ReVIEWING 14 Abstracts + Presenter Bios - Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center

Onur Ayaz is an educator and doctoral candidate. He oversees his classroom with a view towards cultivating an environment that promotes both teaching and learning in a friendly, safe, and inviting manner. Though he teaches English, he sees it as a responsibility to continue to learn and to continue to teach others so that we might, together, bring about meaningful, long-term change. In another frame, Onur Ayaz studies the history of 20th century American poetics, with a focus on marginalized, unknown, and understudied writers and thinkers like Charles Olson and Paul Metcalf.

Makayla Beam graduated from Shepherd University with her Bachelors in Art Education and is currently finishing a Masters of Art Education from Converse University. She has taught public school in four separate states. In recent years, she has completed murals in Rutherfordton, NC and her hometown of Jane Lew, WV. In 2023, Makayla was granted the opportunity with Learn From Travel to work in pottery and textile studios in the Lake Panajachel area of Guatemala. Makayla Beam’s personal artwork favors woodworking, ceramics, and stained glass.

Michael Beggs is a designer and independent scholar who has been studying Black Mountain College since 2010. He previously worked at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and has written about the Alberses and Black Mountain College in Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College, 1933–57 (Yale University Press, 2015), Josef Albers: Interaction (Yale University Press, 2018), and The Quiet House: Stillness in Lake Eden (Atelier Editions and Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, 2022).

Jen Bervin is a visual artist and poet whose multidisciplinary practice weaves together situated poetics and entangled relationships between text and textiles. Bervin‘s conceptual, scientific, and literary investigations of material histories are attuned to the embodied, visual, and tactile aspects of language; these research-driven works frequently result from long-term collaborations with specialists ranging from literary scholars to material scientists. Her work is featured in the BMCM+AC exhibition Weaving at Black Mountain College as an artist whose work connects to the continuing legacy of BMC’s weavers.

Victoria Bradbury is an artist and researcher working with virtual reality, code, fiber art, and physical computing. She is featured on the Radiance VR Blog, co-editor of Art Hack Practice: Critical Intersections of Art, Innovation and the Maker Movement (Routledge 2020), and an Epic MegaGrant recipient. Her work has been shown at IEEE-GEM, xCoAx, the {Re}Happening, Harvestworks, Future Bodies Symposium, The Albright Knox and The New Britain Museum of American Art. Victoria holds a PhD with CRUMB at the University of Sunderland and an MFA from Alfred University. She is Associate Professor and Chair of New Media at UNC Asheville.

Astrid Bridgwood is a senior undergraduate student at Queens University of Charlotte, majoring in Art History with minors in Philosophy and Arts Leadership & Administration. Her studies center Black Mountain College, the Bauhaus school, and Vkhutemas, among other experimental liberal arts institutions as she explores the importance of interdisciplinary learning to movements in art history throughout the 20th century. In her free time, Astrid writes poetry, with work published in the North Carolina Literary Review, among others. Following graduation in 2024, she hopes to pursue a career in academia.

Paul Bright studied printmaking, and was employed as an art museum preparator and installer prior to his graduation from the University of South Carolina. He became the director of Hanes Art Gallery in 2012. Exhibitions under his curatorial direction include SoundSeen: Cage/Braxton/Marclay, Kate Shepherd: Lineaments, and Teju Cole: Blind Spot, as well as the collaborative projects  Cuban Artists’ Books and Prints, John Cage Rocks, Vesna Pavlovic: Lost Art, and Peter Campus Video Ergo Sum. Bright also maintains an active parallel life as an artist. Matter of Style, a survey of the past decade of his work, was shown at SECCA in 2022.

Marina Budhos is an author of award-winning fiction and nonfiction for adults and young adults. Her newest novel is We Are All We Have, about a Pakistani girl on the run after an ICE raid takes her mother. Budhos has also co-authored two nonfiction books with her husband Marc Aronson. Marina Budhos has been a Fulbright Scholar to India, received an NEA Literature Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Award for Women Writers, and three Fellowships from the New Jersey Council on the Arts. She and her husband Marc Aronson oversee the Boris Aronson-Jalowetz archives and legacy.

Danielle Burke is an artist and folklorist. She studies textiles, craft pedagogy, and artist communities; her studio practice focuses primarily on the process and storytelling potential of woven cloth. She is currently a PhD student in Design Studies with a focus in History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Human Ecology.

