Radical Aesthetics & Politics Conference Presenters

Elizabeth Adan is currently an Assistant Professor of modern and contemporary art history in the Department of Art and Design at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, where she is also a member of the Faculty Board in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies. She holds an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Contemporary Art, Religion, and Cultural Analysis with a Doctoral Emphasis in Women’s Studies from U.C. Santa Barbara, and in 2000-01 she was a Helena Rubenstein Fellow in Critical Studies at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.
eadan@calpoly.edu

Corina L. Apostol (B.A., Duke University) is a Ph.D student in the Art History Department at Rutgers University. Her research focuses on experimental artistic practices in Eastern Europe and Russia in the post-socialist period. As a Dodge Fellow, Apostol is a graduate assistant at the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, where she is working on the Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union. She contributes to The Long April. Texts About Art, Critic Atac and IDEA Arts +Society.
corina.lucia.apostol@gmail.com

Cutler Edwards is a PhD candidate in US History at UC San Diego, with research and teaching interests in youth and popular culture, comparative and relational race and ethnicity, and American Studies. His dissertation examines radical politics and multiracial community organizing in New York City, 1968-1984.
ccedward@ucsd.edu

Brian Friedberg is a DJ, writer, producer and curator with a BA in sociology and a MA in Cultural Production. Currently Visual Arts Manager and music programmer at the Boston Center for the Arts, Brian holds several dj residencies in Boston's progressive queer scene, and has an EP of original music forthcoming on Fade to Mind records.
rizzla.dj@gmail.com

Karen Frostig is an Associate Professor at Lesley University, a Resident Scholar at the WSRCenter at Brandeis University and President and Artistic Director of The Danube Memorial project. Karen exhibits her work across the US and in Europe, is widely published, and a recipient of numerous fellowships and awards.
karen.frostig@gmail.com

Salvatore Giusto is a PhD student in socio-cultural anthropology at the University of Toronto. His main academic interests focus on politico-economic anthropology, and on the impact of “mass-mediated” information in Italian and North American ethnographic contexts. As a novelist, he published Ritzomena. Cose che danzano (Lubrina ed., 2000) and co-authored Le Ragazze non guardano lattai (Sperling and Kupfer ed., 2003).
s.giusto@utoronto.ca

Vanessa Grossman is an architect graduated from the University of São Paulo. After earning a Master's degree in History of Architecture from the Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University, she is currently a Ph.D. candidate in History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture at Princeton University, where she pursues a research on the intersections between politics and architecture in postwar France. She is also a Lassen Fellow of the Princeton University Program in Latin American Studies (PLAS). Grossman is the author of the book A arquitetura e o urbanismo revisitados pela Internacional Situacionista (São Paulo: Annablume/FAPESP, 2006). Her work has appeared in different publications such as LʼArchitecture dʼAujourdʼhui, AMC, Archistorm (France), Area (Italy), Pidgin Magazine, Yale School of Architecture Books (USA) Bamboo and Contravento (Brazil). http://soa.princeton.edu/
http://www.princeton.edu/plas/
vgrossma@princeton.edu

Amanda Higgins is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Kentucky. Broadly, Amanda's teaching and research interests center on modern American history and the intersectionality of race, class, and gender on American culture and society. Her dissertation investigates Black Power's response to Vietnam and the gendered nature of protest.

Douglas S. Ishii is a PhD candidate in American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. His research and teaching interests lie in critical ethnic studies, queer theory, and popular culture. His dissertation takes a comparative and theoretical approach to Asian Pacific American and Chicano/Latino panethnic middlebrow cultural productions.
dishii@umd.edu

Chuck Johnson is a composer and musician residing in Oakland, CA. He approaches his work with an ear towards finding faults and instabilities that might reveal latent beauty. Johnson teaches Advanced Computer Music at University of the Pacific and he holds an MFA in Electronic Music from Mills College.
www.cirrusoxide.com
hylaster@gmail.com

Miki Kaneda is a PhD candidate in music at UC Berkeley and instructor of music at Montclair State University. Her dissertation titled The Unexpected Collectives: Intermedia Art in Postwar Japan explores relations between intermedia collectives, economic growth, and senses of the everyday in postwar Japan.
kanedamiki@mac.com

Russet Lederman is a media artist, researcher, and Japanese photobook collector who lives in New York City. She has taught media art theory and practice at Pratt Institute, Parsons The New School for Design and is currently a faculty member in the MFA Computer Art department at the School of Visual Arts, New York City. She regularly writes on photobooks for the International Center of Photography Library blog. Lederman has received awards and grants from Prix Ars Electronica and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
russet@russetlederman.com

Godfre Leung is Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History, Theory, and Criticism in the Gwen Frostic School of Art at Western Michigan University. He is a recent graduate of the Program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester and has previously taught art history at the University of Rochester, Eastman School of Music, and Ontario College of Art and Design. His writings on art have appeared in such publications as Afterimage, Art Journal, caa.reviews, and In Visible Culture; he served as editor of the latter journal from 2008 to 2010. He has a chapter in the forthcoming volume Resounding Pasts: Essays on Popular Music, Literature, and Cultural Memory.
godfre.leung@wmich.edu

