*All bios are current to the date of the contributor’s publication.
Marié Abe is an ethnomusicologist, accordionist, composer, and improviser. She completed her Ph.D. in ethnomusicology at the University of California, Berkeley, and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University. Her most recent work focuses on sound, spatiality and empathy in public spaces in contemporary Japan. She is also co-producer of an NPR radio documentary, “Squeezebox Stories,” airing in summer 2011.
Ximena Alarcón is a UK-based Colombian new media artist who focuses on listening to social context related sound, connecting it to individual and collective memories. She nourishes her practice with ethnography, looks for expression in voice and body, and uses networking technologies to interconnect different locations and perspectives of life. She completed her PhD in Music, Technology and Innovation at De Montfort University and was awarded with The Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship 2007-2009 to develop “Sounding Underground” at De Montfort’s Institute of Creative Technologies (IOCT). She is an Associate Researcher at the IOCT, and currently studies Deep Listening practice developing an art-healing project called Networking Migrations.
Maia Asshaq is an Iraqi born writer and artist currently based in Los Angeles, CA. She is the editor-in-chief of Flint Magazine. She is the founder of DittoDitto Books and the Detroit Art Book Fair. In 2015 she received the first Gilda Award for emerging writers from the Kresge Foundation. She is a 2016 Salzburg Global Forum Fellow.
Andrea Ballestero is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Rice University founder and director of the Ethnography Studio https://ethnographystudio.org/. Since 2002 she has conducted research in Costa Rica, Brazil, and elsewhere studying how water is defined, distributed, and valued. She is currently researching cultural imaginaries of the underground in Costa Rica, particularly of aquifers, to understand how the social world is expanding downwards. Recent publications include A Future History of Water (Duke University Press, 2019 and open access) and Touching with Light (Science, Technology and Human Values, 2019). Her publications can be found at https://andreaballestero.com/.
JT Bullitt Formerly a geophysicist (UC Berkeley and MIT), Bullit turned to art when he could no longer find satisfactory answers to his questions about waves, motion, change, and time using the language of science. Since then, he has been exploring the invisible fields of energy and vibration that permeate the world around us, through sound (natural field recordings, altered found sound, audification of infrasonic geophysical processes), alteration of found objects, and drawing.
Mike Bullock is a composer, intermedia artist, and writer based in Philadelphia. His work encompasses electroacoustic improvisation, modular synthesis, field recording, intermedia installation, contrabass and bass guitar, porcelain making, illustration, and critical writing. Bullock has been performing since the mid 90s at venues across the US and in Europe, including Fylkingen in Stockholm, Sweden; Instants Chavirés in Paris; Café OTO in London; Experimental Intermedia and ISSUE Project Room in New York City; The Philadelphia Museum of Art; and EMPAC in Troy, NY. In June 2015, Bullock received a Performance Grant from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage.
Olayami Dabls has worked as a visual story teller using a wide range of materials for more than 45 years. He uses his work to tell stories about African people in particular and about Africa’s material culture embodying his ancestor history, mythology, creation myths, systems of thought and philosophy. Dabls lives and works in Detroit where he directs the MBAD / African Bead Museum.
Alexandra Dalferro received her BA from Columbia University in 2009. She first visited Thailand and became interested in migration issues when she studied abroad in Khon Kaen in 2007. From 2009 to 2010 Alexandra researched migrant lottery ticket sellers as a Fulbright scholar in Bangkok. She currently lives in Bangkok and works at the Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn Anthropology Centre.
J. Martin Daughtry is an associate professor of music and sound studies at New York University. He teaches and writes on acoustic violence, human and nonhuman vocality, listening, jazz, Russian-language sung poetry, sound studies, the auditory imagination, and air. His monograph Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma, and Survival in Wartime Iraq (Oxford, 2015) received a PROSE Award from the Association of American Publishers, and the Alan Merriam Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology. At present he is writing a book about vocality and environment in the Anthropocene.