Charmaine Cadeau is an Associate Professor of English at High Point University. Her research focuses on contemporary American poetry and Black Mountain College.

Kyle Canter is a master’s student in art history at Hunter College, where he is finishing his thesis on photography at Black Mountain College. In his thesis, he examines photographic publicity, the photography program, and student projects and argues that the medium played an essential role in the conception of arts pedagogy at Black Mountain. His article “Jonathan Williams: Photography and the Queer Self at Black Mountain College” will be published in the upcoming edition of the Journal of Black Mountain College Studies.

Justin Childress is a Clinical Assistant Professor for the MA in Design and Innovation graduate program at Southern Methodist University. He received his MFA from Texas A&M University-Commerce, where his thesis work explored how interactive tools can influence hazard projection and route planning by cyclists who depend on bicycle-specific roadways. He teaches classes on digital UX design, critical approaches to the visual environment, design and innovation studio methodologies, the professional practice of design, and the context and impact of design. He has received fellowships, residencies, and grants from SMU, The National Endowment for the Arts, and The Dallas Cultural Plan.

Chris Morita Clancy is a board member of the Stephen M. Levin Biotensegrity Archive, and director of Embodied Biotensegrity, the premier online education platform for people interested in learning about biotensegrity. She is a founding member of the Pacific Northwest Biotensegrity Interest Group (PNWBIG) and co-host and co-executive producer of the BiotensegriTea Party which can be seen on the Biotensegrity Archive YouTube Channel. A retired yoga teacher and lead trainer Chris has contributed to Susan Lowel de Solòzano’s book “Everything Moves: How biotensegrity informs human movement” and to Karen Kirkness’ book “Spiral Bound: Integrated Anatomy for Yoga”.

Marcia R. Cohen received a BFA from Wayne State University and an MA from the University of New Mexico. Her artwork and scholarship examine the intersection between color, nature, culture, and Jewish history. Cohen maintains an active exhibition record and has lectured at conferences dedicated to the interdisciplinary dimension of color in art, science, and industry. Awarded a 2019-2020 Research Fellowship from Duke University Department of Jewish Studies and a 2019 artist residency at the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation, she has traveled to residencies in Iceland, the Azores Archipelago, and Santa Fe. She is a Professor Emerita from SCAD Atlanta and the Atlanta College of Art.

Olivia Comstock (she/her) is a current PhD student in art history at the University of Minnesota specializing in American craft art. Her work explores relationality and investigates the permeable boundaries and shared agency between human and nonhuman matter. She served as co-curator for ¡PRESENTE! at CLUES, and she is an emerging curator for an upcoming 2024 exhibition at the Northern Clay Center. She was also the recipient of a Fulbright Research Award in Berlin, Germany where she staged participatory workshops at the Museum FLUXUS+.

Brenda Danilowitz is an art historian and chief curator at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. She is the author and editor of numerous books and essays on the work of Josef and Anni Albers and has organized exhibitions of their work in the US, Europe, Mexico, Peru, and Brazil. Her publications include: Anni Albers: Selected Writings on Design, ed. and introduction (Wesleyan University Press, 2001), Josef Albers: To Open Eyes (with Frederick A. Horowitz) (Phaidon, 2006), Anni and Josef Albers: Latin American Journeys (Hatje-Cantz, 2007), The Prints of Anni Albers: A Catalogue Raisonné, 1963-1984 (Editorial RM, 2009), The Prints of Josef Albers: A Catalogue Raisonné (Hudson Hills, 2001) and contributions to Black Mountain: An Interdisciplinary Experiment 1933–1957 (Spector Books, 2015), Anni Albers: Camino Real (David Zwirner Books, 2020), Anni and Josef Albers, L’art et la vie, (Paris-Musees, 2021), and Josef Albers: Discovery and Invention, the Early Graphic Work, (Art/Books London, 2022)

Frédérique Davreux-Hébert is a graduate student in Architectural History and Philosophical Education at the University of Quebec in Montreal. Her thesis focuses on the educational philosophy of Black Mountain College and its embodiment in the built environment at Lake Eden. Her primary research interests include philosophy of education and art, phenomenology, architecture, and the history of Black Mountain College. In the fall of 2022, she conducted a research residency at the Western Regional Archives, and during 2022-2023 she presented at multiple conferences about Black Mountain College in Montreal.

