Bios
Nancy Andrews|2016 bio
Nancy Andrews lives on the coast of Maine, where she makes films, drawings, music and objects. She works in hybrid forms combining storytelling, documentary, animation, and puppetry. Andrews has been the recipient of grants and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, LEF New England Moving Image Fund, Illinois State Arts Council, The Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her films have been presented by the Museum of Modem Art, Pacific Film Archive, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Flaherty Seminar, Nova Cinema Bioscoop and Taiwan International Animation Festival, among others. Six of her films are in the collection of The Museum of Modem Art, New York. She is currently on the faculty of the College of the Atlantic, Bar Harbor, ME.
Walter M. Robinson, M.D., M.P.H.|2016 bio
Walter M. Robinson, M.D., M.P.H. is a physician and writer in Boston. His writing and research focuses on the ethical and clinical issues in chronic illness, end of life care and organ transplantation. He trained in medicine at Emory University and received an M.P.H. in Health Policy from the Harvard School of Public Health and an M.F.A. in Literature from Bennington College. He has previously served as the associate director of the Division of Medical Ethics at Harvard Medical School.
Wendy Jacob|2016 bio
Wendy Jacob is an artist whose work explores the interface between the body and the physical world, between intimacy and architecture, and the interface between the perceptions of individuals and the textures of their shared environment. Her works includes sculptures, installations and performances; walls and ceilings that breathe, chairs that embrace and floors that resonate without sound. She has worked with engineers, athletes and musicians; with animal scientist Temple Grandin; and with autistic children. Her current project explores the physics of everyday ambient sounds and includes a building column activated by a collage of vibrations.
Jacob's works have appeared in the Kunsthaus Graz, the Centre Georges Pompidou, the 1991 Whitney Biennial, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego.
In 2010 she was awarded the Maud Morgan Prize by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She has been supported by grants from the LEF Foundation; the Illinois Arts Council; Creative Capital; and Artlink, Edinburgh. Jacob spent a year at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (2004-2005) and in Scotland as a Fulbright Fellow, Glasgow School of Art (2015-2016).
She was one of four members of the Chicago artists' collaborative group, Haha (1988-2008). She lives and works in Cambridge, MA.
Sara Hendren|2016 bio
Sara Hendren is an artist, design researcher and professor based in Cambridge, MA. She makes material art and design works, writes and lectures on adaptive and assistive technologies, prosthetics, inclusive design, accessible architecture and related ideas. Her work has been exhibited in the US and abroad and is held in the permanent collection at MoMA (NYC), and her writing and design work have appeared in The Boston Globe, The Atlantic Tech, FastCo Design, and on National Public Radio (US), among others. She teaches socially-engaged design practices, adaptive and assistive technology design, and disability studies for engineers-in-training in her role as assistant professor at Olin College.
See the work of her lab here.
Natalie Jeremijenko|2016 bio
Natalie Jeremijenko is an artist/engineer at New York University who has developed a 21st century platform - the Environmental Health Clinic - to help human society realign its existence with nature and natural systems. According to Jeremijenko, with art and technology, we are endowed with the creative agency to redesign our relationship with the planet, the most urgent mandate that we face. Due to society's deep reliance on rationality and empiricism, many believe that the answers to climate destabilization will come from science, geo-engineering and technology. Yet something else is required to achieve environmental transformation: the language of art, which fosters imagination, empathy and an understanding of the mutualistic relationships that fuel our world.
In 2014, the VIDA Art and Artificial Life International Awards Pioneer Prize was awarded to Natalie Jeremijenko "for her consistently brilliant portfolio of work over the past two decades." (This prize was awarded only once before to Laurie Anderson.) She was also presented with the 2013 Most Innovative People award, named one of the most influential women in technology in 2011, one of the inaugural top young innovators by MIT Technology Review and one of the 40 most influential designers in the U.S. Jeremijenko directs the Environmental Health Clinic and is an Associate Professor in the Visual Art Department at New York University as well as affiliated with the university's Computer Science Department and Environmental Studies Program. Previously, she was on the Visual Arts faculty at UCSD, Faculty of Engineering at Yale University, a visiting professor at Royal College of Art in London, a Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Public Understanding of Science at Michigan State University and a Visiting Global Distinguished Professor at the NYU College of Arts and Sciences. Her degrees are in Biochemistry, Engineering, Neuroscience and History and Philosophy of Science.
Peter Galison|2016 bio
Joseph Pellegrino University Professor at Harvard University (based in Physics and History of Science), Peter Galison continues to explore the intersection of art and science and engages in collaborations with artists including William Kentridge in an installation, The Refusal of Time, that opened Documenta 13, as well as with filmmaker Robb Moss, with whom he made Secrecy (2008) and Containment (2015). Together Galison and Moss teach a course at Harvard entitled "Filming Science." Galison pursues these art/science projects, or the co-creation of knowledge, as he believes that "artists give tangible form to scientific ideas that are abstract. Through their visceral language, artists help us to embody and feel the experience of life rather than quantify it. In addition, artistic and scientific collaborations create a space for a kind of chaotic creation laced with success and failure, while also providing the discursive space to debate values."
Whether in his scholarly work or in his filmmaking/artwork, Galison has constantly returned to the ways in which very abstract ideas are lodged in concrete circumstances. His first book, How Experiments End (1987) asked how physicists decided that an experimental result was secure against the vagaries of instrumental or environmental interference. He then pushed farther into the materiality of the laboratory in his Image and Logic (1997) that explored the deep-seated competition between instruments that produced images and those that issued numbers and correlations. Einstein's Clocks, Poincari's Maps (2002) aimed at tracking central ideas about time in relativity back to the altogether practical problems of mapping the world and synchronizing trains. Finally, his work with Lorraine Daston, Objectivity (2007), showed how the very notion of scientific objectivity was inescapably tied to the history of scientific image-making. He is currently at work on Building Crashing Thinking, a bookabout technology and how it is constantly reformulating the self.
Louisa McCall|2016 bio
Louisa McCall co-founded and co-directed Artists in Context (2009-2013), a project of The Arts Company comprised of a flexible organizational framework that produced regional convenings, a national conference, and a wide range of programming focused on the engaged practices of contemporary artists in New England. She also served as program director for the Artists' Prospectus for the Nation. Prior to this, McCall served as the program director for the LEF Foundation (1999-2009) and oversaw two major grant programs that awarded $4.3 million in grants to artists and organizations in all contemporary art disciplines. Her earlier career included a range of strategic positions in museums, art institutes, artist organizations and funding agencies. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Wellesley College with a B.A. in Art History.