2012 Speakers Bios

Multimodal Approaches to Learning Conference

The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Art Beyond Sight

October 26-28, 2012

Speaker Biographies

Halldóra Arnardóttir (Akureyri, Iceland 1967) is a PhD Art Historian from The Bartlett School of Architecture and Planning (UCL) London. She has published extensively in Europe on Art, Architecture and Alzheimer, as well as given lectures at universities and congresses. Emphasising the importance of communication, she has prepared a television and radio programs on the built environment for the National Broadcasting Company in Iceland. Among her publications are: Stories of Houses, The Architecture of Manfreð Vilhjálmsson, which won the Architecture Prize 2009 in Iceland, and the books, El arte de Entretelas (2009), Narrando Memorias (2010), Tarta Murcia (2010) y Emociones en Silencio (2011) as primary results of the Art and Culture as Therapy research project.     

Ms. Arnardóttir is a lecturer at UCAM University, Coordinator of Art and Culture as Therapy against Alzheimer at the Hospital Virgen de la Arrixaca and member of the architecture practice SARQ in Murcia (Spain).

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Rikki Asher studied Ch'an (Zen) meditation and yoga with the late Chan Master Sheng Yen in 1976. Ms. Asher is graduate of the City University of New York (CUNY) with a Master's in Fine Arts in painting, and of Columbia University with a Doctorate in Art Education. She combines her background in art and education with meditation utilizing mindfulness techniques in her CUNY Queens College art education courses and faculty. Ms. Asher is certified as a yoga and meditation instructor and has taught both in the Omega Institute and Dharma Drum Mountain Meditation Retreat Center since 1999. She is a painter and community muralist painting murals in the USA and abroad.

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Alan Balicki began working with material culture in 1980, when he conducted a two-year condition survey of 19^th-century cemeteries in New Orleans. Since then, Mr. Balicki has worked with the conservation of museum, archival and library materials, and has lectured and conducted many workshops on collections care for local archives and preservation programs. He is a graduate of Columbia’s former Conservation Program and is now the Chief Conservator for Library Collections at The New York Historical Society, where he has worked since 1993.

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Emilie Baltz believes that food is the most revealing part of culture, and she works in multiple mediums, both commercially and artistically, to explore that notion in the most robust way possible. Trained in Film Studies, Photography and Industrial Design, she borrows omnivorously from multiple mediums in order to deliver joyful experiences for consumers. The outputs of this practice are personal and professional, functional and fantastical. Her goal is to provoke delicious new perspectives on the world through social, formal, and industrial processes.

 Mary John Baumann, DWS, completed her degree in International Economics at the Swedish Upsala College and the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. After graduating, she began her career in the beauty industry with Estee Lauder’s affiliate in Stockholm. She then returned to New York to embark on a career in global marketing with Avon, Estee Lauder and Coty.

Professional interest in fragrance evolved from years of experience in the industry and in recent years merged with a personal interest in wine collecting and travel to the vineyards of the world. Ms. Baumann was awarded the Diploma certificate from the UK based Wine and Spirits Education Trust. She is currently studying with the London based Institute of Masters of Wine for qualification as a Master of Wine. Currently there are 299 Masters of Wine worldwide.

Ms. Baumann is the founder of “Nose in the Glass,” which seeks to educate consumers on the role of sense of smell in wine appreciation. Her goal is to help demystify wine and encourage consumers to trust their noses while exploring all that wine has to offer.

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Kóan Jeff Baysa is a physician, curator, designer, writer, critic, Whitney Museum ISP Curatorial Fellow, and a member of the Association of International Art Critics (AICA). The Pacific editor for d'Art International, contributing writer for the website ArtSlant, and writer and art editor for the lifestyle journal, aRUde, Dr. Baysa has also written for Art Asia Pacific and Flavorpill. He has presented lectures at the Whitney Museum and MoMA in New York, as well as the Phillips Collection and The National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC, and is an organizing committee member of MMVR/NextMed. A prior clinical professor of pediatrics, and allergy and clinical immunology specialist in Manhattan, his current medical focus is on the potential beneficial impact of olfactory stimuli on memory disorders.

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Paul Bloodgood is co-founder and curator of the AC Project Room. Mr. Bloodgood has been an important figure in the New York art world for the past two decades. His work has been exhibited at David Zwirner Gallery, 303 Gallery, and at the 2007 White Columns Annual. He received his MFA in Painting from the Maine College of Art in Portland and his BA in Painting from Yale University. He was a 2009 recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship. In October 2010, Mr. Bloodgood suffered a brain injury, which altered his visual system, including the ability to make perceptual closure—to “make whole,” perceptually, objects viewed only in part. In response, Mr. Bloodgood has transformed both his studio and teaching practices to at once accommodate and make use of this profound change.

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John Bramblitt is an artist living in Denton, Texas. His art has been sold in more than thirty countries, and he has appeared internationally in print, and on TV and radio, including The New York Times, Psychology Today, and the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric. His work has received critical recognition, including three Presidential Service Awards for his innovative multimodal art workshops. He’s been the subject of several short films and a documentary short, “Bramblitt,” which won the title of “Most Inspirational Video” from YouTube, among other awards.

While art was always a part of Mr. Bramblitt’s life, it was not until he lost his sight in 2001, due to complications from epilepsy, that he began to paint. His workshops are unique in the art world in that they not only span the gap between beginning and professional artists, but also include adaptive techniques for people with disabilities.

Angela Brew is an artist, drawing teacher and PhD student.

She is a co-founder of International Drawing and Cognition Research, http://drawingandcognition.pressible.org/, and a member of The Centre for Drawing UAL http://thecentrefordrawingual.com.

After studying sculpture and drawing at Edinburgh College of Art, Ms. Brew created and ran Skylark Galleries http://www.skylarkgalleries.com/ and worked as an artist and drawing teacher. In 2006 she completed her Drawing Masters at Camberwell College of Art, and in 2007 Ms. Brew began her doctoral research, in the Drawing and Cognition Project, Camberwell, on the impact of drawing practice on perception. Her research interest is in cognitive, perceptual and motor processes involved in drawing. She is studying rhythm of eye and hand movements, and the role of the pause in drawing. Her thesis ‘The Seeing Hand’ argues that the hand and the eye forge a strong connection through practice, with the hand increasingly sharing a perceptual role with the eye.

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Halsey Burgund has a degree in Geophysics, has spent time designing and building furniture and working in the high tech industry, and is now a sound artist and musician. He works primarily with spoken voices in combination with traditional and electronic instruments in both audio installations and musical performances. Recently, his work has focused on contributory location-based audio installations for which he developed Roundware, a distributed platform for collecting, organizing and re-presenting media via smartphones and the web.

Mr. Burgund has exhibited and performed in museums and galleries throughout the country, including the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, the Museum of Science, Boston and the California Academy of Sciences. He was also awarded a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship in 2011 to explore their audio archives for future work.