Mark Diamond was an early pioneer of laser holography. He met Bucky Fuller in Miami in the mid-1970s, and they became friends. Mark and Bucky collaborated in an event at the Harvard Science Center at which Mark made a hologram portrait of Bucky. His presentation centers on that event, from which Mark will present never-before-seen images. Mark will then discuss Bucky’s “Vector Equilibrium System” or “jitterbug.” Mark will demonstrate a jitterbug and discuss its theoretical applications.

Anne Dickens is a writer and artist living in the Asheville area. She has a keen interest in the history and creative influence of Black Mountain College.

Ann Dunn is Artistic and Executive Director of The Asheville Ballet. She is the owner/CEO of Asheville Academy of Ballet and Contemporary Dance, full-time faculty in Humanities at UNCA, and has presented and published widely at academic conferences and in journals on Literature and Dance Theory. Dunn trained with the New York City Ballet, Martha Graham, and Merce Cunningham. Her choreography credits include: “Turandot” for New York City Opera at Lincoln Center, “Amahl and the Night Visitors” for Menotti’s official US tour, and “Macbeth” witches for American University, Rome, Italy. She has published three volumes and two chapbooks of poetry. 

Sarah Ehlers is Associate Professor of English and Director of Graduate Studies at the University of Houston, where she teaches courses in American literature, poetry and poetics, and working-class literature. Her first book, Left of Poetry: Depression America and the Formation of Modern Poetics, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2019 and shortlisted for the Modernist Studies Association First Book Award. She is currently at work on a book-length study of Black Mountain College. 

Seth Forrest wrote his dissertation on the Black Mountain poets en route to his PhD at the University of California, Davis. He has published several articles on Charles Olson and Larry Eigner in addition to work on modernist poetry from Stein to Williams. He is currently working on a book project that explores the aesthetics and forms of noise across modern and contemporary poetry, music, and art. Seth teaches writing and literature as assistant professor of Humanities at Coppin State University, an HBCU in Baltimore.

Thomas Frank taught in the field of American religious history at both Emory and Wake Forest Universities, with special interests in liberal arts colleges, utopian communities, and historic preservation. He currently co-edits the Journal of Black Mountain College Studies and continues volunteer activities in preservation and the arts. 

Jeff Gardiner is an independent scholar whose essays on Olson’s poetry and poetics have appeared in a number of journals and collections of essays, including Staying Open: Charles Olson’s Sources and Influences, Olson’s Prose, and Journal of Black Mountain College Studies.

William Graham is a self taught, formerly incarcerated artist, and art teacher. He was raised on the campus of a seminary, and is a would-be revolutionary and long term fugitive. His formal education came from Ohio University and University of Havana. He is currently a member of the working class.

Sam O’Hana Grainger is a PhD candidate in English, researching creative lifespans at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Crystal Gregory is a sculptor whose work investigates the intersections between textile and architecture. Gregory received her BFA from the University of Oregon and her MFA from SAIC from the Fiber and Material Studies Department. In 2013 she was awarded The Leonore Annenberg Fellowship for the Performing and Visual Arts. With this grant she moved to Amsterdam, where she took a role as Guest Artist at The Gerrit Rietveld Academie of Art. Gregory has recently been awarded the Arturo Alonzo Sandoval Endowed Professorship in Fiber at the University of Kentucky. She currently shows with Tappan Collective in Los Angeles, CA; Imlay Gallery; and Momentum Gallery, NC.

Charlott Greub is an artist, architect, urban designer, and Associate Professor of Architecture at North Dakota State University in Fargo. Her work has been exhibited in many fine art museums across Germany. She holds an MFA in Sculpture and an MA in Architecture from the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Germany.

Max Hamel is a musician, artist, and craftsperson who has worked in musical instrument making and repair for a decade. After starting off building experimental synthesizers and apprenticing for a luthier, they currently specialize in violin and cello repair. Max performs and records solo and in a number of bands using homemade and modified equipment ranging from solar powered circuits and hacked CD players to prepared acoustic instruments and found materials.

Jeff Hamilton teaches writing in the WU McKelvey School of Engineering’s Communications Center. His scholarship on Robert Duncan has been frequently published.

