Alexandra Alisauskas is a Ph.D. student in the Program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester in Rochester, NY. She is currently researching for her dissertation on art collectives and theories of the body in the period of Soviet transition, particularly in Poland and Lithuania.
Paula Pinto is a Ph.D. candidate in the Program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester. She is writing her dissertation on French nineteenth-century photographic reproductions of works of art: “Art Reproduction and the Origins of Photography as a Form of Visual Representation (France, 1816-1886).” She has a Masters Degree in Architecture and Urban Culture from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, Spain. She is the former co-editor of the urban culture journal InSi(s)tu (2001-2006). Paula has worked as a researcher and a producer in the Museum of Fine Arts School of the University of Porto and the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art (Portugal). She is the co-producer of a documentary film about performance art in the Portuguese post-revolution of 1974. She has presented several public interventions in the urban fabric of her hometown, Porto (Portugal).
Marusya Bociurkiw is a media artist, writer, and assistant professor of media theory in the School of Radio and Television Arts at Ryerson University. Her videos and films have screened around the world. She is the author of four literary books, including, most recently, a food memoir, Comfort Food for Breakups: The Memoir of a Hungry Girl. Her monograph, Feeling Canadian: Nationalism and Affect on Canadian Television, is forthcoming in 2010 from Wilfred Laurier Press.
Janine Catalano is a food scholar and art historian interested in the interplay between these two fields in the first half of the twentieth century, particularly as it relates to surrealism and the subversive. She spoke on this topic at the Oxford Food Symposium in 2009. Catalano studied at the University of Pennsylvania and later at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, where she now works.
Beatriz da Costa is an interdisciplinary artist who works at the intersection of contemporary art, science, engineering and politics, and Associate Professor of Studio Art, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine. Her work takes the form of public participatory interventions, locative media, conceptual tool building and critical writing. da Costa has also made frequent use of wetware in her projects and has recently become interested in the potential of interspecies co-production in promoting the responsible use of natural resources and environmental sustainability. Issues addressed in previous work include the politics of transgenic organisms, and the social repercussions of ubiquitous surveillance technologies. Through her work da Costa examines the role of the artist as a political actor engaged in technoscientific discourses. This topic is also addressed in Tactical Biopolitics: Art, Activism, and Technoscience, a recently published anthology from MIT Press she co-edited with her colleague Kavita Philip.
da Costa is a co-founder of Preemptive Media, an arts, activism and technology group, and a former collaborator of Critical Art Ensemble (2000-2005). She has exhibited and lectured both nationally and internationally at venues such as the Andy Warhol Museum, the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Sevilla (Spain), Zentrum fuer Kunst und Medien (Germany), Museum of Contemporary Art, (Serbia), Exit Art Gallery, Cornerhouse (UK), Saidye Bronfman Centre for the Arts (Montreal), and the Natural History Museum in London. Media coverage of her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Reuters, CBS Evening News, BBC, CBC and the New Scientist. da Costa is a current has Creative Capital grantee, received support from the Durfee Foundation, the Inter-Society for Electronic Arts and the University of California Institute for the Research in the Arts. She has also received an Honorary Mention from the Adobe Emergent Artists Award, an Honorary Mention at the Prix Ars Electronica and been nominated twice for the Rockefeller New Media Arts grant. Together with Preemptive Media she received the Social Sculpture Commission from Eyebeam and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, as well as funding from Franklin Furnace, Turbulence, the Experimental Television Center and the Beall Center for Art and Technology.
Critical Art Ensemble is a collective of five tactical media practitioners of various specializations including computer graphics and web design, film/video, photography, text art, book art, and performance.
Formed in 1987, CAE’s focus has been on the exploration of the intersections between art, critical theory, technology, and political activism. The group has exhibited and performed at diverse venues internationally, ranging from the street, to the museum, to the internet. Museum exhibitions include the Whitney Museum and The New Museum in NYC; The Corcoran Museum in Washington D.C.; The ICA, London; The MCA, Chicago; Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; and The London Museum of Natural History.
The collective has written six books, and its writings have been translated into eighteen languages. Its book projects include: The Electronic Disturbance (1994), Electronic Civil Disobedience & Other Unpopular Ideas (1996), Flesh Machine: Cyborgs, Designer Babies, Eugenic Consciousness (1998), Digital Resistance: Explorations in Tactical Media (2001),Molecular Invasion (2002), and Marching Plague (2006).