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Amanda Cachia is from Sydney, Australia and recently completed her second Masters in Visual & Critical Studies at the California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco. Her MA thesis, entitled What Can a Body Do? Inscribing and Adjusting Experiences of Disability in Contemporary Art will form the basis of an exhibition to be curated by Cachia and hosted by Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery at Haverford College, PA from October 26 – December 16, 2012.

Ms. Cachia received her first Masters in Creative Curating from Goldsmiths College, University of London in 2001 and will embark on a dual PhD in Art History, Theory & Criticism and Communication at the University of California, San Diego in Fall, 2012. Her dissertation will focus on the intersection of disability and contemporary art.

Ms. Cachia held the position of Director/Curator of the Dunlop Art Gallery in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada from 2007-2010, and has curated approximately 30 exhibitions over the last ten years in London, New York, Oakland and various cities across Australia and Canada. Her curatorial practice revolves around interdisciplinary themes within a social justice framework. Cachia has been the Chair of the Dwarf Artists Coalition for the Little People of America since 2007.

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Marie Clapot spearheads the Art Beyond Sight Lab for Learning programs, where she develops and teaches curriculum for K-12. She also has extensive experience in museum education and accessibility. She completed research and development projects as a graduate assistant at the Adaptive Technology Center, Bloomington, IN. While working as Access Coordinator at the Indiana University Art Museum, she completed an accessibility assessment and implemented an accessibility program for people with vision loss. She has also worked in the Access Coordination office of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY. Ms. Clapot holds a Master in Art Education from Indiana University, and an MA in Heritage Development, from Université de Bretagne Occidentale (UBO), Quimper (France) and MA in Heritage Development form UBO (Brest).

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William Crow is Managing Museum Educator of School and Teacher Programs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In that role he oversees programs serving over 200,000 students and teachers annually. He co-authored the AAM publications Unbound by Place or Time:  Museums and Online Learning and All Together Now:  Museums and Online Collaborative Learning. He is Adjunct Instructor in the M.A. Program in Museum Studies at Johns Hopkins, and Assistant Professor of Museum Studies at NYU. He holds a B.A. in Romance Languages and Art from Wake Forest, an M.F.A. in Painting from Hunter College, an M.S.Ed. in Museum Education Leadership from Bank Street, and is a Ph.D. student in Cognitive Studies at Teachers College, Columbia University.

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 Mihir Desai chef, organizer of supper clubs, proponent of molecular gastronomy.

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Isabel Walcott Draves started Leaders in Software and Art (LISA), an organization founded to bring together technology artists, curators, collectors, coders and collaborators, in 2009. Since then, the project has hosted private salons all over New York City featuring presentations by artists who work with technology; interviewed a selection of artists on the blog at https://softwareandart.com; and promoted the shows and careers of its alumni speakers on Twitter @softwareandart. Ms. Draves is the founder (in 1996) and former CEO of SmartGirl.org, the first social media site for teenage girls. In her more gainful moments, she is an internet strategy consultant. She has worked in project management, research, and marketing at multiple technology endeavors large and small, including Bertelsmann, Gartner, and Linden Lab. She has a BA in Literature from Harvard and a MA in Communications, Computing and Technology from Columbia.

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Jim Drobnick is a critic, curator, and Associate Professor of Contemporary Art and Theory at OCAD University, Toronto. He has published on the visual arts, performance, the senses, and post-media practices in recent anthologies such as Art, History and the Senses (2010) and Senses and the City (2011), and the journals Angelaki, High Performance, Parachute, Performance Research, and The Senses & Society. He edited the anthologies Aural Cultures (2004) and The Smell Culture Reader (2006), and recently co-founded the Journal of Curatorial Studies. He is a co-founder of DisplayCult, a curatorial collaborative that recently produced Odor Limits (2008), MetroSonics (2009) and NIGHTSENSE (2009) (www.displaycult.com). He is working on an upcoming book on smell in contemporary art.

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R. Luke DuBois is a composer, artist, and performer who explores the temporal, verbal, and visual structures of cultural and personal ephemera. He holds a doctorate in music composition from Columbia University, and has lectured and taught worldwide on interactive sound and video performance. He has collaborated on interactive performance, installation, and music production work with many artists and organizations and was the director of the Princeton Laptop Orchestra for its 2007 season. Dr. DuBois is the co-author of Jitter, a software suite for the real-time manipulation of matrix data developed by San Francisco-based software company Cycling'74. He appears on nearly twenty-five albums both individually and as part of the avant-garde electronic group The Freight Elevator Quartet.

Stemming from his investigations of “time-lapse phonography,” Dr. DuBois’ work is a sonic and encyclopedic relative to time-lapse photography. Exhibitions of his work include: the Insitut Valencià d’Art Modern, Spain; 2008 Democratic National Convention, Denver; Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis; San Jose Museum of Art; National Constitution Center, Philadelphia; Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art; Daelim Contemporary Art Museum, Seoul; 2007 Sundance Film Festival; the Sydney Film Festival; the Smithsonian American Art Museum; and PROSPECT.2 New Orleans. His work and writings have appeared in print and online in the New York Times, National Geographic, and Esquire Magazine.

Dr. DuBois is the director of the Brooklyn Experimental Media Center at the Polytechnic Institute of NYU, and is on the Board of Directors of the ISSUE Project Room. His records are available on Caipirinha/Sire, Liquid Sky, C74, and Cantaloupe Music. His artwork is represented by bitforms gallery in New York City.

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John H. Falk, Sea Grant Professor of Free-Choice Learning at Oregon State University and Director, OSU Center for Research on Lifelong STEM Learning, is known internationally for his expertise on free-choice learning: the learning that occurs while visiting museums, traveling abroad or surfing the Internet. Before joining the faculty at Oregon State University, Dr. Falk founded, and for twenty years directed, the Institute for Learning Innovation. He spent fourteen years at the Smithsonian Institution where he held a number of senior positions including Director, Smithsonian Office of Educational Research. In 2006 Dr. Falk was recognized by the American Association of Museums as one of the 100 most influential museum professionals of the past 100 years. In 2010 he was further recognized by the American Association of Museum’s Education Committee with its highest award, the John Cotton Dana Award for Leadership.

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David Freedberg is Pierre Matisse Professor of the History of Art at Columbia University, as well as Director of its Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America. His best known books are The Power of Images:  Studies in the History and Theory of Response (1989), and The Eye of the Lynx, Galileo, his Friends and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History (2003). Since then he has devoted much of his energy to the preparation of his forthcoming book on neuroscience, images, and art, with particular reference to multimodal responses -- particularly visuomotor and visuotactile ones -- and their esthetic and therapeutic implications.

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Lou Giansante is a Peabody Award-winning multimedia producer, writer and voice talent of broadcast, Internet, and museum media. He has created original audio and video for Art Beyond Sight since its inception as Art Education for the Blind in 1987. Mr. Giansante also consults, writes, produces, and narrates audio tours for art, history, and science museums. Recent clients: Acoustiguide Inc., Orpheo USA, the New York Historical Society, VSA: The International Organization on Arts and Disability, the Jewish Community Center, and the Intrepid Sea, Air, and Space Museum. He has special expertise writing verbal description for exhibitions and audio description for videos.