Caprice HamlinKrout (she/her) lives and works in Asheville, North Carolina. The primary mediums for her newer works are collage, sound, and visual/written language. The influences in defining the process for her work come from artists and teachers who studied/taught at Black Mountain College. She received a BA in Art History from UNC Chapel Hill.

Amanda Hartman is the Founder and Executive Director of Visual Archives, leading digital archiving and preservation initiatives for museums and archives. She is also a PhD student in Digital History at Clemson University, where she specializes in digital methodologies for exploring Southern US material culture, specifically focusing on death and funerary objects and mourning practices from the late 1800s to the early 1900s.

Charlotte Healy is a Senior Research Associate in Prints and Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she is on the curatorial team for a major retrospective of Willem de Kooning’s drawings. She received her PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University and wrote her dissertation on the role of the hand in the work of Paul Klee. Previously, she was a Morgan-Menil Pre-Doctoral Fellow at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York and the Menil Collection in Houston and a Museum Research Consortium Fellow and Research Assistant at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. 

John Henson is a Senior Lecturer and Digital Media Specialist in the Department of Media, Career Studies, and Leadership Development in the Reich College of Education at Appalachian State University. In his work as an educator, he enjoys guiding students as they explore ways to share their voice and cultivate digital storytelling skill sets and abilities across a range of communication forms. He recently completed his doctoral dissertation research investigating the spirit of Black Mountain College in the Digital Age. 

Joshua Hoeynck’s research focuses primarily on the confluences between process philosophy, Black Mountain poetry, and environmental criticism. His work has appeared in The New American Poetry: Fifty Years Later, Contemporary Literature, and is forthcoming in The Blackwell Companion to American Poetry. In conjunction with the Charles Olson Society, he edited Staying Open: Charles Olson’s Sources and Influences (Vernon Press). As director of the Charles Olson Society, he organizes annual panels at the ReVIEWING Black Mountain College Conference, The Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture, and the American Literature Association Conference. He teaches writing and literature in the SAGES program at Case Western Reserve University.

Marius Hofbauer born in Berlin, Germany, studied to become a high school teacher for Music and English at the University of Potsdam. He finished his Bachelor’s degree in 2017 with a thesis on strategies for dealing with indeterminate notation, and his Master’s in 2021 with a thesis on the listening practices afforded by Cage’s indeterminate music. He returned to the musicology department at the University of Potsdam in 2023 to begin a dissertation project on a Cagean mode of music listening and its parallels to mindfulness meditation practices as afforded by the indeterminate music of John Cage.

Katie Horak is a Principal at Architectural Resources Group, an architecture and planning firm that focuses on the historic built environment. Katie manages the firm’s Los Angeles office. Her work at ARG ranges from rehabilitation projects on some of Los Angeles’s most recognizable landmarks to large-scale planning projects that foster strategic historic resource management. In addition, Katie is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California, where she teaches graduate-level courses in historic resource documentation methods in the School of Architecture. Katie’s current research projects include the use of color in post-WWII architecture, and the life and work of artist Jane Slater Marquis.

Fritz Horstman is an educator, curator, and artist based in Bethany, Connecticut where he is Education Director at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. He has curated exhibitions in Italy, Ireland, Croatia, Norway, and the United States, including “Anni Albers: Work with Materials” at the Syracuse University Art Museum in 2022, which will travel to the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, TX in 2024. He has lectured and given workshops at Yale University, Harvard University, Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, l’École des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, and many other institutions. He received his BA from Kenyon College and his MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art.

Kira Houston is an artist, writer, and LGBTQ+ advocate based in Asheville, NC. He graduated from Clark University with a BA in Art History and Spanish, and now works as Outreach Coordinator at Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center. In addition to art history and BMC scholarship, his research interests include queer theory, science fiction, and new media.

Mark Hursty is a glass and new media artist, teacher, and researcher. He received his BFA from Rhode Island School of Design, his MFA from Alfred University, and his PhD from the National Glass Centre (NGC), University of Sunderland, UK. He was a 2011-12 Fulbright Fellow at Tsinghua University in Beijing where he researched and taught glass studio practice at universities in China. His work has been exhibited at the Shanghai Museum of Glass, Ken Saunders Gallery (Chicago), Lattitude Gallery (Boston), S.O.F.A. (Chicago), and the Museum of Contemporary Craft (Portland, OR). Mark teaches at UNC Asheville.