Larisa Mann is a DJ, legal anthropologist, and PhD Candidate in Jurisprudence & Social Policy at UC Berkeley Law School. Her work focuses on the intersection between music, technology, and law, on how people formulate social positions resistant to colonial power, and the role of law and technology in those formulations.
djripley@gmail.com

Park McArthur is an artist from North Carolina and graduated from Davidson College in 2006 and from The University of Miami with an MFA in sculpture in 2009. She currently lives in New York, attends the Whitney Independent Study Program, and works on individual and collective projects concerning disability, care, and correspondence. She has contributed to Aspect Magazine: The Chronicle of New Media Art and The International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics' forthcoming issue on vulnerability.
pamcarthur@gmail.com

Helen Panagiotopoulos is a graduate student of anthropology at Hunter College whose research focuses on the misuse of power in the intimate and private relations between domestic workers and their employers. Her work explores how the domestic's individual experience relates to, and is influenced by, larger political and economic forces, in addition to the intersection of the domestic's role, modes of reproduction among affluent communities, and the social reproduction of a capitalist class. Helen's research grows out of her nineteen years as a domestic worker.
hpanagiotopoulos@gmail.com

D'hana Perry is a DJ, event creator and MFA candidate in Media Art at Emerson College. Perry's work explores liminal identity construction, gender/racial performance and self-expression, blending the practices of documentary production and live digital DJ/VJ remixing techniques native to club culture. Within this exploration of identity, s/he is researching a concept of remixing as a mode of existence and survival, turning everyday interactions into a creative act.
dhana_perry@emerson.edu

Aliza Shvarts is a PhD candidate in Performance Studies at NYU. Her artwork has been shown at the Slought Foundation in Philadelphia, at the LOOP International Film Festival in Barcelona, and at the Tate Modern in London. She is currently a managing editor of the performance studies journal TDR/The Drama Review.

Anna P. Sokolina is an art/architecture historian and educator. She has published over eighty research papers, articles, abstracts and reviews in professional periodicals and anthologies and initiated, co-authored and edited the monograph Architecture and Anthroposophy [1st and 2nd edition]; lectured and curated architecture/art exhibitions in the United States, France, Germany, and Russia. Currently she is conducting two book projects - an anthology Alternative Spaces, and a monograph Parallel Universe: Architecture behind the Iron Curtain.

Sokolina received her PhD in Architecture from RAACS / NIITAG - Russian Academy of Architecture and Construction Sciences / Research Institute for Theory of Architecture and City Planning, and MA from the Moscow Institute of Architecture. She is a Certificate graduate from New York University SCPS, and she has interned at the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, the Guggenheim Museum New York, and the Public Design Commission of the City of New York. She has contributed as a docent at the Pierpont Morgan Library and as a volunteer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Department of Education; worked as a Curator of Exhibitions at the Tabakman Museum of Art, a Research Associate at the Cultural Heritage Database Project funded by the Guggenheim Foundation, and as a tenure-track Assistant Professor at Miami University Department of Architecture and Interior Design where she also coordinated the Cage Architecture Gallery. Sokolina has extensively exhibited her own drawings and paintings in the US and Europe. Currently, she contributes on ARTMargins Advisory Board, and as Board Honorary Advisor of the International Archive of Women in Architecture facilitated at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University that also holds over sixty records of her publications, course syllabi, and exhibition catalogs.


Jazmin Venus Soto is a DJ, scholar, and producer. Founder of the notorious GHE20G0TH1K events in New York and producer of the upcoming documentary SHAKEDOWN, she is exploring the possibilities of community building and group progress via nightlife and the communities formed there. Venus uses her press and events to open up critical dialogues about capitalism, racism, sexism and imperialism without alienating mainstream youth who do not directly identify with politics and social justice advocacy.
jazminvenus.soto@gmail.com

Pwyll ap Stifin is currently writing a doctoral thesis: "Configuring the Post-9-11 Voice", at the Department of Anthropology, University College London. I have worked on various aspects of the memory of 9-11 for the past four years. Before becoming an anthropologist I worked as a field archaeologist.
p.stifin@ucl.ac.uk

Cheryl Thompson is a PhD Candidate in Communication Studies, Department of Art History & Communication Studies at McGill University. Her dissertation is an examination of black female hair aesthetics and the hair care industry within the context of Western beauty culture in Canada. She is co-editor of McGill’s graduate online journal, IN CIRCULATION.
cheryl.thompson@mail.mcgill.ca

Abe Walker is a doctoral candidate in sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center, an adjunct instructor at Queens College, and a rank-and-file agitator in the Professional Staff Congress (AFT Local 2334).
awalker@qc.cuny.edu

Luke White teaches Visual Culture and History of Art and Design at Middlesex University, London, where he also received a PhD examining Damien Hirst and the sublime, and at Birkbeck College. With Claire Pajaczkowska he edited the book /The Sublime Now/ (Cambridge Scholars, 2009). His recent work examines kung-fu cinema.
http://kungfuwithbraudel.blogspot.com
l.white@mdx.ac.uk
lukewhite@mac.com