WHAP! Lecture Series
Aesthetics and Politics WHAP! Lecture Series with presentations by:
Hannah Meszaros Martin is an artist, writer, and current Postdoc researcher in the Center for Creative Ecologies at UC Santa Cruz. She holds a PhD from the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London. She is also a research fellow in Forensic Architecture, a European Research Council funded project, which she has been a member of since 2012.
Megan Dorame is a Tongva poet, indigenous to the Los Angeles / Santa Ana river basin. She lives and writes in Santa Ana, CA. In her writing, Megan aims to bring visibility to her people by confronting the colonization and occupation of Tongva homeland, often code-switching between English and Tongva as an act of resistance.
Elizabeth Povinelli is a critical theorist and filmmaker. Her critical writing has focused on developing a critical theory of late settler liberalism that would support an anthropology of the otherwise. This potential theory has unfolded across five books, numerous essays, and a thirty-five years of collaboration with her Indigenous colleagues in north Australia including, most recently, six films they have created as members of the Karrabing Film Collective.
Jerry Zee is assistant professor in Anthropology and core faculty in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His work explores questions of materiality, experimental governance, environmental process along the globetrotting trajectory of dust storms that form in China and trace planetary airstreams far beyond. His work has appeared in Scapegoat, Cultural Anthropology, and American Anthropologist.
Carolina Caycedo is a London-born Colombian artist, living in Los Angeles. She participates in movements of territorial resistance, solidarity economies, and housing as a human right. She has held residencies at The Huntington Gardens, Libraries and Art Collections in San Marino, California DAAD artists-in-Berlin program, amongst others.
Lisa Jackson is an Anishinaabe Canadian filmmaker. She is known for her cross-genre projects including VR, animation, performance art film and a musical. Playback Magazine named her one of 10 to Watch and her work has played at festivals internationally, including Berlinale, Hot Docs, SXSW, Tribeca, and London BFI, as well as airing on many networks in Canada.
Roshanak Kheshti is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies and affiliate faculty in the
Critical Gender Studies Program at the University of California, San Diego. She is the author of Modernity’s Ear: Listening to Race and Gender in World Music (NYU Press, 2015) and Wendy Carlos’s Switched on Bach (Bloomsbury, 2019).
Sara Mameni is Faculty in the School of Critical Studies and Director of Aesthetics and Politics Program at California Institute of the Arts. Her specialization is contemporary art in SWANA region with a focus on queer of color theory. Her current research explores biopolitics, racial discourse in the Anthropocene, post-humanist aesthetics and the geo-ecological age of petroleum. She is currently working on her book manuscript titled, Crude Aesthetics.
Anna Luisa Petrisko (Director, Composer) is a visual artist and musician. Whether it is experimental opera, multimedia installation, or a tropical new age pop album, her work is otherworldly spectacle that explores future and ancient ideas, invested as much in the sacred as in technological speculation. Anna Luisa’s trademark hand-painted bodysuits are re-indigenized alien skin, an embodied research project and reconception of pre-colonial tattooing practices of Pacific Ocean Peoples.