Elliot Inman has degrees in English, Experimental Psychology, and Electronics and has always lived in an interdisciplinary world. He works at a software development company implementing machine learning and data visualization models. Outside of work, he has led workshops in electronics, musical experimentation, and creative coding at many universities, most recently at the New York City Electroacoustic Music Conference (Summer 2022). 

Elin Käck is Associate Professor of Language and Culture at Linköping University, Sweden, where she teaches English and Comparative Literature and serves as Director of Doctoral Studies. Her research interests include poetry and poetics, modernism and postwar poetry, ecocriticism, and literary geography. She has published essays on William Carlos Williams, Jack Kerouac, Marianne Moore, H.D., and Ernest Hemingway. Her work has appeared in journals such as ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Journal of Modern Literature, and William Carlos Williams Review. She is completing a book called The Europe Trope: Constructions of Europe in Modern American Poetry and is Vice President of the William Carlos Williams Society.

Eric Keenaghan is Associate Professor and Chair at The University at Albany, SUNY. He is the author of Queering Cold War Poetry (Ohio State UP) and coeditor of The Muriel Rukeyser Era: Selected Prose (Cornell UP, forthcoming November 2023). His writings on Robert Duncan and other Black Mountain poetry figures (including John Wieners, Denise Levertov, and Charles Olson) have appeared in Sillages critiques, Contemporary Literature, Journal of Modern Literature, and elsewhere, including several edited volumes. Currently, he is developing book projects about antifascism, anarchist pacifism, and queer liberation in which Duncan, his students, and his poetic circles figure prominently.

Karen Koehler is Chair of the Dept. of Art and the History of Art at Amherst College. Koehler has published widely on dialogues between architecture and pictures, including a special edition of Art in Translation which she co-edited with Jeffrey Saletnik and the edited volume The Built Surface: Architecture and the Pictorial Arts. Koehler was guest curator for the exhibition at the Mead Art Museum on Architectural Ghosts (2023) and was curator and sole author of Bauhaus Modern, an exhibition and catalogue at the Smith College Museum of Art (2008). Koehler is currently completing an intellectual history of the architect Walter Gropius for Reaktion Books. 

Alex Landry is a graduate student in art history in the Newcomb Art Department of Tulane University, where she is completing her thesis on Ray Johnson and the impact of his time at BMC on his work. She has held curatorial positions at the Newcomb Art Museum and the Asheville Art Museum, where she curated a digital exhibition titled “Dear Lorna, Love Ray” on the letters that Johnson wrote to Lorna Blaine Halper while he was a student at BMC. Alex is currently a gallery assistant at The Parlour Gallery in New Orleans. In her writing and sculptural work, she studies how queerness relates to art-making and reception.

Monique Lanoix is associate professor of philosophy at St. Paul University where she teaches courses in feminist ethics, bioethics, and disability studies. Her research examines caregiving and the manner in which it is structured and funded. One aspect of her study focuses on care as a right of social citizenship; the other is on paid caregiving labor. Implicit within this research is a concern for our embodied reality and the manner in which it has been made invisible, leading to her interest in dance as both an activity and a subject of study.

Naomi Lindenfeld is the daughter of Lore Kadden Lindenfeld (1921-2010), former weaving student at Black Mountain College, graduating in 1948. Naomi’s career as a clay artisan has been greatly influenced by her mother’s time as a student, fiber artist, and teacher, and she created an exhibition of clay pieces inspired by her mother’s fiber work. Naomi has a Bachelor of Applied Arts in ceramics from Boston University’s Program in Artisanry. Since 1998 Naomi has been the ceramics teacher at The Putney School, teaching a variety of hand-building and wheel-throwing methods and has also taught a number of colored clay workshops at craft centers around the northeast. 

Maria Molteni is a queer transdisciplinary artist, designer, educator, and mystic. They are the grandchild of Tennessee square dancers, stunt motorcyclists, quilters, beekeepers, and opera singers of various European backgrounds. Their practice has grown from formal studies in painting, printmaking, and dance at Boston University and Scuola Internazionale di Grafica (Venice, IT), to incorporate research, ritual, play-based collaboration, and experimental education. Their intuitive practice spans movement-based alchemy, tarot, dreamwork, and color magic. Molteni enjoys tactile and tactical problem solving, giving shape to the unseen. They playfully position their practice as Phys Ed experiments for visionary communities like the Shakers, Bauhaus, and Black Mountain College.