See more at www.lougiansante.org.

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Johannes Goebel is the founding director of EMPAC (the Curtis R.Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, since 2002. Between 1990 and 2002 he was the founding director of the Institute for Music and Acoustics at the Center for Art and Media ZKM Karlsruhe in Germany where he was also involved with exhibits in the Media Museum of ZKM. At both institutions he created platforms and initialized artistic and research work between the digital domain and our domain of experience. Earlier in his life he was a composer who built his own instruments out of wood and metal or digital code, or an educator who played with or taught children and adults with varying degrees of challenges in the continuum of the physical and the mental realms. And there were other lives as well…

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Larry Goldberg is the founder and director of the Carl and Ruth Shapiro Family National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM) at Boston's public broadcaster WGBH. For more than a decade he directed WGBH's Media Access Group and its Caption Center and Descriptive Video Service and now focuses on research and development, public policy initiatives and strategic partnerships for global impact. He is a leader in the international effort to assure that the design and implementation of new technologies meet the needs of people with disabilities and other populations who lack access.

Mr. Goldberg led development of the specifications for digital television closed captioning in the U.S. and was awarded a patent in 1996 for "Rear Window™," the first closed-captioning system for movie theaters and theme parks. He has developed dozens of innovative R&D projects for full inclusion in such fields as online education and digital publishing, mobile devices and mobile media, in-flight entertainment, home media networks, Web-based media, theatrical motion pictures, museums and theme parks, and many others. Larry served on the FCC's Technological Advisory Council, its Consumer Advisory Committee and recently co-chaired its Video Programming Accessibility Advisory Committee. He worked closely with industry and consumer representatives and Congressional staffers on the "21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act," which was signed into law by Pres. Obama in October of 2010.

Mr. Goldberg works with technology companies such as Apple, Disney, Microsoft, Verizon, Panasonic, AT&T, Yahoo!, HP, Adobe, and others on solutions to meet the needs of consumers with disabilities. His undergraduate degree focused on Cinema Studies and Broadcast Journalism at University of Southern California.

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Carolyn Halpin-Healy, M.A., Williams College, is Executive Director of Arts & Minds, a non- profit organization dedicated to improving well-being for people with dementia and their caregivers through meaningful art experiences. In 2010, she founded Arts & Minds with Columbia University neurologist, Dr. James Noble and launched programs at the Studio Museum in Harlem and the New York Historical Society. Since 1991, she has been on the teaching staff at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Ms. Halpin-Healy brings her expertise in adult learning to her work training museum educators and teachers.  She teaches a variety of programs that serve people with disabilities. For more information, visit www.artsandminds.org

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Rachel Herz, PhD, is a leading expert in the psychological science of smell. She has been conducting research on olfaction since 1990, has published more than 65 original research papers, contributed numerous chapters to and co-edited college textbooks and academic anthologies, received a variety of awards and grants, and is on the faculty of Brown University. Dr. Herz is also a professional consultant for multinational fragrance and flavor companies, and is frequently called upon as an expert witness in cases involving the sense of smell. Her first popular science book, The Scent of Desire: Discovering Our Enigmatic Sense of Smell, was published in 2007 and selected as a finalist for the 2009 AAAS/Subaru SB&F Prize for Excellence in Science Books. Her latest book, That’s Disgusting, released in January 2012, explores the emotion of disgust from culture to neuroscience and explains how this fascinating emotion is a mirror of human nature. For more information see: www.rachelherz.com

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Olga Hubard is Assistant Professor of Art Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, where she teaches museum education, multimodality and art education, research, and painting. Her scholarship on the theory and practice of museum education has appeared in various academic journals. With years of museum education experience, Dr. Hubard continues to collaborate with major art museums through research, consulting, curriculum development, lectures and professional development workshops. Dr. Hubard received an EdD and an MA in art education from Teachers College, Columbia University. She also holds an MFA from the School of Visual Arts and a BA in Art History from the Universidad Iberoamericana. Parallel to her work in art and museum education, Dr. Hubard maintains an active practice as an artist. For more information visit: http://olgahubard.wordpress.com

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Phoebe Hui is an interdisciplinary artist primarily working in the relationship between language, sound and technology. Most of her works defamiliarize, and experiment with, text, image, and sound, to discover new possibilities and to transgress ordinary boundaries. Her recent projects have increasingly relied on interdisciplinary ideas drawn from art history, quantitative research, electronics, and interface design.

Ms. Hui received her Master of Arts in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. She is the recipient of a number of grants and awards, including Hong Kong Art Development Council Young Artist Award (Media Arts) 2011, Asian Cultural Council Altius Fellow, Bloomberg Emerging Artist Award, Asian Cultural Council United States-Japan Arts Program Research Fellowship, Hong Kong Art Development Council Art Scholarship, Solo show grant from Watermans to coincide with 2012 Olympics Games in London, Hong Kong Design Association Design Student Scholarship. Currently, she is doing her MFA at UCLA Design Media Art.

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Andrea Kantrowitz is an artist, teacher and doctoral candidate at Teacher’s College, Columbia University, and a member of the international Drawing Research Network. She holds a B.A in Art and Cognition from Harvard University and a MFA in Painting from Yale, and is an adjunct professor in the graduate program in art education at the College of New Rochelle. Ms. Kantrowitz has also worked for many years as a teaching artist in the New York City public schools. Her research examines the cognitive interactions underlying contemporary artists’ drawing practices. Her own art work is represented by Kenise Barnes Fine Art in Larchmont, NY.

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Matthew Kaplowitz, Founding partner/ Director of Technology and Content Innovation, Bridge Multimedia, has been in the world of media and entertainment for more than 25 years as a writer, producer, director, composer and sound designer of TV shows, feature & documentary films and commercials that have won multiple Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Peabody, and Clio Awards. Mr. Kaplowitz has also been the recipient of grant awards from the U.S. Department of Education and the National Science Foundation for the development and implementation of accessible technology and transmedia for children and adults. Mr. Kaplowitz’s daughter, Anna, has CHARGE Syndrome.

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Dr. Andreas Keller works as a Research Associate at the Rockefeller University where he investigates the causes and consequences of the variability of human odor perception. In addition he is a graduate student in the philosophy department at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he is writing a thesis on the role of olfaction in the philosophy of mind. He also sometimes organizes exhibitions of olfactory art and builds interactive odor art pieces.

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Kimberly Kelly is a designer and artist. In her recent work, she creates experimental sensory experiences that draw new intersections between people, food and interior space. The installations explore the impact of the interior on taste perception by creating interactive and comparative experiences. This work is a continuation of Ms. Kelly’s graduate thesis investigating the “Ingestion of the Interior”. In her past two years at Parsons, The New School for Design, she was a recipient of the Innovation and Experimentation award for her graduate work.