Warren Defever is a musician and producer, originally from Livonia, Michigan, now based in Detroit. He is most known for his chameleonic project His Name Is Alive, though he is active in numerous other circles. He produced, engineered, and or remixed recordings by Iggy and the Stooges, Easy Action, Low, Ida, Michael Hurley, Califone, Yoko Ono, Thurston Moore, the Gories, the Go, Nomo, Saturday Looks Good to Me, Ethan Daniel Davidson, Faruq Z. Bey, the Von Bondies, Reba Fritz, Destroy All Monsters, Jenny Toomey, Slumber Party, John Sinclair, Elizabeth Mitchell & Lisa Loeb, as well as HNIA offshoot Velour 100.
Stephanie Deumer (b.1989, Oakville, Ontario, Canada) is a visual artist currently living and working in Los Angeles, California. She completed a BA at the University of Guelph in 2011 and an MFA at California Institute of the Arts in 2015. From 2018-2019 she was a fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York. She is the recipient of a 2019 Research and Creation Grant from Canada Arts Council, as well as a 2018 Bar-Fund LA Artist Grant. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include “Far from Fixed,” Modern Fuel Artist Run Centre, Kingston, Ontario (2018); “Real Shadows for Mere Bodies,” College of the Canyons, Valencia, California (2017); and “The Body of Language and The Motion of Words,” PAVED Arts, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan (2017). She has participated in public presentations and panel discussions at institutional venues including The Kitchen, ArtCenter College of Design, PAVED Arts, College of the Canyons, and Cerritos College.
Jason Dilworth’s art and practice reflect a love of geology, history, and ecology. He has collaborated with artists and designers in Sweden, Iceland, Nepal, and Germany. Jason is a co-founder of the collective Designers & Forests. He live and works in western New York where he currently teaches graphic design and typography at the State University of New York at Fredonia, which is near Dunkirk.
Chinnie Ding is a doctoral candidate in English at Harvard. Her main research interests include poetry, Asia, cinema, and the arts. Based in New York, she teaches courses on labor and sensory studies at NYU Gallatin, and is an occasional contributor to Artforumonline.
Peter Doolan is an independent researcher of Thai music. Through several stays in Thailand, he has tried to learn all he can about the country’s many styles of music. He has been sharing his collection of Thai cassettes and knowledge of the music’s history at his blog Mon Rak Pleng Thai since 2008. He currently live in Brooklyn, New York.
Alex Fattal is a Ph.D. Candidate in Social Anthropology at Harvard University. His dissertation “Guerrilla Marketing: Information War and the Demobilization of the FARC” explores the conjugation of counterinsurgency, marketing, and humanitarianism in the Program for Humanitarian Attention to the Demobilized within the Colombian Ministry of Defense. Alex has produced experimental ethnographic videos, founded participatory photography projects and studied the role of photography in the South African liberation struggle. Between 2009 and 2011, Alex put his academic work aside to lead an international campaign to free his brother from arbitrary detention in Iran.
Steven Feld is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Music at the University of New Mexico. His research concerns the anthropology of sound and senses, at ethnographic sites in Papua New Guinea, Europe, Japan, Ghana, and Togo. His books include: Sound and Sentiment (1982/1990), Senses of Place (with Keith Basso, 1996) and Jean Rouch: Ciné-Ethnography (editor/transl., 2003). As a musician, composer, and phonographer he has produced many CDs and radio programs. His most recent project, on jazz cosmopolitanism in Accra, Ghana, is published in DVDs, CDs, and a forthcoming book. He has received fellowships from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (1991), and John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2003-4). His media arts label VoxLox publishes art/anthropology in all media; www.voxlox.net.
Elizabeth Fitzgerald is an observer of Thai politics and history concerned with the ways in which law, rather than protecting citizens, becomes the method by which they are dispossessed of rights.
Lupe A. Flores is a PhD student in sociocultural anthropology at Rice University. Their work bridges border and migration studies, feminist surveillances studies, and science and technology studies. Their dissertation project examines the sociotechnical entanglements between bureaucratic practices and racialized surveillance that underpin humanitarian and migration governance within state and non-state institutions in Mexico. Lupe is also co-coordinator in the Ethnography Studio.
