Materiality of Resistance Symposium - Presenters
Participants include established and emerging scholars from the Americas and beyond, as well as renowned practicing artists, architects, and designers.
Nilgun Bayraktar (She/Her)
Nilgun Bayraktar is associate professor of Film in the History of Art and Visual Culture program and Film program at California College of the Arts. Her work, focusing on migrant and diasporic cinema, contemporary art, and critical border studies, has been published in academic journals including Journal of European Studies, Screen City Biennial Journal and New Cinemas. She is co-editor with Alberto Godioli of Rethinking Defamiliarization in Literature and Visual Culture (Palgrave 2024) and author of Mobility and Migration in Film and Moving Image Art: Cinema Beyond Europe (Routledge 2018), which examines cinematic and artistic representations of migration and mobility in Europe since the 1990s. Her current book project, Border Futurities expands the chronological, geographic, and theoretical scope of her earlier research, looking beyond Europe to the Middle East, Africa, and the U.S.-Latin American context to investigate the multiplication and diffusion of borderlands. She received a B.A. in Cultural Studies from Sabanci University, Istanbul, and a PhD in Performance Studies & Film Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. Nilgun is a member of the organizing committee for The Materiality of Resistance Symposium.
Spectral Sounds, Alien Landscapes in Bogota: Listening to Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria (2021)
Chris Bennett (He/His)
Chris Bennett completed his PhD with a focus on art since 1945 at the University of Michigan in 2008. He has held research fellowships at the American Academy in Rome and the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. Currently working on a book project on the Italian Arte Povera group—his publications to this point include articles and exhibition catalog essays devoted to the work of Alighiero Boetti, Pino Pascali, Marisa Merz,and Jannis Kounellis, and also writings on the Rome-based School of Piazza del Popolo. He is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
Silvia Bottinelli (She/Her)
Silvia Bottinelli (PhD University of Pisa) is senior lecturer and chair of the Visual and Material Studies Department, School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. Her scholarship has appeared in journals such as Art Journal, California Italian Studies, Humanities, Modernism/modernity, and Public Art Dialogue. Recent books include Artists and the Practice of Agriculture (Routledge 2024); Double-Edged Comforts: Domestic Life in Modern Italian Art and Visual Culture (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021); Lead in Modern and Contemporary Art (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021, with Sharon Hecker); and The Taste of Art (University of Arkansas Press, 2017, with Margherita d’Ayala Valva).
The Materiality of Landscape: Critiquing Lawns through Edible Gardens in Contemporary American Art
Sara Dean (She/Her)
Sara Dean is a designer and architect in the Bay Area. She is assistant professor at California College of the Arts and the principal of IF/THEN Studio. Her work considers the implications of emerging technologies on public engagement and urban life. Her work has been shown widely, including recently at Ars Electronica, Dutch Design Week, Exploratorium, and Shenzhen Biennale. She has published and spoken widely on designing towards greater resiliency and equity. She is committed to open-access data and crowd-production.
Elizabeth Fair (She/Her)
Elizabeth Fair is a PhD candidate in the History of Art Department at the University of California, Berkeley, and 2023-24 Smithsonian Predoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Museum of Asian Art. Before graduate school, she worked for two years at the Angel Island Immigration Station museum.
Recarving a Cultural Landscape: Inscriptions at the Angel Island Immigration Station
Charlotte G. Chin Greene (They/Theirs)
Charlotte G. Chin Greene is an artist and curator based in Philadelphia. Their research probes the architecture of the human and the non-human in the digital age through sculpture, digital fabrication and new media, drawing, performance, and writing. Greene earned their MFA in Sculpture from Tyler School of Art & Architecture and BA in Art History from Kenyon College. Recently, they have exhibited at Zach’s Crab Shack, Spencer Brownstone Gallery, and Tiger Strikes Asteroid (Brooklyn). Greene is a Co-Director at FJORD in Philadelphia. Writing about their work has been published in Artblog, Artforum, and The Brooklyn Rail.
Martin's End: Image-Makers in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
Thomas O. Haakenson (He/His)
Thomas O. Haakenson is associate professor in History of Art & Visual Culture, and Critical Studies at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. He is co-editor of the book series Visual Cultures and German Contexts and has been published widely, including in New German Critique, Cabinet, Rutgers Art Review, German Studies Review, and the anthologies Legacies of Modernism, Spectacle, Representations of German Identity, as well as Memorialization in Germany Since 1945. He has received awards and fellowships from the United States Fulbright Program, the Social Science Research Council, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, and the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies.