Alex Mouw is a doctoral candidate in English and American literature at Washington University in St. Louis. His scholarship appears in Twentieth-Century Literature, Literature and Theology, and elsewhere, and his poetry has recently appeared in The Southern Review, The Minnesota Review, and the Massachusetts Review.

Kate Nartker works between animation and weaving to dismantle images, narratives, and material structures. She received an MFA from the California College of the Arts and is an Assistant Professor of Textile Design at North Carolina State University. Her work has been exhibited at The Museum of Craft and Design in San Francisco, The Contemporary Austin, and the Hordaland Art Center in Bergen, Norway. She was named a 2023 Fulbright U.S. Scholar, and her writing has been published in the Journal of Textile Design Research and Practice, Research Journal of Textile and Apparel, and the Surface Design Journal.

Eireene Nealand is a two-time Fulbright fellow with degrees from UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz. Her stories, poems, and translations from Russian, French, and Bulgarian have appeared in ZYZZYVA, Drunken Boat, Chicago Quarterly Review, Poetry International, and The St. Petersburg Review, among other places. Her books include The Darkroom, a translation with Alta Ifland (Contra Mundum 2021) of Marguerite Duras’ experimental film Le Camion, The Nest, a collaboration with architect Megan Luneburg (Nova Kultura 2017), and Shadows and Doubts (eohippus 2014). She is currently working with Kinetech Arts to find new ways of visualizing algorithms through dance.

Jess Peri received a BFA from the University of North Texas and a MFA from the University of New Mexico. Currently, Peri lives and works in Columbia, SC where he is an instructor of art at the University of South Carolina. Peri’s work has been included in exhibitions at the Harwood Museum of Art (Taos, NM), Albuquerque Museum (Albuquerque, NM), University of New Mexico Museum of Art (Albuquerque, NM), SRO Photo Gallery (Lubbock, TX), Lionel Rombach Gallery (Tempe, AZ), Yuma Center for the Arts (Yuma, AZ), Salina Art Center (Salina, KS), and Millepiani Exhibition Space (Rome, Italy) among others.

Bruna Petito is a physiotherapist, Osteopath, doctoral candidate, researcher and a former professional in Ballet and Contemporary dance. As creator and teacher of the Inner Balance Method, she has trained hundreds of physiotherapists and movement teachers in Brazil, France, USA, Germany, Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Argentina. As co-founder and teacher of Applied Biotensegrity in Physiotherapy, she develops curriculum for the first-ever online course in biotensegrity designed exclusively for physiotherapists, which is developing an active learning community spanning three continents.

Joseph Pizza is Associate Professor of English at Belmont Abbey College, where he has taught courses in Modern and Contemporary Poetry, African American Studies, and Writing and Rhetoric since 2012. He is the author of the forthcoming monograph Dissonant Voices: Race, Jazz, and Innovative Poetics in Midcentury America and has published recently on the work of Jayne Cortez, T.S. Eliot, Nathaniel Mackey, and Diane di Prima.

Ted Pope is an artist and author based in Morganton, North Carolina. He has cultivated a lifetime of experience in spontaneity and innovation with recurring styles, media, and processes combined with emergent ones as fast as he can find a surface and a means to mark it. He is an autodidact of artwork, literature, history, and popular culture who strives to see all that is great that preceded him and will always endeavor not to emulate, imitate, borrow, or derive but merely to grow in tandem unto perpetuity with the knowledge of the immensity of life.

Alessandro Porco is an Associate Professor of English at UNC Wilmington. His research and teaching focus on twentieth century poetry and poetics.

Deborah Randolph  is an independent researcher and museum educator. She is the Principal Researcher for the International Scholars Group. She served as Curator of Education at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA) and Assistant Curator of Education at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. She is co-authoring the book An Introductory Guide to Qualitative Research in Art Museums for Routledge and has published chapters in five edited volumes. Research interests include exhibition history, US weaving history, artistic practice, arts integration, qualitative research, museum environmental resilience, and arts and social justice.  