In addition to Ms. Kelly’s graduate work, she is a licensed interior designer focusing in education, corporate design, and research + development for international design firms in Boston and New York. Ms. Kelly is an Angeleno Donghia Award recipient and Teknion Junior Fellow. Her recent installations have been published in Wallpaper Magazine and NY11 Exhibition at Knoll in Manhattan.

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John Kennedy is the award-winning author of “Drawing and the Blind" and many research papers on touch, understanding space and pictures. His work on perspective, pictures and the development of drawing in blind and sighted children was described as one of the top ten ideas of the year by The Times of London. Born in Belfast, educated at Queen's University Belfast and Cornell, he has taught at Harvard and University of Toronto.

Currently he is Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and distinguished University Professor, emeritus, at Toronto.

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Volker Kirchberg received Diploma and PhD degrees in sociology from the University of Hamburg. His graduate work was based on urban and cultural studies at Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore). As an assistant professor at William Paterson University of New Jersey he received a habilitation degree in sociology from the Free University Berlin. Since 2004 he has taught art, urban and organizational studies at Leuphana University of Lueneburg. His main research interests are museum studies and urban studies.

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Georgia Krantz is Senior Education Manager, Adult and Access Programs at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. In 2008, she launched Mind’s Eye, a program at the Guggenheim for visitors with low vision or blindness and who are deaf. She regularly leads Art inSight programs at NYC’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), is a steering committee member of the NYC Museum Access Consortium, and was invited to informal meetings on accessibility at the White House in 2009 and 2010. She is the Guggenheim representative for the museum’s participation in the Multi-site Museum Accessibility Study organized by Art Beyond Sight. Ms. Krantz is also Adjunct Associate Professor of Communications for graduate studies in the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU and a Gallery Lecturer for Adult and Academic Programs at MoMA. Ms. Krantz did her PhD studies in art history, with a specialty in 20th-century art and theory. She has taught at Pratt Institute and The New School, and worked as an Educator at many cultural institutions throughout New York City.

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Doylene Land is the Curator of Education at the Ellen Noël Art Museum in Odessa, Texas. She earned her BFA in Art Education and MFA in Education with a Visual Impairment Teaching Certification from Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas. Ms. Land taught art in public and private schools in Texas and Guadalajara, Mexico. She has twenty three years of experience as a Rehabilitation Teacher and Independent Living Coordinator with the State of Texas/Department of Blind Services. Ms. Land assisted in the planning of The George and Milly Rhodus Sculpture and Sensory Garden at the Ellen Noël Art Museum. As Curator, she continues to seek exhibitions and programming designed for visitors of all abilities, including summer art camp and adult art classes for patrons who are blind.

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Steve Landau is President and Founder of Touch Graphics, Inc. (www.touchgraphics.com), a company that develops and manufactures devices and media that rely on the sense of touch as the primary means of communicating spatial information. The company's flagship product, the Talking Tactile Tablet is now in wide use in schools around the world. Touch Graphics also specializes in producing museum exhibits and guide booklets based on principles of universal design. Mr. Landau has taught in design programs at New York University, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Parsons School of Design, University of Arizona and Harvard University. As an undergraduate he studied Art at Oberlin College, and received a Masters of Architecture from Harvard. Touch Graphics' offices and studios are located in New York City and Barcelona. 

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Stephen Lapthisophon is an artist and writer whose work addresses questions of language, history, and cultural memory. His work has been seen at Artists Space in New York, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta; in Chicago at the Hyde Park Art Center,  N.A.M.E., and Randolph Street galleries; as well as exhibitions in Berlin at Zagreus Projekt and in Barcelona at El Escaparate. Mr. Lapthisophon is also represented in the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Dallas Museum of Art. Mr. Lapthisophon received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1979,   He currently teaches studio art and art history at the University of Texas at Arlington. Mr. Lapthisophon’s  vision was damaged in 1994 due to an optic nerve disorder. He was a jury award recipient of the 2001 Artadia Award. In 2008 he was awarded the prestigious Wynn Newhouse Foundation Award for artists with disabilities.

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Christophe Laudamiel was a Fine-Fragrance Perfumer at International Flavors & Fragrances Inc. at their Manhattan headquarters from 2000 to 2008. He created fragrances for Abercrombie & Fitch, Frederic Fekkai, Cath Kidston, The Estee Lauder Companies, Ralph Lauren Fragrances, Harvey Nichols, Slatkin & Co. (including CEW Award-winning Elton John's Black Candle). He is a co-author of Polo Blue for Men, Ralph Lauren 2002, allegedly the largest launch and success of a men's fragrance in the history of perfumery. The fragrance received the 2003 FIFI Award for Fragrance Star of the Year as well as the Perfumers' Choice Award.

Mr. Laudamiel spent his childhood in wild parts of France and New Caledonia. He learnt within his family about tulips, narcissi, wild berries, herbs, spices, woods and the tropical fruits, as well as about merciless quality criteria. A background duality between natural wilderness and chemistry, and a total devotion to beauty and science have shaped his vision of bringing Perfumery to a higher awareness level, as a true Art form, in people's lives and in the academics. From the beginning, he distinguished with a very personal creative style which he later polished with established perfumers in Paris. His inspirations stem from atmospheres or conceptual ambiances, "he thinks outside of the bottle" (IFF quote), collaborates with fine artists and designers, and keeps his exploration going by creating for queens of the night in New York City such as the now famed Amanda Lepore.

Mr. Laudamiel graduated Valedictorian with a Master's Degree in Chemistry from France, was teaching assistant at Harvard University and teaching fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received his Perfumer-Creator Degree from Procter & Gamble in 1997, and was later promoted to Senior Perfumer. He is uniquely inventor on several patents citing new molecules and new fragrance diffusion techniques. He holds national and international awards, is a member of the American Society of Perfumers, the French Perfumers' Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the World Wildlife Fund and the French League for Bird Protection. He enjoys running, dancing, and the performing arts.

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Pamela Lawton’s large-scale, colorful multi-panel painting installations are inspired by reflections in architecture, a theme first begun when an artist in residence at the World Trade Center through the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Her recent one-person exhibitions include “Curved Reality” at the Atrium Galleries of the former Citigroup Center, New York City, “Liquid City”, at the Conde Nast building in Times Square, NYC.

At the Metropolitan Museum, she teaches a wide range of studio and gallery programs for diverse audiences, including people with dementia, people with visual impairments, and people with learning and/or developmental disabilities. At the museum, she developed a class, Seeing Through Drawing, for people with visual impairments. She has also taught at the New School, American University, and William Paterson University, and The Smithsonian Institution. She has taught art in Sri Lanka working with tsunami survivors, in Afghanistan working with widows of refugees and their children, in Mississippi working with Katrina survivors.