Steve Dalachinsky was born in 1946, Brooklyn, New York. His work has appeared extensively in journals on and off line including: Big Bridge, Milk, Unlikely Stories, Xpressed,Ratapallax, Evergreen Review, Long Shot, Alpha Beat Soup, Xtant, Blue Beat Jacket, N.Y. Arts Magazine, 88, and Lost and Found Times. He is included in such anthologies as Beat Indeed,The Haiku Moment, and the esteemed Outlaw Bible of American Poetry. He has written liner notes for the CDs of many artists including Anthony Braxton, Charles Gayle, James “Blood” Ulmer, Rashied Ali, Roy Campbell, Matthew Shipp, and Roscoe Mitchell. His 1999 CD, Incomplete Direction (Knitting Factory Records), a collection of his poetry read in collaboration with various musicians, such as William Parker, Matthew Shipp, Daniel Carter, Sabir Mateen, Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth), Vernon Reid (Living Colour), has garnered much praise. His most recent chapbooks include Musicology (Editions Pioche, Paris 2005), Trial and Error in Paris (Loudmouth Collective 2003), Lautreamont’s Laments(Furniture Press 2005), In Glorious Black and White (Ugly Duckling Presse 2005), St. Lucie(King of Mice Press 2005), Are We Not MEN and Fake Book (2 books of collage, 8 Page Press 2005), and Dream Book (Avantcular Press 2005). His books include A Superintendent’s Eyes(Hozomeen Press 2000) and his PEN Award winning book The Final Nite (complete notes from a Charles Gayle Notebook, Ugly Duckling Presse 2006).
His latest CD is Phenomena of Interference, a collaboration with pianist Matthew Shipp (Hopscotch Records 2005).
He has read throughout the New York area, the United States, Japan and Europe, including France and Germany.
Eidia (Paul Lamarre and Melissa Wolf) has been a working collaborative since 1986.
Paul Lamarre 1979 BFA Magna Cum Laude, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Melissa P. Wolf 1980 BFA Boston Museum School / Tufts University 1981-1983 MFA program Pratt Institute Brooklyn, New York.
Wolf and Lamarre live and work in New York City.
Fast Forward is a New York based English composer and performer who makes music with almost anything. He is probably best known for his in depth musical explorations of the Trinidadian steel pan and his music-theatre works for diverse instrumentation.Feeding Frenzy, a culinary concert for 5 musicians, 5 cooks, 5 waiters and the audience has been performed in many countries, for many occasions, including the 15 year celebration of Freunde Guter Musik at The Museum for Contemporary Art in Berlin and the Time of Music Festival in Finland. It ran for three seasons at the Kitchen Center in New York. For 3 years, he toured extensively as a guest composer and musician for The Merce Cunningham Dance Company and continues to work closely with them as a musician and composer. As a teacher, he teaches master classes in composition, improvisation, and music/theater at various institutions including: Time of Music Festival (Viitassari, Finland), Bergen and Trondheim Art Academies (Norway), STEIM (Amsterdam, Holland), Wien University (Vienna), CNDO, (Amsterdam), Theatre pour Danse Contemporain (Paris), Podewil (Berlin), and New York University.
Rebecca Federman has been with the New York Public Library since 2003. She is currently NYPL’s Electronic Resources Coordinator and Culinary Collections Librarian; her prior position was as the social sciences bibliographer for the Humanities and Social Sciences Library. Federman holds a B.A. from Vassar College, and an M.L.S. from Pratt Institute. She also co-teaches a class on ephemera at Pratt’s School of Library and Information Sciences. Federman writes about the culinary collections at the Library in her blog Cooked Books.
Doug Fitch and Mimi Oka have created multi-sensory experiences known as Orphic Feasts.
Mimi Oka’s career has included financial arbitrage, professional cooking, writing, and theater production.
Doug Fitch’s work has ranged from theater, opera design and direction to architecture and furniture. His book “Organs of Emotion” explores the notion of redesigning the human body based on emotional logic.
Doug and Mimi both went to cooking school in Paris. Together they emerged as the world’s only sustenance artists, making works of art in edible media.
Kate H. Hanson is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at the University of Southern California. She specializes in early modern Italian visual culture and her dissertation, “Visualizing Culinary Culture at the Medici and Farnese Courts,” analyzes the relationships between culinary literature and texts of natural philosophy, the collecting of still life paintings of food, and archival documentation of gastronomic activities in Florence and Parma.
Annie Rachele Lanzillotto took to the stage in 1993 writing and performing Confessions of a Bronx Tomboy, which premiered at Manhattan Class Company’s Performance Marathon and Under One Roof Theater. Theatrical highlights include her public art installation and performance A Stickball Memoir, curated by City Lore for the 2001 Smithsonian Folk life Festival; her play Pocketing Garlic, commissioned by Franklin Furnace in 1994; her one woman show How To Wake Up a Marine in a Foxhole, which premiered at The Kitchen Solo Voice’s Series in 1998, and her two year site-specific work entitled, a’Schapett! (the act of wiping your plate clean with the heel of the brea, and savoring the juices) at The Arthur Avenue Retail Market in the Bronx, which garnered her inclusion in Franklin Furnace’s “The History of the Future,” a selection of best performance art works over the past 25 years, in the “Art & Life” category. This work was commissioned by Dancing in the Streets and funded by The Rockefeller Foundation MAP fund and The Puffin Foundation. Lanzillotto’s poetry won the 1st annual Paolucci Award given by the Italian American Writers Association. Lanzillotto has taught at Sing Sing, Bedford Hills, and Bayview Correctional Facilities; Housing Works, Sarah Lawrence College, Naropa University, Pace University, and Liberty High School for New Immigrants. She served as Literature Curator at The Kitchen, and Curator of “Opera Vindaloo!” at Dixon Place. Lanzillotto holds a B.A. with honors from Brown University, M.F.A. from Sarah Lawrence College, and was a fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation Next Generation Leadership Program through which she led a healing circle for artists and activists working on Middle East issues, called “Aah: Artists and Activists Healing.” Lanzillotto is currently a Writer in Residence at the Santa Fe Art Institute.