Rebecca Dowd Geoffroy is a Ph.D. student in musicology at Duke University. She performs in Duke’s Collegium Musicum and the Duke New Music Ensemble [dnme]. Her current research focuses on music and politics during the French Revolution.
Kathryn Linn Geurts is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota, where she teaches classes on medical and psychological anthropology, ethnographic methods, African Studies and Disability Studies. She has carried out research in Ghana for over twenty years, most recently as a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2009-10), and is the author of Culture and the Senses: Bodily Ways of Knowing in an African Community (2003).
Benjamin Gaydos is a Detroit-based designer, filmmaker, artist, and educator. He is the founding editor and creative director of Flint Magazine. His experiments in design, sound, film and video have been exhibited internationally. Ben has presented his work at Rhode Island School of Design, Case Western, and MIT’s Media Lab, among other institutions. He is co-founder and principle of goodgood, an interdisciplinary design firm with offices in Detroit and Boston, associate professor at the University of Michigan – Flint, and co-founder and programmer at Mothlight Microcinema in Detroit.
Denise Gonzales Crisp is professor and director of the Master of Graphic Design program in the College of Design at North Carolina State University. She is the author of Graphic Design in Context: Typography, (London: Thames & Hudson, 2012), and co-curator of DesignInquiry: Futurespective, ICA MECA, ME (2019), and Deep Surface: Contemporary Ornament and Pattern, CAM Raleigh, NC (2012). She is currently co-authoring a book that promotes improvisational, situational, and circumstantial approaches to design pedagogy (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2021).
Nicholaus Gutierrez is a Master’s Candidate at NYU, with a focus on literary theory and continental philosophy. He is also a contributing deputy editor for the NYU student publication Anamesa.
Tyrell Haberkorn is a scholar-activist based in the Department of Political and Social Change at the Australian National University. She is the author of Revolution Interrupted: Farmers, Students, Law, and Violence in Northern Thailand (University of Wisconsin Press, 2011) and is now working on a history of impunity for state violence in Thailand since 1932.
Stefan Helmreich is Professor of Anthropology at MIT and author of Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas (University of California Press, 2009) and of Sounding the Limits of Life: Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond (Princeton University Press, 2016). Helmreich’s essays have appeared in Critical Inquiry, Representations, Public Culture, The Wire, Cabinet, and American Anthropologist.
Jen Heuson is a scholar and media artist currently pursuing her Ph.D. in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. Her work critically engages the mediated production, consumption, and circulation of knowledge, sentiment, memory, identity, and culture during travel. Specifically, she investigates the role of sound in the tourist experience, exploring how what is heard shapes who we are as individuals, as communities, as nations. Jen holds an MA in Film Studies and an MA in Philosophy from the University of Amsterdam. For more about Jen and her collaborative film and audio work, visit www.smallgauge.org
David Howes is Professor of Anthropology at Concordia University, Montreal, and the Director of the Centre for Sensory Studies. He holds two degrees in law and three degrees in anthropology. His research interests span the fields of law, commerce, consumption, cross-cultural psychology, the senses and aesthetics. His latest book is The Sixth Sense Reader (Berg 2009). See generally www.david-howes.com and www.sensorystudies.org.
Sarah E. Igo is an Associate Professor of History at Vanderbilt University who teaches and writes about modern American cultural and intellectual history. She is the author of The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens and the Making of a Mass Public (2007), and is currently at work on a cultural history of modern privacy. Igo has held fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Whiting Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She also founded and co-directs the National Forum on the Future of Liberal Education, a national-level initiative to promote the liberal arts.
Tim Ingold is the Chair in Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. His research interests include: ecological approaches in anthropology and psychology; comparative anthropology of hunter-gatherer and pastoral societies; human-animal relations; relations between biological, psychological and anthropological approaches to culture and social life; environmental perception; language, technology and skilled practice; anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture; and the anthropology of lines and line-making. His many publications include Lines: a brief history (2007), The perception of the environment: essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill (2000), and The appropriation of nature: essays on human ecology and social relations (1986).
The Institute for New Feeling is a collective founded by Scott Andrew, Agnes Bolt, and Nina Sarnelle, committed to the development of new ways of feeling, and ways of feeling new. As a group, our identity is always shifting. Borrowing aesthetics and language from wellness and tech industries, market research, speculative design, political propaganda, we assume a familiar yet fragile voice of authority. IfNf has recently shown work at The Getty Museum, LA, Ballroom Marfa, TX, MoMA, NY, Istanbul Modern, Turkey, MAAT, Lisbon, Whitechapel Gallery, London, Hammer Museum LA, Fundacion PROA, Buenos Aires, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, Jardin Essential, Bruxelles, Recess, NY, and Mwoods, Beijing.
Heidi Jackson was born in Sierra Leone and is an artist and teacher who lives and works in Sydney, Australia. Her work examines absence, memory and the quietness of natural space and these themes are predominantly explored through depictions of the New Zealand landscape where she spent her childhood. Although trained as a printmaker and graphic artist, she now works in small palm sized paintings. She is the Mother of 2 small children and is currently teaching Visual Arts at Sydney Girls Grammar School.
Michael D. Jackson is a Distinguished Visiting Professor of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School and an award-winning author. His work has been strongly influenced by critical theory, American pragmatism, and existential-phenomenological thought. He has conducted ethnographic research in Sierra Leone and Aboriginal Australia and is the author of numerous books including: Paths Toward a Clearing (1989), Minima Ethnographica (1998), At Home in the World (2000), The Palm at the End of the Mind: Relatedness, Religiosity, and the Real (2010), and Life Within Limits: Wellbeing in a World of Want (2011). He has also published three novels, a memoir, and six books of poetry.
Ernst Karel is Lecturer on Anthropology, Assistant Director of the Film Study Center, and Lab Manager for the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University. A musician, sound recordist, composer, and anthropologist of sound, his two newest CD releases, on the Gruenrekorder and and/OAR record labels, are constructed with unmanipulated location recordings, and edited as imageless observational cinema. Other recent sound work based on location recordings makes use of four-, five-, and eight-channel recording and exhibition formats. He also performs and records improvised experimental electronic and electroacoustic music using modular analog electronics; current collaborations include the electroacoustic duo project EKG with Kyle Bruckmann, and the New England Phonographers Union. In addition to his own work, he also does sound editing, mixing, and sound design for nonfiction and experimental film and video.
Matthew Klimas is a designer, illustrator, and musician residing in Richmond, VA. He is a long-time fuzz-fiend, the driver behind the noise pop of The Snowy Owls. Klimas’ visual explorations of the abstract, the surreal, and the feline can be found at mattklimas.tumblr.com.
Nicole Labruto is a PhD candidate in the History, Anthropology, Science, Technology and Society program at MIT. Her research examines sustainability in the context of waste-to-energy technologies in Brazil. She is also interested in the phenomenology of waste.
Young Joo Lee is a multimedia artist born in South Korea. Her work deals with personal narratives about her experiences of being an immigrant in Europe and the US, a woman, and a cultural nomad. In her recent moving image works, these personal narratives interweave with the current and historical narratives to investigate the issues of cultural colonialism, alienation, and assimilation processes. Young is currently a Visiting Lecturer at the Department of Art, Film and Visual Studies at Harvard University and a Harvard Film Study Center Fellow.
Francisco López is internationally recognized as one of the major figures of the sound art and experimental music scene. For almost forty years he has developed an astonishing sonic universe, absolutely personal and iconoclastic, based on a profound listening of the world. Destroying boundaries between industrial sounds and wilderness sound environments, shifting with passion from the limits of perception to the most dreadful abyss of sonic power, proposing a blind, profound and transcendental listening, freed from the imperatives of knowledge and open to sensory and spiritual expansion. He has realized hundreds of concerts, projects with field recordings, workshops and sound installations in over seventy countries of the six continents. His extensive catalog of sound pieces -with live and studio collaborations with hundreds of international artists- has been released by nearly 400 record labels / publishers worldwide. He has been awarded four times with honorary mentions at the competition of Ars Electronica Festival and is the recipient of the Qwartz Award 2010 for best sound anthology.
Taylor Lowe is an architect, lecturer, and writer living and working in Bangkok. After completing his M.Arch degree at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Taylor began working with S+PBA in Bangkok. He is now an architect at AND and a lecturer in the International Program in Design and Architecture (INDA) at Chulalongkorn University, where he also is the Coordinator of the History and Theory curriculum. His critical writings in architectural theory have garnered both the Berkhardt Prize and the Schiff Prize, and his design work has been exhibited in galleries in Delhi, Ladakh, Bangkok, Chicago and Berlin.
Peter Lunenfeld is professor and vice chair of the Department of Design Media Arts at UCLA, and is a member of Digital and Urban Humanities faculties. His most recent book is City at the Edge of Forever: Los Angeles Reimagined (New York: Viking, 2020).
Louise Ma is a graphic designer living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Her work revolves around translating ideas into graphics, which includes an ongoing project called What Love Looks Like.
Francis McKee is an Irish writer and curator working in Glasgow. He is a research fellow at The Glasgow School of Art. From 2005 – 2008 he was director of Glasgow International, and since 2006 he has been the director for Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow.
Mue Meut is a student of Thai history interested in the techniques Thais and others use to visualize power and agency in contemporary society. His stance is that the images deployed by various groups to help conceptualize social phenomena have a very tangible, though not always obvious, effect on the way history is understood. It makes sense, then, to examine the epistemological roots of these techniques, especially if one hopes to make sense of the way political conflict plays out in the Kingdom.
Darren Mueller is currently a PhD student in the music department at Duke University, where he researches and writes about jazz, recording technology, and musical performance. His work as a writer and researcher includes contributions to the Duke Performances blog, The Thread, and to the Nesuhi Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame, housed at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City.
Kara Oehler is Co-Founder/Documentary Arts + Media Innovation Fellow at metaLAB (at) Harvard. She is a radio documentary producer and media artist whose work over the past decade has focused upon pushing the boundaries of narrative journalism both on the air and across multiple platforms, combining investigative storytelling with participatory media, building new systems and opportunities for education and artistic practice. Kara is the creator of multiple transmedia projects on which she has pioneered new forms of interactive experience, including the collaborative documentary Mapping Main Street; Capitol of Punk, featured in MoMA’s Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition; Zeega; and the UnionDocs Collaborative.
Pauline Oliveros (May 30, 1932 – November 24, 2016) was an American composer, accordionist and a central figure in the development of experimental and post-war electronic art music. She was a founding member of the San Francisco Tape Music Center in the 1960s, and served as its director. She taught music at Mills College, the University of California San Diego (UCSD), Oberlin Conservatory of Music, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Oliveros authored books, formulated new music theories, and investigated new ways to focus attention on music including her concepts of “deep listening” and “sonic awareness”. She was an Eyebeam resident.
Juan Orrantia (b. Bogota, Colombia), works on nonfiction projects that explore the evocative and critical possibilities of photography and multimedia. With a background in anthropology and documentary studies, his series address questions of memory, violence, intimacy, (dis)location and the everyday. See Juan’s work here.
Heather Paxson is Associate Professor in Anthropology at MIT, where she teaches classes on food and culture, craft practice, gender and family, and ethnographic research. She is the author of Making Modern Mothers: Ethics and Family Planning in Urban Greece (2004) and The Life of Cheese: Crafting Food and Value in America, due to be published November 2012 with University of California Press.