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Nina Levent, Ph.D., Executive Director, Art Beyond Sight Institute/Art Education for the Blind, is an art historian and museum trainer. She is on the faculty of the New York Academy of Art. She is currently the principal investigator on a multi-site museum study involving major US art museums: Guggenheim Museum; SFMoMA; Seattle Art Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Brooklyn Museum; Indianapolis Museum of Art; and the National Gallery, Washington, DC. Dr. Levent also leads a study and development project that looks at the need for disability and diversity education for museum studies students and young museum professionals.

Previously she was a lead researcher and author on an IMLS-funded development project, Handbook for Museum, involving museums in NY, WI, MN, and MD . Dr. Levent is a co-editor of Art Beyond Sight Resource Guide and a co-author of the Handbook for Museums and Educators Online.

Dr. Levent has lectured on accessibility, inclusion, and Universal Design at museums and conferences around the world. She has trained staff and educators at many museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, Buffalo’s Albright-Knox Art Gallery, and Baltimore’s Walters Museum of Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, Walker Art Center, Museo de Arte dePuerto Rico, and many others. She is a co-editor of an upcoming volume of Disabilities Studies Quarterly on Blindness and Museums, and a number of White Papers on critical accessibility and inclusion issues.

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Margaret Livingstone is Professor of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School. She has done research on hormones and behavior, learning, dyslexia, and vision. Dr. Livingstone has explored the ways in which vision science can understand and inform the world of visual art. She has written a popular lay book, Vision and Art, which has brought her acclaim in the art world as a scientist who can communicate with artists and art historians, with mutual benefit. She generated some important insights into the field, including a simple explanation for the elusive quality of the Mona Lisa’s smile (it is more visible to peripheral vision than to central vision) and the fact that Rembrandt, like a surprisingly large number of famous artists, was likely to have been stereoblind.

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Jesse Louis-Rosenberg is the co-founder of Nervous System, a design studio that works at the intersection of science, art, and technology. The studio consists of Jesse Louis-Rosenberg and Jessica Rosenkrantz who met as undergraduates at MIT where he studied math + computer science and she studied architecture + biology. Nervous System’s novel creative process employs computer simulation to generate designs and digital fabrication to realize products. Drawing inspiration from natural phenomena, Mr. Louis-Rosenberg and his partner write computer programs mimicking processes and patterns found in nature and use those programs to create unique and affordable art, jewelry, and housewares.

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Deborah Lutz is an artist, and museum educator and lecturer. Ms. Lutz lectures in galleries and conducts studio and gallery based art-making workshops for The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Ms. Lutz co-teaches Metropolitan Museum’s Seeing Through Drawing workshop for adults with vision impairments, employing a curriculum based in the sequential building of drawing skills using a multisensory approach to learning, incorporating: verbal imaging; touch; and related tactile drawing materials. She also lectures for The Morgan Library and Museum, and The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, where she teaches Design in the Classroom, a program for the public schools as part of the Target Design initiative.

Ms. Lutz received her B.F.A. from Bowling Green State University, and her M.F.A. in Figurative Painting and Drawing from New York Academy of Figurative Art. She teaches Drawing and 2D Design courses at Westchester Community College and Manhattanville College. Ms. Lutz is a practicing artist working primarily in graphite, gouache and oils. Her work can be viewed at http://deborahlutz.carbonmade.com/.

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Lou Mallozzi is a sound artist who makes installations, performances, works for CD and broadcast, improvised music, sound design for cinema and media installations, drawings, visual installations, and other projects. He regularly collaborates with other artists and musicians – these have included Michael Zerang, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Hal Rammel, Gustavo Matamoros, Charlotte Hug, Michael Vorfeld, Antonia Contro, Sandra Binion, Carlos Zingaro Alves, and many others. He has received grants and residencies to pursue his work, including four Illinois Arts Council fellowships; a residency at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Study Center in Italy; Artist-in-Residence positions at Harvestworks New York, Spritzenhaus Hamburg, and the City of Lucerne; and faculty grants from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Mr. Mallozzi is co-founder and executive director of Experimental Sound Studio, a nonprofit sonic arts organization in Chicago, and he is on the faculty of the Sound Department at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

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Daniel Mason is an independent curator, writer, and lecturer based in New York. His recent exhibitions include Chamber Piece, an exhibition of paintings, prints, drawings, and photographs by Richard Benson, Linden Frederick, David Heald, Mia Westerlund Roosen, and William Tucker; The Sabbath of History: William Congdon, a retrospective exhibition of paintings, drawings, and sculpture by the Abstract Expressionist William Congdon; Arthur Ganson: Kinetic Mandala, a mid-career survey of Ganson’s work in kinetic sculpture and video; Broom: The Full Sweep, an exhibition of the international avant-garde magazine Broom, published from 1921 to 1924; Open Score Variations, a group show that featured works by Sanford Biggers, Lee Boroson, John Cage, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Paula Hayes, Yoko Ono, Edward Ruscha, Xaviera Simmons, Allison Smith, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and La Monte Young; and Art Beyond Sight, an exhibition presented as part of the 2009 Art Beyond Sight Conference that included works by Kendall Buster, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Dario Robleto, Miriam Songster, and Rirkrit Tiravanija.

He has been a guest lecturer at Bard College, Ramapo College, and Yale University where he developed the college seminar Art of the Senses with curator Frederick Lamp. His catalogs include The Sabbath of History: William Congdon with Meditations on Holy Week by Joseph Ratzinger (2012) and Chica Tenney: Advent (2005). He holds an M.A. in Curatorial Studies from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and a B.A. in History of Art from Yale University.

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Shannon Mattern is Associate Professor in the School of Media Studies at The New School in New York. Her research and teaching focus on relationships between the forms and materialities of media, and the spaces (architectural, urban, conceptual) they create and inhabit. She is the author of The New Downtown Library: Designing with Communities (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), as well as articles and chapters on libraries and archives, media companies’ headquarters, place branding, public design projects, media art, media acoustics, media infrastructures, and material texts. You can find her at wordsinspace.net.

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 Rebecca McGinnis is the Museum Educator overseeing Access and Community Programs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. She and her colleagues are recognized internationally for their pioneering programs for visitors with disabilities. In 2011 she received the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Award for Excellence in Accessibility Leadership and the American Council of the Blind Achievement Award in Audio Description for Museums. Her publications include Art and the Alphabet: A Tactile Experience (with Ileana Sanchez), an innovative children's book combining braille, tactile pictures, and images of works of art from the Metropolitan Museum; "Enabling Education: Including People with Disabilities in Art Museum Programming" in From Periphery to Center: Art Museum Education in the 21st Century, ed. Pat Villenueve, National Art Education Association, 2007; and “Developing Museum Programs for People with Autism” in Understanding Students with Autism through Art, ed. Beverly Levett Gerber and Julia Kellman, National Art Education Association, 2010.

