Astrida Neimanis
Astrida Neimanis is Associate Professor of Feminist Environmental Humanities at the UBC Okanagan, on unceded Syilx territory in Kelowna, BC. Her most recent book, Bodies of Water: posthuman feminist phenomenology (2017) explores the shared watery constitution of human bodies and all other planetary life, as a starting point for rethinking environmental ethics, aesthetics, and justice. Often in dialogue with artists and artworks, her work has recently been featured at the 2021 Shanghai Biennale, the 2020 Riga Biennale, and the 2019 Lofoten Biennale.
George Gessert
George Gessert is an artist and writer. He has exhibited widely in the U.S. and internationally. His writings, mostly on art, have appeared in numerous books and periodicals and been translated into many languages. Green Light, a book-length collection of notes on bio art, was published by MIT Press. He has received a Pushcart Prize, and been included in Best American Essays.
Heather Barnett
Heather Barnett is an artist, researcher and educator working with natural phenomena and emergent systems. Employing live organisms, imaging technologies and playful pedagogies, her work explores how we observe, influence and understand multi-species ecosystems. Recent work centres around nonhuman intelligence, collective behaviour and systems for co-enquiry and knowledge distribution, including The Physarum Experiments, an ongoing ‘collaboration’ with an intelligent slime mould, and Animal Collectives collaborative research with the SHOAL Group at Swansea University where she is an Honorary Research Fellow. Heather is Pathway Leader on the MA Art and Science and Convenor of the Art & Living Systems Lab at Central Saint Martins (University of the Arts London), a Visiting Associate Professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology, and founding member of The Slime Mould Collective (http://slimoco.ning.com/). www.heatherbarnett.co.uk https://twitter.com/HeatherABarnett
Rob Dunn
Rob Dunn is a professor in the Department of Applied Ecology at North Carolina State University and in the Center for Evolutionary Hologenomics at the University of Copenhagen. His research focuses on the biology of daily life, from skin microbes to bedroom-dwelling insects to sourdough bread. He is the author of seven books, including, most recently, Delicious: How the Evolution of Flavor Made us Human, written with Monica Sanchez and published by Princeton University Press. Link for the book... https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691199474/delicious
Shelby Brewster
Shelby Brewster is a Ph.D. Candidate and Cultural Studies Fellow at the University of Pittsburgh. She recently defended her dissertation, “Planetary Praxes: Performing Humanity under Ecological Emergency,” which examines multiple ways of being human emerging at the point of environmental crisis. She serves on the editorial team at Environmental History Now. Website. Twitter.
Stephanie M. Tharp
Stephanie M. Tharp is an industrial designer and educator— currently an Associate Professor and an Undergraduate Program Co-Director at the University of Michigan’s Stamps School of Art & Design. Her recent research surrounds the theory and practice of discursive design. One current project is a collaboration with chronic pain specialists exploring public engagement with medical research and challenging popular stigmas of pain sufferers. She received a master's degree in industrial design from the Rhode Island School of Design, and a bachelor's of mechanical engineering from the University of Michigan. From 2002 until 2014, she was Associate Professor, and Founding Program Chair of Industrial Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s School of Design. She has work experience with Ford Motor Company, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Armstrong Industries, and amazon.com. In addition to running an award-winning design studio with Bruce, she has led interdisciplinary student teams in collaboration with companies such as Motorola, Dell, and Procter & Gamble. https://www.discursivedesign.com/
Bruce M. Tharp
Bruce M. Tharp is believed to be the first industrial designer to receive a PhD in anthropology (University of Chicago), in 1998 Bruce began researching the material culture of Indiana's Old Order Amish, focusing on the production & consumption of value. He first earned a BS in mechanical engineering from Bucknell University and a master’s degree in industrial design from Pratt Institute. In between his schooling, he served as a US Army nuclear weapons officer (Captain) in Germany. After researching the future of work and the workplace for Haworth Inc.'s design research think-tank, the Ideation Group, he began his teaching career. Over the last fifteen years he has been a tenured professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and currently at the University of Michigan’s Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design. His and Stephanie's award-winning design studio has exhibited internationally, licensed designs for local and global companies, and self-produced commercial, experimental, and discursive products.
Eben Kirksey
Eben Kirksey is an American anthropologist who specializes in science and justice. Kirksey attended the University of Oxford as a British Marshall Scholar and earned his Ph.D. from the University of California at Santa Cruz.Duke University Press published his first two books–Freedom in Entangled Worlds (2012) and Emergent Ecologies (2015)–plus The Multispecies Salon (2014), a curated collection of artwork and essays. The Mutant Project (St. Martin’s Press 2020), a book that follows some of the world’s first genetically modified people, was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.