Marina Peterson is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. Her work traces modalities of matter, sensory attunements, and emergent socialities, exploring diverse and innovative ways of encountering and presenting the ethnographic. Her book Atmospheric Noise: The Indefinite Urbanism of Los Angeles (2021, Duke UP) engages mobilizations around airport noise to address ways in which noise amplifies modes of sensing and making sense of the atmospheric.
Joana Pimenta is a media researcher and artist, working with video, digital media and installation art. She is a PhD student in Film and Visual Studies and Critical Media Practice at Harvard, and works at the metaLAB. Her research focuses on cinematic objects, installation and systems art. She has previously studied and held research positions in Lisbon, Paris and Amsterdam, as well as directed short films and worked in film production, digital media and curation projects.
Jennifer C. Post is an ethnomusicologist whose current research interests include the musics of Inner and Central Asia. Her recent studies in Mongolia with Kazakh pastoralists living in the Altai Mountains addresses music and sound in relation to mobility, well-being, and ecological knowledge. In addition to publications on these topics in edited collections and journals, a co-edited volume on Mongolian music titled Mongolian Sound Worlds will be published by University of Illinois Press. She teaches ethnomusicology at the Fred Fox School of Music, University of Arizona.
Filipa Ramos is a writer and editor based in London, where she works as Editor in Chief of art-agenda. She is a Lecturer in the Experimental Film MA programme of Kingston University and in the MRes Art:Moving Image of Central Saint Martins, both in London, and works with the Master Programme of the Institut Kunst, Basel. Ramos is co-curator of Vdrome, a programme of screenings of films by visual artists and filmmakers. She was Associate Editor of Manifesta Journal and contributed to Documenta 13 (2012) and 14 (2017). She recently edited Animals (Whitechapel Gallery/MIT Press).
Joe Reinsel uses media, video, and sound to explore ideas about architectural space, time, and touch. His creative work continues to considers interaction and the environment and each work investigates different facets of communication such as video work for public installation, collective storytelling, and interactive exhibitions. He is the recipient of grants from The Flint Public Art Project, International Society of Electronic Arts, Maryland State Arts Council,Baltimore Museum of Art, New York State Council for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Baltimore City Office of Promotion and the Arts, and University of Michigan among others. Also he has presented work in thirteen countries on four continents at venues such as Museum of Contemporary Art(Chile), Corcoran Gallery of Art, Ars Electronica, Centro Cultural São Paulo (Brazil), Centro Cultural de España(Mexico), ZeroOne, and SIGGRAPH.
Craig J. Reynolds is a historian of Southeast Asia. Recent publications include “Rural Male Leadership, Religion and the Environment in Thailand’s Mid-South, 1920s-1960s,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies (Feb. 2011) and “The Social Bases of Autocratic Rule in Thailand” in Bangkok May 2010: Perspectives on a Divided Thailand (Singapore 2012). He reviews English and Thai books online at New Mandala. See more of his work here.
Max Ritts is an environmental geographer currently living in Sweden. In May 2021, he will begin a Research Fellowship at the University of Cambridge. His work focuses on environmental governance questions, using a sustained engagement from sound studies. His book, A Resonant Ecology, is under contract with Duke University Press.
Jeffrey T. Schnapp Before moving to Harvard in 2011, Jeffrey T. Schnapp occupied the Pierotti Chair of Italian Studies at Stanford, where he founded the Stanford Humanities Lab in 2000. A cultural historian with research interests extending from antiquity to the present, his most recent books are Speed Limits (Skira, 2009) and The Electric Information Age Book (Princeton Architectural Press, 2011). His Trento Tunnels project — a 6000 sq. meter pair of highway tunnels in Northern Italy repurposed as a history museum– was featured in the Italian pavilion of the 2010 Venice Biennale.
Michael Silvers is an associate professor of musicology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he teaches courses on music and animals, Lusophone musics, and ethnomusicological theory and methods, among other topics. He is the author of Voices of Drought: The Politics of Music and Environment in Northeastern Brazil (UI Press, 2018). His research has been supported by fellowships from Fulbright, Carnegie, ACLS, and the NEH.