Ms. McGinnis is co-convenor with Art Beyond Sight of the bi-annual Multimodal Approaches to Learning conference (2005, 2007, 2009, 2012). She co-chaired the New York Museum Access Consortium from 2000-2012 and is chair of the board of City Access New York (CANY). Her international experience includes directing access audits and training for over fifty museums in the United Kingdom and in the United States, and major collaborations with the British Museum and National Portrait Gallery in London. Ms. McGinnis has worked at the Royal National Institute for the Blind and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. In addition to MA degrees in History of Art (NYU) and Museum Studies (University of Leicester), she is a doctoral candidate in Cognitive Psychology pursuing research relating to visual impairment and mental imagery at Teachers' College, Columbia University.

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D. Lynn McRainey is the Chief Education Officer and Elizabeth F. Cheney Director of Education at the Chicago History Museum where she leads a highly creative department in designing interpretive programs and resources to expand and diversify audiences. She has chaired several teams for institutional advancement including the Visioning Committee, a team of staff and board members who envisioned the future of the museum in the report, “Claiming Chicago, Shaping Our Future.”

Ms. McRainey currently leads master planning to redefine the museum as a family destination. Her recent work has explored the role of the senses in creating award-winning interpretive experiences for children and families. “Imagining Lincoln and Juarez,” a non-narrated audio tour for high school students, received the Gold MUSE Award for Audio and Visual Tours at the 2010 American Association of Museums annual meeting and the exhibition Sensing Chicago received an Honorable Mention from the Excellence in Exhibitions competition at the 2007 American Association of Museums annual meeting.

Ms. McRainey is co-editor and chapter author of Connecting Kids to History with Museum Exhibitions. She served on the editorial advisory board and was guest editor for the Journal of Museum Education. She has been a guest instructor for the Leadership in Museum Education program at Bank Street College of Education, and delivered the keynote presentation at the Museum and Gallery Services Queensland, Australia 2007 state conference.

With 25 years of experience in museum education, Ms. McRainey has worked at art, history, and children’s museums. She has received fellowships from the Smithsonian Institution and the National Endowment for the Humanities and participated in the Getty Leadership Institute program “Museum Leadership: The Next Generation.” Ms. McRainey has an MA in art history and a BA in American studies from the University of Virginia.

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Dr. Joshua Miele is the founder and director of the VDRDC. He is also the Associate Director at The Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute. At SKI his work focuses on the research and development of innovative approaches to information accessibility for blind and visually-impaired consumers.

Areas of active research involve the integration of inexpensive software adaptations, existing mainstream technologies, mobile platforms, and the Internet. Current projects include the development of a web-based tool for the automated production of tactile street maps (TMAP); investigation of the use of an off-the-shelf smartpen as a platform for next-generation audio/tactile graphics; a psychophysical investigation of haptically-integrated sonification techniques; and the development of a virtual, wireless Braille keyboard (the WearaBraille) for use with smartphones and mobile platforms.

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Rashaad Newsome was born in New Orleans, Louisiana where he received a B.A. in Art History at Tulane University before studying Film at Film Video Arts NYC as well as music production and programing at Harvestworks NYC .

Mr. Newsome has exhibited nationally and internationally at such creditable institutions and Galleries as: The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; PS1MoMA, New York, NY; The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, NY; Brooklyn Museum, New York, New York; The Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, Boston, Massachusetts; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford Connecticut; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; ar/ge Kunst Galerie Museum, Bolzano, Italy; Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow, Russia and MUSA, Vienna, Austria.

Recent awards include: 2012 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, New York, NY, McColl Center for Visual Art Artist Residency, Charlotte, North Carolina, 2011, Artist in Residence, Pilchuck Glass School, Seattle, Washington; 2010 The Urban Artist Initiative individual Artist Grant, UAI, New York, NY; 2009 Rema Hort Mann Foundation, Visual Arts Grant, New York, NY and 2009 BAC Community Arts Regrant, New York, NY.

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Bruce Odland, composer, sound artist and sonic thinker has been an early innovator in sound design for theatre, museum, film and radio, winning national awards in those fields. His work has been heard at the Whitney Biennial, Venice Architecture Biennale, NPR, PBS, and at festivals and museums from Australia to Korea. He collaborates with such luminaries as Laurie Anderson, The Wooster Group, Royal Shakespeare, Dan Graham, Wallace Shawn, Andre Gregory, Tony Oursler and Peter Sellars amoung many others. His long term work with Sam Auinger (as O+A) recently won a Prix Ars Electronica for "Sonic Vista", a sound installation re-tuning the Frankfurt Greenbelt’s soundscape. His "Sounds from the Vaults, a virtual orchestra of sonic artifacts for the Field Museum, won the AAM’s Golden Muse for interactivity in 2000. 

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Sofia Paraskeva is an interactive designer specializing on the intersection of sound and visuals. Through art and technology she enhances the human experience. Her work spans art and design, filmmaking, video production, visual effects, graphics and experimental sound. She creates narratives for her computer vision installations and performance instruments using MAX/MSP/Jitter, and sensing technologies like the Kinect. She combines cameras with custom wearable instruments, wireless gloves and bodysuits.

Ms. Paraskeva is currently developing Rainbow Resonance, a musical experience for adults and children with special needs. Rainbow Resonance was originally exhibited at the New York Hall of Science in 2008-9, and has been shown at Queens Museum of Art, the Mind's Eye program at the Guggenheim Museum, and the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music.

Ms. Paraskeva studied Visual Studies at Oxford Brookes University, England, Media Communication at Emerson College, Boston, and holds a master’s degree from the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) New York University.

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Jaclyn Packer, Ph.D., received her doctorate in Social Psychology at the Graduate School at the City University of New York.  Dr. Packer is currently working with the American Foundation for the Blind on a project for the Video Description Research and Development Center, and as Project Director for Bridge Multimedia’s OSEP grant to provide video description for educational videos. Dr. Packer conducted some of the earliest research on video description, and published the book “Who’s Watching? A Profile of the Blind and Visually Impaired Audience for Television and Video.”  She has worked as a researcher in the blindness field over 3 decades.

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Flip Phillips is a Professor of Psychology & Neuroscience at Skidmore College. At one point or other in his life, he has been a marching percussion instructor, a computer programmer, a medical imaging researcher, a cyclist/rower/cross country skier, a professional musician and an animation scientist at Pixar Animation Studios. His academic credentials come via The Ohio State University (mail-order branch) and he has taught, lectured, and done research at various institutions all over the world (many times with permission). At Skidmore, Professor Phillips teaches and researches perception & action, and visual and haptic three-dimensional shape. If he were a tree, Dr. Phillips would most likely be cut down and turned into a bookshelf.

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Nancy Proctor heads up mobile strategy and initiatives for the Smithsonian Institution, and is co-chair of the Museums and the Web annual conference. With a PhD in American art history and a background in filmmaking, curation and art criticism, Ms. Proctor published her first online exhibition in 1995.