Dada Sexuality
Judy Halebsky (She/Her)
Judy Halebsky is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Spring and a Thousand Years (Unabridged). She holds an MFA in English & Creative Writing from Mills College and a PhD in Performance Studies from the University of California, Davis. Her honors include fellowships from MacDowell, Millay, the Vermont Studio Center as well as the New Issues Poetry Prize and a Graves Award for Outstanding Teaching in the Humanities. At Dominican University of California, she directs the MFA in Creative Writing program and teaches courses in poetry and live storytelling.
Sources, Shared Knowledge and Writing a New Dictionary in Poems
Genevieve Hyacinthe (She/Her)
Genevieve Hyacinthe is an associate professor of History of Art and Visual Culture and a member of the MFA Fine Arts faculty at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Her West African and Haitian dance and drumming practices intersect with her academic work. She extends phenomenological and self-critical explorations of the body as a cultural and sensorial locus point into her research, writing, and teaching. Dedicated to D. Soyini Madison’s “loving ethnography,” Hyacinthe views research and writing as critical and heartfelt artistic practice that exposes blind spots and shortcomings as opposed to maintaining closed, authoritative positions. Hyacinthe’s recent book, Radical Virtuosity: Ana Mendieta and the Black Atlantic was published by MIT Press in 2019. Her current book project is about contemporary Black sculpture. Hyacinthe is continually wondering about risk in art practice, privileging but not limited to writing, research, dance, and forms of abstraction and poetry across media. Genevieve is a member of the organizing committee for The Materiality of Resistance Symposium.
Elizabeth Mangini (She/Her)
Lead Faculty Organizer of The Materiality of Resistance Symposium
Elizabeth Mangini is an art historian specializing in social and material histories of transnational contemporary art. She has published and lectured extensively on postwar Italian art. Professor Mangini’s 2021 book Seeing through Closed Eyelids: Giuseppe Penone and the Nature of Sculpture (University of Toronto Press) was reissued in paperback in 2023. Her writings appear in international museum catalogues and edited anthologies, as well as in Artforum, Art Journal, Eikon, Enthymema, Performing Arts Journal, Photofile, and Palinsesti, a journal for which she serves on the editorial board. She is professor and chair of the History of Art and Visual Culture Program at California College of the Arts, San Francisco and is the lead faculty organizer of The Materiality of Resistance Symposium.
Tess McCoy (She/Her)
Tess McCoy is a doctoral candidate at Florida State University studying Circum-Arctic Indigenous art of the 21st century. Her research interests include questions of identity, materiality, relationality, and storied objects. Tess has received various awards, including the American Philosophical Society’s Phillips Fund for Native American Research. She received her BA in Art History from the University of North Texas and her MA in Art of the Americas from the University of New Mexico. She is currently working on her dissertation “Indigenous Installation Art as Story: Material, Method, and Memory in the Practices of Sonya Kelliher-Combs, Hannah Claus, and Maureen Gruben.”
Unbroken Connections: Customary Materials in Contemporary Alaska Native Art
Amanda Moore (She/Her)
Amanda Moore’s debut collection of poetry, Requeening, was selected for the 2021 National Poetry Series by Ocean Vuong for Ecco and was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award. Her poems, essays, and translations have appeared in journals and anthologies, including Best New Poets, ZYZZYVA, Catapult, Ploughshares, and LitHub. A high school teacher who also leads advanced poetry workshops for adults, Amanda lives near the beach in San Francisco, California with her husband and daughter.
Beyond Ekphrasis and the Broadside: New Approaches to the Dialogue between Poetry and Art
Noriko Okada (She/Her)
Noriko Okada is a PhD student in Art History at the University of Maryland. Her research interest is Japanese and Japanese diaspora artists who worked in the 20th century United States. Her questions deal with the issues of identity and representation, transcultural artistic exchange, and national politics behind visual expressions. Noriko is from Osaka, Japan. She earned her BA in Aesthetics and Art Theory from Doshisha University, and her MA in Art History and MFA in Visual Arts from Purchase College, State University of New York.
Meghaa Parvathy Ballakrishnen (She/Her)
Meghaa Parvathy Ballakrishnen is currently the Andrew W. Mellon fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts (CASVA) and an advanced doctoral candidate in the Department of History of Art at Johns Hopkins University. Her dissertation investigates abstraction and secularism in postcolonial India and has been supported by the American Institute of Indian Studies, the Paul Mellon Centre, the Getty Research Institute, the Rockefeller Archive Center, and the Programs in Women, Gender, and Sexuality and Islamic Studies at Hopkins. Other research projects consider the history of photography, sexuality, and the art of climate change. Her writing is published or forthcoming by Steidl and in Modernism/modernity, Artforum, The Brooklyn Rail, and ASAP/J.