Scott Smallwood is a sound artist, composer, and performer who creates works inspired by discovered textures and forms, through a practice of listening, field recording, and improvisation. In addition to composing works for ensembles and electronics, he designs experimental instruments and software, as well as sound installations and audio games, often for site-specific scenarios. Much of his recent work is often concerned with the soundscapes of climate change, and the dichotomy between ecstatic and luxuriating states of noise and the precious commodity of natural acoustical environments and quiet spaces. He performs as one-half of the laptop/electronic duo Evidence (with Stephan Moore) and teaches as an associate professor of composition at the University of Alberta, where he also serves as the director of the Sound Studies Institute.
Benjamin Tausig is a PhD Candidate in ethnomusicology at New York University. He conducted fieldwork on sound and public space in Bangkok during the 2010-11 protests while on a Fulbright Scholarship, and is currently writing his dissertation while on a Mellon Fellowship.
Amy Trubek is an associate professor in the Nutrition and Food Science department at the University of Vermont. Trained as a cultural anthropologist and chef, her research interests include the history of the culinary profession, globalization of the food supply, the relationship between taste and place, and cooking as a cultural practice. She is the author of Haute Cuisine: How the French Invented the Culinary Profession (2000) and The Taste of Place: A Cultural Journey into Terroir (2008) as well as numerous articles and book chapters. For more information on her current research, see her profile at the University of Vermont’s website.
Emilio Vavarella is an artist whose work blends interdisciplinary art practice and theoretical research and is centered around the study of the relationship between humans and technological power. Emilio is currently working toward a PhD in Film and Visual Studies and Critical Media Practice at Harvard University. Esteemed venues that have exhibited Emilio’s work include: MAXXI – Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo; KANAL – Centre Pompidou; MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna; Museum of Contemporary Art – Zagreb; Museu de Ciències Naturals of Barcelona, The Photographer’s Gallery of London, Museo de Arte de Caldas; Villa Manin; Museo Nacional Bellas Artes in Santiago; Museu das Comunicações of Lisbon, National Art Center of Tokyo; Eyebeam Art and Technology Center and Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina. His academic writings have been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Leonardo (MIT Press), Digital Creativity (Routledge), and CITAR Journal – Journal of Science and Technology of the Arts. His writings have also appeared in Behind the Smart World: Saving, Deleting and Resurfacing Data and in exhibition catalogues like Low Form: Imaginaries and Visions in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (MAXXI and CURA Books); That’s IT! (MAMbo), and Robot Love (Niet Normaal Foundation). His most recent artist book, published by Mousse, is entitled rs548049170_1_69869_TT.
Ana Vaz (1986, Brasília) is an artist and filmmaker whose films, installations and performances drawn on relationships between environments, territories and hybrid histories pushing the boundaries of our perception. Assemblages of found and shot materials, her films combine ethnography and speculation in exploring the frictions and fictions imprinted upon both cultivated and savage environments and their multiple inhabitants. Her films have been showed internationally in film festivals and institutions such as the Tate Modern, Palais de Tokyo, New York Film Festival, TIFF Wavelengths, Rotterdam Film Festival, BFI, CPH:DOX, Cinéma du Réel, TABAKALERA, Courtisane, Videobrasil, amongst others. Specific focuses on her work have been developed in seminars and institutions such as the Flaherty Seminar (USA), Doc’s Kingdom (Portugal), Lux Salon (UK), Curto Circuito Film Festival (Spain) and Massart Film Society (USA). Her work has also featured in solo and group shows such as the Moscow Biennial of Young Art (Russia), Dhaka Art Summit (Bangladesh), Khiasma (France), Rosa Brux (Belgium) and Temporary Gallery (Germany).