She co-founded TheGalleryChannel.com in 1998 with Titus Bicknell to present virtual tours of innovative exhibitions alongside comprehensive global museum and gallery listings. TheGalleryChannel was later acquired by Antenna Audio, where Ms. Proctor lead New Product Development from 2000-2008, introducing the company’s multimedia, sign language, downloadable, podcast and cellphone tours. She also directed Antenna’s sales in France from 2006-2007, and worked with the Travel Channel’s product development team. From 2008-2010 she was Head of New Media at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Ms. Proctor served as program chair for the Museums Computer Network (MCN) conference 2010-2011, and co-organizes the Tate Handheld conference among other gatherings for cultural professionals. She also manages MuseumMobile.info, its wiki and podcast series, and is Digital Editor of Curator: The Museum Journal.

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Mia Westerlund Roosen was born in New York and at an early age pursued two careers, one as a dancer and the other as a sculptor. She cites her experience as a dancer as the reason her sculpture often refers to the body, its sensuality, and its movement. Throughout her career, Ms. Westerlund Roosen has created sculpture in a range of media including copper, concrete, ceramic, felt, lead, resin, flannel, stucco, plaster, and bronze that range in scale from the handheld to the monumental. Her work often references organic form and emphasizes the specific qualities of the handmade object. In 2010 her monumental sculptures “Baritone,” “French Kiss,” and “Juggler” were exhibited along Park Avenue, and earlier this year a survey of her models and maquettes from 1976-2012 were exhibited at the Betty Cunningham Gallery. Ms. Westerlund Roosen has received several prestigious awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and a Fulbright Fellowship. Her work can be seen in numerous public collections, most notably the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Storm King Art Center where her work is permanently installed. She divides her time between New York City and her studio in Buskirk, New York.

Francesca Rosenberg is Director, Community, Access, and School Programs at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). In her 17 years with the museum, Ms. Rosenberg and her team have won national and international respect for MoMA’s efforts to make the museum accessible to all. Most recently, MoMA received awards from the Alzheimer’s Association; American Association of Museums; and Museums and the Web for its efforts on behalf of people with dementia. In 2007, Ms. Rosenberg received the Ruth Green Advocacy Award from the League for the Hard of Hearing; in 2002, she was recognized as the Community Leader of the Year by Self Help for the Hard of Hearing. Ms. Rosenberg is a founding member of the Museum Access Consortium and currently serves on its steering committee. She is the co-author of Meet Me: Making Art Accessible to People with Dementia and Making Art Accessible to Blind and Visually Impaired Individuals. New to Ms. Rosenberg’s portfolio of programs is School Programs.

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Jessica Rosenkrantz is the co-founder of Nervous System, a design studio that works at the intersection of science, art, and technology. The studio consists of Jesse Louis-Rosenberg and Jessica Rosenkrantz who met as undergraduates at MIT where he studied math + computer science and she studied architecture + biology. She and her partner create using a novel process that employs computer simulation to generate designs and digital fabrication to realize products. Drawing inspiration from natural phenomena, they write computer programs mimicking processes and patterns found in nature, and use those programs to create unique and affordable art, jewelry, and housewares.

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Daniel Rozin is an artist, educator and developer, working in the area of interactive digital art. As an interactive artist he creates installations and sculptures that have the unique ability to change and respond to the presence and point of view of the viewer. In many cases the viewer becomes the contents of the piece; in others the viewer is invited to take an active role in the creation of the piece. Even though computers are often used in Mr. Rozin's work, they are seldom visible.

As an educator, Mr. Rozin is Associate Arts Professor at ITP, Tisch School Of The Arts, NYU where he teaches such classes as: "The World- Pixel by Pixel", "Designing for Digital Fabrication", "Project Development Studio," and "Toy Design Workshop".

Born in Jerusalem and trained as an industrial designer, Mr. Rozin lives and works in New York. His work has been exhibited and collected widely. He has had solo exhibitions in the United States and internationally, and been featured in publications such as The New York Times, Wired, ID, Spectrum and Leonardo. His work has earned him numerous awards, including Prix Ars Electronica, ID Design Review, and the Chrysler Design Award.

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Jennifer Rubell creates participatory artwork that is a hybrid of performance art, installation, and happenings. The pieces are often staggering in scale and sensually arresting, frequently employing food and drink as media: one ton of ribs with honey dripping on them from the ceiling; 2,000 hard-boiled eggs with a pile of latex gloves nearby to pick them up; 1,521 doughnuts hanging on a free-standing wall; a room-sized cell padded with 1,800 cones of pink cotton candy. Viewers are encouraged to partake in the work, violating the traditional boundaries of art institutions and engaging senses usually forbidden in or absent from museum and gallery contexts. Ms. Rubell’s work explores the intersection of the monumental and the ephemeral, and serves as a counterpoint to the virtual nature of much of contemporary life.

Some of Ms. Rubell’s notable previous projects include Old-Fashioned, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The de Pury Diptych at the Saatchi Gallery, London; Icons, at the Brooklyn Museum; Creation, for Performa, the New York performance-art festival; and, since 2001, a yearly breakfast project in the courtyard of the Rubell Family Collection in Miami during Art Basel Miami Beach.

Ms. Rubell, 41, received a BA in Fine Arts from Harvard University and subsequently attended the Culinary Institute of America. Prior to beginning her artistic practice, she wrote about food for more than a decade, including columns in the Miami Herald and Domino magazine, and the book Real Life Entertaining (Harper Collins). Ms. Rubell lives in New York City.

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Siegfried Saerberg teaches Sociology and Disability Studies at several universities in Germany. Besides having written many articles, Dr. Saerberg is the author of the books titled Blinde auf Reisen (Travelling Blind People) and Geradeaus ist einfach immer Geradeaus (Always Straight Ahead: Spatial Orientation of Blind and Sighted People). Furthermore, he works as an artist (acoustic installations) and is curator of exhibitions together with the association Blinde und Kunst (Blind People and the Arts). His last projects in this realm were “Blinde Flecken” (Blind Spots), “Ohrenblicke” (Earglances) and Blackout.

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Jane Samuels has worked in the cultural sector for eighteen years, where for the last nine years she has been based at the British Museum managing the Access programme. During her time at the Museum she has collaborated with and advised departments on issues of intellectual, sensory and physical access for disabled and underrepresented audiences. She also manages the Museum’s Access learning programme where she has pioneered innovative collaborations between the British Museum and the criminal justice sector, working in prisons with museum curators and contemporary artists. On this subject she has published work, The British Museum in Pentonville Prison; dismantling barriers through touch and handling: Touch in Museums, Berg, 2008.

Previously, Ms. Samuels worked at Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication managing the Widening Participation programme and as the Education Director for the London based arts charity Turtle Key Arts. Here her core role was to manage ground-breaking Access projects in London based cultural institutions, amongst them the Turtle Opera at the Royal Opera House. This was a unique four year opera, dance and music initiative for young people on the autistic spectrum.

Ms. Samuels has also worked as a freelance Access consultant to Sadler’s Wells, the internationally acclaimed dance house and lectures on the MA programme for the Institute of Education, University College London where she also completed her MA in Museum Studies.

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 Peter Sellars is one of the world’s leading theater, opera, and television directors, with a wide and diverse range of accomplishments. He has directed more than 100 productions around the globe, ranging from Handel operas to a Herbie Hancock music video. “A specialist in 20th-century operas, he has garnered great praise from audiences in America and abroad, most notably for his contemporary versions of Mozart's operas.

Mr. Sellars is applauded in his UCLA professor profile for “his innovative treatments of classical material…and for his commitment to exploring the role of the performing arts in contemporary society.” He has also served as artistic director of the Los Angeles Festival, the American National Theatre at the Kennedy Center, the Boston Shakespeare Company, and the Elitch Theatre for Children in Denver. He is a recipient of the MacArthur Prize Fellowship and the Erasmus Prize, which he was awarded at the Dutch Royal Palace for his contributions to European culture.

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John Shields received a BA in Spanish-French Secondary Education from S.U.N.Y. Albany. After a career in community relations and sales, he changed careers and received his MA in Museum Studies from the Fashion Institute of Technology, NYC. Mr. Shields served as Curator of Education at the Snite Museum of Art at Notre Dame, South Bend, Indiana; since 1992, he has been Manager of Docent and Internship Programs at the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore. At the Walters he developed a partnership with the Maryland State Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped offering Touch and Verbal Descriptive tours.

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Joaneath Spicer, James A Murnaghan Curator of Renaissance and Baroque Art, Walters Art Museum, taught at University of Toronto before coming to the Walters. Besides publications on art and science at the court of Rudolf II in Prague ca. 1600, collecting bronzes in the Renaissance, and Dutch and Italian painting, exhibitions at the Walters include The Allure of Bronze (1995) and Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe (on now). Reinstalling the Renaissance and Baroque collections in 1998-2005 to recreate the choices and displays of collectors from the late Renaissance prompted her reflection on the greatly expanded role of tactility in the Renaissance.

Ms. Spicer has given papers in various venues on this subject and co-curated the exhibition Touch and the Enjoyment of Sculpture: Exploring the Appeal of Renaissance Statuettes (spring 2012) with the Hopkins neuroscientist Steven Hsiao. They are preparing a publication combining their perspectives and research.

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Jacqueline Terrassa is Managing Museum Educator for Gallery and Studio Programs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she directs public programs and community programs that involve direct engagement with works of art as well as creative processes. Prior to joining the Met, she led public programs at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; served as Head of Planning the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; and worked in various education and leadership capacities at the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago and the Hyde Park Art Center. She is Director-Elect of the Museum Education Division of the National Art Education Association; has written and presented on artists, art organizations, and art education; and served on panels for the National Endowment for the Arts, the Illinois Arts Council, and the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, and the Terra Foundation for American Art.

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William Tucker received a B.A. from Oxford University and also studied at the Ruskin School of Drawing, Oxford, and Central Saint Martins Schools of Art, London. His work can be found in several public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Britain, the British Museum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Kröller-Müller Museum, Netherlands; the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia; the Hakone Open-Air Museum, Japan; as well as numerous private collections. His books include The Language of Sculpture, London, 1974. Mr. Tucker exhibits in New York at McKee Gallery, in London at Pangolin London Gallery, and in San Francisco at Paule Anglim Gallery. His sculpture can be seen in Boston on the campus of the University of Massachusetts, and in Ghent, New York at the Fields Sculpture Park.

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Barbara Tversky is Professor of Psychology at Columbia Teachers College and Professor Emerita of Psychology at Stanford University. Her research has concerned memory, categorization, spatial thinking and language, event perception and cognition, diagrammatic reasoning, creativity, and gesture, with applications to design, art, education, computer science, architecture, geography, philosophy, linguistics, and the sciences. She has enjoyed collaborating with colleagues all over the world, in those fields and more.

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Stephen Vitiello is an electronic musician and media artist. Mr. Vitiello’s sound installations have been presented internationally, including at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA); the 2002 Whitney Biennial; the 2006 Biennial of Sydney; the Cartier Foundation, Paris; and a site-specific project on the High Line in NYC. His CD releases include Bright and Dusty Things (New Albion Records), Listening to Donald Judd (Sub Rosa), The Gorilla Variations (12k) and Box Music (12k). Since 1989, Mr. Vitiello has collaborated with numerous artists and musicians, including Pauline Oliveros, Tony Oursler, Julie Mehretu, Scanner, Steve Roden, Taylor Deupree and Ryuichi Sakamoto. In 2011, ABC-TV, Australia produced the documentary Stephen Vitiello: Listening With Intent. Originally from New York, Mr. Vitiello is now based in Richmond, Virginia, where he is on the faculty of the Kinetic Imaging Department at Virginia Commonwealth University. In 2011, he was awarded a John Simon Memorial Guggenheim Fellowship.  www.stephenvitiello.com

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John S. Weber is the Dayton Director of the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York, an interdisciplinary museum opened in 2000 to create links between contemporary art and other disciplines. He supervises the Tang staff and oversees exhibitions, programs, collections, and the Tang website, as well as curating exhibitions and writing for museum publications. At the Tang he has organized And Therefore I Am, a group show on consciousness and the mind; Joachim Schmid Photoworks 1982-2007; Molecules That Matter, an interdisciplinary exhibition on chemistry, art, and history, conceived and co-curated by Ray Giguere, Skidmore Chemistry Department; and Environment and Object - Recent African Art, co-curated with Lisa Aronson, Skidmore Art History Department. As part of his Tang duties, Mr. Weber teaches in the Skidmore art history program.

Mr. Weber was the Curator of Education and Public Programs at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art  (SFMOMA) from 1993 to 2004, where he spear-headed the architectural design and program of SFMOMA’s Koret Visitor Education Center, founded the museum’s interactive educational technologies program, co-curated exhibitions including 010101, Art in Technological Times; Public Information: Desire, Disaster, Document, and wrote regularly for exhibition catalogues.

From 1987 to 1993 Mr. Weber was curator of contemporary art at the Portland Art Museum in Oregon. He holds a BA from Reed College (1978), and an MFA from the University of California, San Diego (1984), where he began his career as a studio artist. He has also taught at the San Francisco Art Institute, Mills College, the University of Washington, and the Pacific Northwest College of Art.

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Calder Zwicky is the Associate Educator of Teen and Community Programs at the Museum of Modern Art where he has worked since 2006. In this capacity, he oversees the Museum's Community Partnership Program, which seeks to create programming throughout New York City for a wide-range of underserved and historically overlooked community audiences. In addition, he oversees the institution’s multiple-session free arts programming for teens including the MoMA + MoMA PS1 Cross-Museum Collective and the Museum’s long-running In the Making program. Mr. Zwicky has worked for a variety of museums and arts institutions including the Walker Art Center, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Queens Museum of Art, and the Studio Museum in Harlem.