Natalie Pellolio (She/Her)
Natalie Pellolio is a visiting professor in the History of Art and Visual Culture at California College of the Arts. Her research interests include the history and theory of photography; technology, art, and the visual construction of power in the American West; and the aesthetics of communication. She received her BA in Art History at Reed College in 2009 and her PhD in Art & Art History at Stanford University in 2018. She has held positions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Portland Art Museum, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and the California Historical Society.
The Open Letter: Félix González-Torres and the Materiality of Communication
Thomas M. Pierce-Reyes (He/His)
Thomas Pierce-Reyes is a second-year graduate student in the History program at California State University, Fresno. His field of interest pertains to civil protests and reactionary movements that opposed discriminatory institutions; as such, Thomas examines the late-modern to the contemporary period of the United States and Latin American history. Thomas previously spoke about arpilleristas and the tapestry weavers’ roles in opposing the Pinochet government in Chile, discussing the stories weaved into the arpilleras that exposed the crimes committed under the dictator’s nearly three-decade rule.
Dean Rader (He/His)
Dean Rader has authored or co-authored 12 books, including Works & Days, winner of the 2010 T.S. Eliot Prize, Landscape Portrait Figure Form, a Barnes & Noble Review Best Book, and Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry, a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award and the Northern California Book Award. Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly was published in April of 2023 from Copper Canyon. His writing has been supported by fellowships from Princeton University, Harvard University, Headlands Center for the Arts, Art Omi, and the MacDowell Foundation. Rader is a professor at the University of San Francisco and a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry.
Engagement or Resistance? Notes on Inscrutability in Cy Twombly & Edgar Heap of Birds
Danielle Ridolfi (She/Her)
Danielle Ridolfi is an educator, visual culture scholar, and illustrator. She holds an MFA in Illustration and Visual Culture from the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis and a PhD in Clinical Psychology from Kent State University. Her debut picture book was acquired by a major publisher and will reach the market in 2025. Her studio work investigates image-making processes, particularly collage, that are contingent upon contact with the tangible world. Her scholarly research exists at the confluence of illustration, pedagogy, and material culture. She teaches undergraduate courses in design and children’s studies.
Eloise Seda (She/Her)
Eloise Seda is a writer and editor interested in poetry, translation, textiles, and decolonial theories. Her work explores themes such as place, language, history, collective and personal memory, and the ways in which these inform how we learn and navigate the spaces around us. Seda received her BA in American Studies from Wesleyan University and is completing her MA in Visual & Critical Studies at California College of the Arts. She was born in Brooklyn, New York and currently lives in San Francisco.
On Shifting Sands: Land and Image in Mariana Ramos Ortiz's Playgrounds and Caña Gorda
Emilia Shaffer-Del Valle (She/Her)
Emilia Shaffer-Del Valle is a writer and curator whose interdisciplinary research centers on decolonial notions of identity. She is interested in image (un)making, mixed media installation, text and poetry, and archival material. Her curatorial projects include As Yet and Still to Come (Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Los Angeles), featured in Hyperallergic, and her writing can be found in Rewind Review Respond (RRR), The Dancer Citizen, and New Body (Wolfman Books: 2019), among other publications. Originally from Los Angeles, Shaffer-Del Valle has a BA from Columbia University and is completing her MA in Visual & Critical Studies at California College of the Arts.
Caty Telfair (She/Her)
Caty Telfair received her PhD from UC Berkeley in 2014, with a dissertation about Symbolist portraiture and the representation of the intersubjective encounter. She is now a lecturer at CSU East Bay and at the California College of the Arts, and teaches classes that often focus on issues of global modernism; ideas of monstrosity, anthropocentrism and subjectivity; and art in the public sphere.
The Nows of the Past and Future: Indigenous Modernities and the Prints of Pudlo Pudlat
Kitty Whittell (They/Theirs)
At the time of writing Kitty is completing a PhD in contemporary art history at University College London entitled “Clear Boundaries, Manifestations of interfacial interactivity in Art from 1965-2019.” This thesis examines around how dynamics of interfaces have shaped boundaries within contemporary art, with the particular interest in the boundaries of subjecthood and the shaping of the digital user. Their research interests revolve around how interactivity in contemporary art is being represented, and how this is being defined by the ever-evolving limits of digital technology. With 10 years of experience working in the museum and heritage sector, they are also interested in hybrid relationships between practical museum studies and critical theory and are developing work in the field of post-Internet curatorial practice.
Materiality of Resistance Symposium