Brad Weiss is Professor of Anthropology at the College of William & Mary. An editor of the Journal of Religion in Africa for over ten years, his work examines the production of value as a symbolic, embodied, and political economic process. Weiss is the author of The Making and Unmaking of the Haya Lived World: Consumption and Commoditization in Everyday Practice (Duke University Press 1996), Sacred Trees, Bitter Harvests: Globalizing Coffee in Northwest Tanzania(Heinemann 2003), and Street Dreams and Hip Hop Barbershops: Global Fantasy in Urban Tanzania (Indiana 2009). He currently serves as the President of the Society for Cultural Anthropology.
Dr. Sarah Marie Wiebe grew up on Coast Salish territory in British Columbia, BC, and is an Assistant Professor focused on environmental sustainabilityin the School of Public Administration at the University of Victoria and an Adjunct Professor in the the Department of Political Science at the University of Hawaiʻi, Mānoa. Her book Everyday Exposure: Indigenous Mobilization and Environmental Justice in Canada’s Chemical Valley (2016) with UBC Press won the Charles Taylor Book Award (2017) and examines policy responses to the impact of pollution on the Aamjiwnaang First Nation’s environmental health. At the intersections of environmental justice and citizen engagement, her teaching and research interests emphasize political ecology, participatory policy making and deliberative dialogue. For more see: www.sarahmariewiebe.com.
Gavin Williams comes from the valleys of south Wales and has studied music at Oxford and London. He is currently writing a dissertation at Harvard on the politics of sound media in early twentieth-century Italy, in the realms of futurism, opera, and, lately, Deaf studies.
Rebecca Worby received her MFA in creative nonfiction from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in Orion Magazine, Salon, The Common online, and elsewhere. She is associate editor at Pacific Standard.
Mark Peter Wright is an artist, lecturer and researcher working across sound, video, assemblage and performance. His practice critically explores the relationship between humans, animals, environments and their associated technologies of capture: playfully and poignantly animating the rituals and constructs behind what he calls these “humanimentical” relations. He has exhibited and spoken at various international galleries and institutes including Flat-Time House, GV Art, ICA, IMT Gallery, Museum of Contemporary Art Rome, Paccar Gallery, Parasol Unit, Platform A, South London Gallery, TATE, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, University of Copenhagen and Harvard University. Recent publications and anthology contributions can be found via Caught by the River, Corbel Stone Press, Gruenrekorder, Interference Journal and Uniform Books. More at: http://markpeterwright.net
Julia Yezbick is a filmmaker, artist, and anthropologist based in Detroit. She received her PhD in Media Anthropology and Critical Media Practice from Harvard University and an MA in Visual Anthropology from the University of Manchester. Her audio and video works have shown at the Berlin International Film Festival, the New York Library for Performing Arts, Ann Arbor Film Festival, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit. She is the founding Editor of Sensate, and co-directs Mothlight Microcinema in Detroit.
Ryat Yezbick is a visual artist who uses their training in cultural anthropology to inform the issues they tackle as a maker. They are interested in the personal, social and political costs of conformity, and explore these costs with the participants in their films and performances. Yezbick figures their experience centrally in their work, using encounters with collaborators and participants to explore the impacts of digital surveillance technology on collective aspirational behaviors. They work in a variety of mediums – notably live performance, experimental documentary filmmaking, and installation – that have garnered support from audiences and curators internationally. Yezbick’s work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions in Los Angeles, Melbourne, and Glasgow, and in notable group exhibitions and performances at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, REDCAT, Materials & Applications, The Akademie Schloss Solitude, The Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, Glasgow International 2018, The Banff Center for the Arts and Creativity and Gertrude Contemporary.
Emily Zeamer is a Social Anthropologist (PhD Harvard 2008) interested in how private religion – defined as a sense of the spiritual and moral in the everyday world – is woven into modern life. Her current ethnographic research in contemporary Bangkok, Thailand, looks specifically at how aspects of religious tradition inform the ways that Buddhist Thais imagine and use modern techniques and technologies in their everyday lives. Emily is also working to complete a series of short films which explore material sensory dimensions of urban life in the modern megacity of Bangkok, including human encounters with the built landscape, traffic, and trash.