weatherspoon Gallery, Greensboro, North Carolina; Hood Museum of Art, New Hampshire; Czech National Gallery, Prague; Moravian Gallery, Brno, Czech Republic; Macau Art Museum, Macau, China; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Her permanent site specific wall drawings can be found in Macau, China; Kobe, Japan and Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Publications include five volumes of LIVE TRANSMISSION drawings.
Jaanika Peerna is an Estonian-born artist living and working near New York since 1998, and currently in Berlin. Her work engages with transitions in light, air, water and often involves collaborative processes with designers, dancers, and musicians.
Sharon Rosenzweig is an investigative cartoonist, looking at and listening to people involved in their pursuits, including Occupy Wall Street and backyard chickens. She was trained as a painter/printmaker, at Indiana University, The Art Students’ League, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.Previously, in collaboration with her husband, the comedian Aaron Freeman, she created The Comic Torah, a graphic re-imagining of the Hebrew Bible, published by Ben Yehuda Press.
Sara Schneckloth‘s studio practice is motivated by the question of how science, imagination, and the body inform one another through the activity of drawing. Schneckloth has shown in over fifty exhibitions throughout the US, South Africa, and France, including the Wisconsin Triennial, the Columbus Biennial, Drawing Beyond at the Princeton Arts Council, the Florida Experimental Film Festival, Soho20 Chelsea, and in numerous university galleries. Her essays on drawing and embodiment have appeared in the Journal of Visual Culture, Visual Communications Quarterly, and the Manifest International Drawing Annual. Schneckloth holds an MFA from the University of Wisconsin – Madison, and has lived and worked in Iowa, Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, and Cape Town, South Africa, and Columbia, SC. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Art at the University of South Carolina. Images of her work can be found at www.saraschneckloth.com.
Marjorie Shelley is the Sherman Fairchild Conservator in Charge of the Museum’s Sherman Fairchild Center for Works on Paper and Photograph Conservation.
Jill Sigman asks questions through the medium of the body. Trained in classical ballet, contemporary dance, art history, and analytic philosophy, Sigman has been making dances and performance installations since the early 90s. She is Artistic Director of jill sigman/thinkdance which she founded in 1998, the same year she received her Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton University. Sigman is based in New York City and in 2012 has been a Fellow at the Center for Creative Research at NYU and a Visiting Artist at Wesleyan University. She is currently at work on The Hut Project, an exploration of issues around waste, sustainability, and real estate through the creation of a series of site-specific structures made of found materials. www.thinkdance.org
Seymour Simmons is an Associate Professor in the Department of Fine Art at Winthrop University, Rock Hill, South Carolina, where he coordinates the Undergraduate Art Education program and teaches courses in both art education and studio art, e.g., drawing and figure drawing. He has a B.F.A. in Printmaking from Colorado State University, as well as Masters and Doctorate degrees in Education from Harvard University where his degree was in Philosophy of Education. Prior to coming to Winthrop, he taught at Massachusetts College of Art and worked as a researcher at Harvard ProjectZero with Dr. Howard Gardner. http://www.seymoursimmons.com/
Kim Sloane is currently the Acting Chair of Foundation at Pratt Institute where he had taught the Foundation Drawing course for some fifteen years. Mr. Sloane is also a practicing artist who has shown widely in New York, and has twice received awards for his drawing at the National Academy Museum’s biannual exhibitions. He is a graduate of Yale College and received his MFA from the Parsons School of Design. John Tchalenko graduated in Geology, continued with a PhD in Civil Engineering and published extensively in seismotectonics and earthquakes. He became documentary film director for arts and science films, producing essentially for Channel4, BBC2 and FR3. In 2000, he was made Reader in Drawing and Cognition at the University of the Arts London. Presently, John is Emeritus Researcher at Birmingham University U.K. His interest in Cognition started with the Painter’s Eye Movements, a Wellcome Trust initiative developed with collaborators Humphrey Ocean, painter, Chris Miall, psychologist (Oxford University) and Robert Solso, psychologist (University of Nevada). Eye-tracking and brain scanning techniques were used for the first time to investigate the creative drawing process. Results were presented in the peer-reviewed literature and at the National Portrait Gallery in 1999. Since then John has extended the study to include Human-Computer interfaces for the disabled (Eyemouse Project), visual search in medical imaging (Eye Control Project with Imperial College Computing Dept) and Laparoscopic surgery (How do you Look? with St Mary’s Hospital). Results were presented in the scientific literature and in theNeedle in a Haystack display at the Royal Society 2002 Summer Show and at the Royal Academy of Arts show 2004. How Do You Look? comparing eye-hand co-ordination in painters and laparoscopic surgeons opened at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, toured the U.K. to end at the Royal College of Surgeons in December 2006. Latest publications include: Eye-hand strategies in copying complex lines (2009) in Vision Research 45, and The Gaze-Shift Strategy in Drawing (forthcoming) in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts. Victoria Turnbull is an artist based in London, whose work is concerned with the close examination of objects. Her 154 page work ‘The Drawn Inventory of all the Objects in my Studio’ won the Islington Exhibits artist award in 2012 and her work has been commissioned by the Whitechapel Gallery, Great Ormond Street Hospital and the Building Exploratory. Viyki leads practical workshops in drawing at the National Portrait Gallery, the Camden Arts Centre and RIBA. She is also a freelance lecturer at the National Gallery and has co-written ‘The Keys to Creativity’ (2011) a drawing resource for the National Gallery, as well as education resources for several exhibitions at the Camden Arts Centre including ‘Looking with Viyki Turnbull: Jim Hodges and Breda Beban (2010) and for Wilhelm Sasnal’s painting exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery (2011).
Barbara Tversky is a cognitive psychologist, currently Professor of Psychology at Columbia Teachers College and Professor Emerita at Stanford University. She has long been interested in visual and spatial cognition, thinking, language, and communication, including depictions, descriptions, maps, diagrams, instructions, sketches, illustrations, gestures, and comics. These interests have taken her to collaborations with computer scientists, philosophers, chemists, biologists, geographers, geologists, educators, linguists, designers, architects, and artists. She is gratified by what seems to be an explosion of interest in visual and spatial thinking and communication in so many arenas.
Monika Weiss is a transdisciplinary artist whose work examines relationships between body and history, and evokes ancient rituals of lamentation as traditionally performed in response to war. Her public performances, films, installations and sound works often incorporate drawing as a performative language sited within the space of historical memory and contemporary urban landscape. Her current work considers aspects of public memory and amnesia as reflected within the physical and political space of a City. In 2005 Lehman College Art Gallery (CUNY) organized a retrospective of the artist’s work, Monika Weiss-Five Rivers, which was reviewed in The New York Times. Recent solo museum exhibitions include Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, Poland (2010), and Museum of Memory and Human Rights, Santiago, Chile (2012 – 2013). Weiss’ writings have appeared in numerous publications including New Realities: Being Syncretic (Springer, Wien/New York) and Technoetic Arts (Intellect, London). The artist divides her time between New York City and St. Louis, where she is currently professor at Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, Washington University. Weiss’ work in represented by Galerie Samuel Lallouz, Montreal and in public collections internationally, including CIFO Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, Miami, and Frauenmuseum, Bonn.
Anna Willieme is the founder and director of ArtMed inSight which explores the connections between art and medicine and is currently collaborating with leading medical institutions in both New York and Boston.