Caitlin Schrader is a dance artist attracted to experiential engagement and challenging modes of traditional classifications, whether it is through the learning environments she facilitates, the events she curates, or the performative spaces she designs. Her works have taken the hybrid forms of installations, dance works, and events or happenings. Caitlyn holds an MFA in Choreography (UNCG), an MS in Education (Univ. of Rochester), and a BA in Communications and French/Francophone Studies (William Smith College). She is the Director of Greensboro Project Space and serves on the  faculty in the Interdisciplinary Art & Social Practice program, at UNC Greensboro.

David Silver is an associate professor and chair of environmental studies and affiliate faculty of urban agriculture at the University of San Francisco. David’s forthcoming book, The Farm at Black Mountain College, will be co-published by Atelier Éditions and Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center in fall 2024.

Rishi Singh is a graduate student in photography and philosophy at ENSAV La Cambre and Université LIbre de Bruxelles in Brussels, Belgium

Heather South obtained her MA in History from Winthrop University, and her role as lead archivist at the Western Regional Archives has put her at the center of Black Mountain College scholarship for the last 12 years. The mission of the archives is to preserve and make information accessible, and Heather strives to do that every day, collaborating with museums, galleries, students, writers, and artists with their BMC projects.

Julie J. Thomson is an educator, independent scholar, and curator who has been researching and writing about artists at Black Mountain College since 2006 and served as co-editor of the Journal of Black Mountain College Studies from 2018–20. She is the author of Begin to See: The Photographers of Black Mountain College (Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, 2017) and the editor of  That Was the Answer: Interviews with Ray Johnson (Soberscove Press, 2018).

Catherine Cross Tsintzos is an artist who creates within interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary realms, focusing on environmental and social issues, traditional fine craft, and sustainability. She has a clear purpose in building and crossing bridges among the arts with a deep focus and balance between artistic practice, teaching, activism, and invitation for participation. Catherine has spent her life’s work developing arts curriculum and arts education opportunities for all ages, abilities, and socio-economic backgrounds in all mediums of the visual arts in the Southeast United States.

Erica Warren is a decorative arts and design curator and scholar, and is currently the editor of Craft Quarterly the James Renwick Alliance for Craft’s magazine and Assistant Instructional Professor, Master of Arts Program in the Humanities at the University of Chicago. From 2016-2022, Dr. Warren was a curator of textiles at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she organized numerous installations, including the critically acclaimed exhibitions Bisa Butler: Portraits and Weaving beyond the Bauhaus. Her recent publications include the essay “Fission: Design and Mentorship in the Dorothy Liebes Studio” for the catalog accompanying the Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum’s exhibition A Dark, A Light, A Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes (2023). In 2021, her essay “Beyond Weaving: Transdisciplinarity and the Bauhaus Weaving Workshop,” was published in Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture. 

Maggie Warren (she/her) is a PhD candidate at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Her areas of interest include 20th and 21st century female poets, feminism, and queer studies. She is also a published poet whose work can be found in several journals including Rattle, Bayou Review, Connecticut River Review, and Minnesota Review. Her debut chapbook, The Bones That Map Us, is forthcoming from Belle Point Press in early 2024.

Tara Webb is a costume designer, educator, and artist who enjoys playing with all things textile related. She has over 30 years’ experience designing wearable art, costumes, and/or video for performing arts companies from New York to California. Her current praxis includes sustainable art-making, learning about natural dyes and exploring surface design, inclusive education, and trauma-informed teaching. Tara holds an MA in Visual Culture: Costume Studies from NYU and a BA in Theatre Studies from Swarthmore College. She is a Lecturer in Costume Technology at UNC Greensboro and the Co-Director of Undergraduate Studies for the School of Theatre. 

Matt Wellins can be found most frequently at transfer stations, dollar stores, and internet forums for bootlegged films. His work is broadly occupied with the way objects resist control, the snafus of live performance, and how difficult it is to do very simple things. He generally works with analog circuitry, field recording, notated music, and computer programming. This work has been fueled by long-term research into the private loft theater of 1970s New York, artificial life, and cybernetic systems, as in the work of Gordon Mumma and Roland Kayn, and most recently, the ZBS Artist-in-Residency program. 

Janie Woodbridge is an Assistant Professor of Textile Design at the College of Textiles at North Carolina State University. She earned her BFA in Fiber Art from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her MFA in Textile Design from The Rhode Island School of Design. After years of working as a woven designer in the textile industry, she decided to focus her energy on textile education, studio practice and research. In addition to teaching at the College of Textiles she has taught at the College of Design and Penland School of Crafts.