Anthony Leslie received a B.A. in English from UCLA in 2006. He currently lives in Los Angeles and works at the Southern Regional Library Facility. He is a writer, musician, and drag performer.
Cary Levine is an assistant professor of contemporary art history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He received his Ph.D. from the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and is a recent recipient of a J. Paul Getty Postdoctoral Research Fellowship. He is currently completing a book on the work of Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, and Raymond Pettibon, to be published by the University of Chicago Press.
Katie G. McGowan is a writer and interdisciplinary artist working in the conceptual space between the social sciences and the visual and language arts. The Spectacle, Americana, and late Capitalist modes of living are all subjects at the forefront of her investigative practice.
She is engaged in genre bending performance, installation, creative non-fiction, and working as an amateur private eye. By conducting invisible theatre experiments—whether posing as the next cosmetic surgery victim or a hapless traveler looking for God—one is given entrée into cultures far removed from one’s own. These inquiries are then processed in a variety of media.
Katie received M.A. and B.A. degrees from Wayne State University in Creative Writing and English, respectively. She is currently an M.F.A. candidate and teaching assistant at The University of Iowa in the Intermediate Area. Katie is recipient of a Wilhelm and Jane Bodine Fellowship, Virgil M. Beall Academic Fellowship; and a residency from Udruga Filmaktiv-Rijeka, Croatia.
Francisco M. Palma-Dias was born in 1942 in the south of Portugal, next to the Andalusian Spanish border. In Brussels he studied cinema, established the laboratory-theater le clou dans la langue, and co-founded the vegetarian restaurant of Mediterranean stamp le paradoxe. Between 1972 and 1992 practiced Tibetan Buddhism in Paris and Lisbon, traveling through Africa, India and Brazil. He has published three poetry books. Since 1992, he lives at Fazenda S. Bartolomeu in Castro Marim (Portugal), where he founded with the anthropologist Eglantina Monteiro the Companhia das Culturas.
Nicole Peyrafitte is a Pyrenean-born performance artist who sings, paints, films, writes, and cooks. She draws on her eclectic heritage to perform songs ranging from French cabaret to jazz standards and contemporary poetry. Her voice work is often integrated into multimedia stagings based on her visuals (paintings and/or videos) and writings, and involves the onstage preparation and cooking of a dish, to be shared with the audience. Her work addresses the experiences of negotiating her identity across two continents and four languages. She performs domestically and internationally. Nicole has two CD’s out: The Bi-Continental Chowder/La Garbure Transcontinentale released in 2006 andWhisk! Don’t Churn! (both released with Ta’wil productions).
Barbara Philipp is a visual artist working in Austria and the Netherlands. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and Paris, at the Städelschule Frankfurt, and the Dutch Art Institute (DAI). The body in transition in our times and its abstractions are a key to her work; she explores the relationship of different formal and contextual languages. The artistic translation is located between words, images, and the imagination that point to an allegedly perfect world. Her mainly used media are painting, drawing and performance. Food is often used as subject and/or medium.
Julia Pine recently received her Ph.D. in Cultural Mediations, with a specialization in Visual Culture, at the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. Her doctoral thesis was on the subject of Salvador Dalí’s 1942 autobiography The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, and she is currently conducting research on Dalí’s war-era paintings, as well as his society portraits of the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s.
Yael Raviv is the Director of Umami food and art festival, a non-profit arts organization bringing together artists and food professionals. She is also an adjunct professor at NYU’s Nutrition, Food a Studies and Public Health Department where she teaches courses on food and performance, combining her background in theater and the culinary arts.
Susana Reisman is a graduate from the School of Imaging Arts and Sciences from the Rochester Institute of Technology (Rochester, NY). Born and raised in Venezuela, Susana Reisman continues to live a nomadic life—currently dividing her time between Toronto and Caracas. Her artwork has been exhibited throughout the United States and Canada. She is represented by Peak Gallery (Toronto), Spazio Zero Gallery (Caracas), and offers limited editions of some of her work via Circuit Gallery.
Shyh-shiun Shyu is a molecular biologist currently living in Taiwan. At the time of his involvement in “Free Range Grain,” he was a Ph.D. student in molecular biology at the University at Buffalo.
Kerstin McGaughey is a graduate student in the Gastronomy department at Boston University.
Gabrielle Moser is a Ph.D. student in the Art History and Visual Culture program at York University and an independent writer and curator.
Amy L. Powell is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Helen Vallianatos is an assistant professor of Anthropology at the University of Alberta.
Jane Van Slembrouck is a Ph.D. candidate in Literature at Fordham University.
Bo Zheng is an artist and Ph.D. student in the Program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester.