Michael Banissy is a Social Neuroscientist working at Goldsmiths College, University of London, supported by an Economic and Social Research Council Future Research Leaders Award. Banissy has been and remains one of the world's leading researchers of mirror-touch synaesthesia, since documenting the first group study of mirror-touch in 2007. Banissy received his PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience from University College London in 2009, has authored over fifty publications, including articles on mirror-touch synaesthesia in the Journal of Neuroscience and Nature Neuroscience, and has been regularly invited to present his findings at conferences and seminars around the world. His work has been widely published and broadcast, including in the New Scientist, Scientific American, BBC Radio 4, and Good Morning America. He is also regularly invited to write popular science articles and commentaries for magazines including AEON Magazine and Scientific American.
Giuliana Bruno is Emmet Blakeney Gleason Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. Her latest books are Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality and Media (University of Chicago Press, 2014); and Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts (MIT Press, 2007). For Streetwalking on a Ruined Map (Princeton University Press, 1995), she won the Society for Cinema and Media Studies award for best book in film studies. Her seminal book Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (Verso, 2002) won the 2004 Kraszna-Krausz Book Award in Culture and History for "the world's best book on the moving image." Bruno is featured in Visual Culture Studies: Interviews with Key Thinkers (Sage, 2008) as one of the most influential intellectuals working today in visual studies.
Anthony Chemero is Professor of Philosophy and Psychology at the University of Cincinnati. He received his Ph.D. in Philosophy and Cognitive Science from Indiana University in 1999. From then to 2012, he taught at Franklin & Marshall College (F&M), where he was Professor of Psychology. Chemero's research is both philosophical and empirical. It is focused on questions related to dynamical modeling, ecological psychology, artificial life and complex systems. He is author of more than 80 articles and the books Radical Embodied Cognitive Science (2009, MIT Press), which was a finalist for the Lakatos Award, and Phenomenology (2015, Polity Press), co-authored with Stephan Kaufer. He is currently editing the second edition of the MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences.
Thomas J. Csordas is the Dr. James Y. Chan Presidential Chair in Global Health, Professor and Chair in the Department of Anthropology, Director of the Global Health Program, and Associate Director of the Global Health Institute at the University of California, San Diego. He has conducted fieldwork funded by major grants from the National Institute of Mental Health on the Catholic Charismatic Renewal movement, examining topics including healing ritual, religious language, bodily experience, and child development; among Navajo Indians, examining topics including the experience of Navajo cancer patients, therapeutic process in Navajo religious healing, language and narrative; on adolescent mental health among psychiatric inpatients and their families in New Mexico; and on Roman Catholic exorcism in Italy and the United States. Among his publications are The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology of Charismatic Healing (1994); Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self (1994); Language, Charisma, and Creativity: Ritual Life in the Catholic Charismatic Renewal (1997); Body/Meaning/Healing (2002); and Transnational Transcendence: Essays on Religion and Globalization (2009).
Elinor Cleghorn is a researcher and writer specialising in mirror-touch synaesthesia, and also theories of embodiment explored through art making and spectatorship. She is editorial assistant to Mirror-Touch, and was research assistant to 'Mirror-Touch: Empathy, Spectatorship, and Synaesthesia', a project based at the Ruskin School of Fine Art, University of Oxford, between 2013-2015. Cleghorn received her BA and MA from Goldsmiths College, and her PhD from the London Consortium, Birkbeck College in 2012. In 2011 she programmed a season of events and screenings at the British Film Institute commemorating the 50-year anniversary of the death of avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren, and she has since been published in The Moving Image Review and Art Journal, LUX Online, and Screen. In 2012 Cleghorn edited a volume of the International Journal of Screendance dedicated to the work of Deren; she is also an editor of the Arts Council England supported poetry and science journal Litmus.
Trisha Donnelly is an artist who implements multiple mediums in her practice moving regularly between the performative and text, the action and the plane. Donnelly has had solo exhibitions at international institutions such as Modern Art Oxford (2007); the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (2008); Kunsthalle, Zurich, Switzerland (2006); and the Kolnischer Kunstverein, Koln, Germany (2005). She has also participated in group shows such as Depth of Field: Modern Photography at the Metropolitan, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Third Mind, Palais De Tokyo, Paris; Utopia Station: The 50th International Exhibition of Art, Venice Biennale; and the 54th Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. Donnelly received her B.F.A.from the University of California, Los Angeles, and her M.F.A from the Yale University School of Art.
Vittorio Gallese is Professor of Physiology at the Department of Neuroscience of the University of Parma, Italy. A cognitive neuroscientist, his research interests focus on the cognitive role of the motor system and on an embodied account of social cognition. His major contribution is the discovery, together with his colleagues of Parma, of mirror neurons and the elaboration of a theoretical model of social cognition - embodied simulation theory. He has worked at the University of Lausanne, at the Nihon University of Tokyo, and at the University of California at Berkeley. He received the Grawemeyer Award for Psychology in 2007, the Doctor Honoris Causa from the Catholic University of Leuven in 2010, and the Arnold Pfeffer Prize for Neuropsychoanalysis in 2010.
Judith Hopf is an artist who lives and works in Berlin. She works across a variety of media including film, sculpture, installation and performance. She has had solo exhibitions at the Neue Galerie Kassel (2015), Grazer Kunstverein (2012), Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe (2008), Portikus, Frankfurt/Main (2007), and the Wiener Secession, Vienna (2007). Her recent solo exhibition, Testing Time at Studio Voltaire, London (2013) presented a new film commission, works of sculpture, and a specially conceived installation environment. Hopf has participated in festivals and group exhibitions including the Liverpool Biennial (2014), dOCUMENTA(13), (2012), Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen (2007) and the Bienal de la Habana (2003).
Siri Hustvedt is the author of a book of poetry, six novels, three books of essays, and a non-fiction work about the quandaries of psychiatric and neurological diagnoses. In 2012 she received the International Gabarron Prize for Thought and Humanities. Her most recent novel, The Blazing World was nominated for the 2014 Man Booker Prize and won The Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction. She has a PhD in English literature from Columbia University and is a lecturer in psychiatry at the Dewitt Wallace Institute for the History of Psychiatry at Weil Medical School of Cornell University in New York City. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages.
Wayne Koestenbaum - poet, critic, artist - has published seventeen books, including The Queen's Throat, Humiliation, Hotel Theory, Jackie Under My Skin, Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films, and The Anatomy of Harpo Marx. His newest books are My 1980s & Other Essays (FSG, 2013) and The Pink Trance Notebooks (Nightboat Books, 2015). His first solo exhibition of paintings took place at White Columns gallery in New York; in 2015 he has a retrospective at the University of Kentucky Art Museum. He received a BA from Harvard University, an MA from Johns Hopkins University, and a PhD from Princeton University. He lives in New York City, where he is Distinguished Professor of English at the City University of New York Graduate Center.
Mark Leckey is an artist who has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally, and has recently had solo exhibitions at the Serpentine Gallery, London (2011); Ko?lnischer Kunstverein, Cologne (2009); Portikus, Frankfurt (2005); and Migros Museum, Zurich (2003). He has been included in several important international exhibitions including 10,000 Lives: The Eighth Gwangju Biennale (2010); Moving Images: Artists & Video/Film, Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2010); Playing Homage, Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (2009); Sympathy for the Devil, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2007); 9th Istanbul Biennial (2005); and Manifesta 5, European Biennial of Contemporary Art, San Sebastian (2004). Leckey has presented his lecture/performances at the ICA, the Solomon R. Guggenheim, New York, and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York. In 2008 Leckey received the Turner Prize. From 2005 to 2009 Leckey was professor of Film Studies at the Sta?delschule in Frankfurt am Main. His work is included in the collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; MoMA; Tate Gallery, London; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
Laura U. Marks is a scholar, theorist, and programmer of independent and experimental media arts. She works on the media arts of the Arab world, intercultural perspectives on media art, Islamic genealogies of contemporary philosophy, and embodied approaches to information culture. Her most recent books are Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art (MIT Press, 2010) and Hanan al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image (MIT Press, 2015). She has curated programs of experimental media for festivals and art spaces worldwide. She teaches in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver.
Brian Massumi is professor of communication at the University of Montreal. His most recent books include Ontopower: War, Powers, and the State of Perception (Duke UP 2015), Politics of Affect (Polity, 2015), and What Animals Teach Us about Politics (Duke UP, 2014). He is co-author with Erin Manning of Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience (University of Minnesota Press, 2014). Also with Erin Manning and the SenseLab collective, he participates in the collective exploration of new ways of bringing philosophical and artistic practices into collaborative interaction.
Massimiliano Mollona is a visual anthropologist, writer, and filmmaker. He is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and has carried out extensive fieldwork on the steel industry in Europe, and in Brazil where he is involved in several film projects. Mollona's publications bring together economics, political anthropology, and art and film theory, Amonst his most recent publications are Made in Sheffield: An Ethnography of Industrial Work and Practice (Berghahn, 2009); Seeing the Invisible: Maya Deren's Experiments in Cinematic Trance (October, Summer 2014) and Working class politics in a Brazilian Steel-town (CUP 2015). Mollona is the main editor of the Focaal Art and Visual Anthropology (AVA) blog; one of the artistic directors of the forthcoming Bergen Assembly in Norway and the programme director of the forthcoming Athens Biennale (2015-17).
Rabih Mroue (b. 1967, Beirut, Lebanon) is a theatre director, actor, visual artist and playwright. Rooted in theatre, his work includes videos and installation art; the latter sometimes incorporates photography and texts. He is a contributing editor for The Drama Review /TDR (New York) and the quarterly Kalamon (Beirut). He is also a co-founder and a board member of the Beirut Art Center (BAC). He is a fellow at The International Research Center: Interweaving Performance Cultures/ FU/Berlin since 2013. His works include: Riding on a cloud, 33 RPM and a Few Seconds (2012), The Pixelated revolution (2012), The Inhabitants of images (2008), Who's Afraid of Representation (2005) and others.
Christopher Pinney is an anthropologist and art historian. He is Professor of Anthropology and Visual Culture at University College London. His research interests cover the art and visual culture of South Asia, with a particular focus on the history of photography and chromolithography in India. Pinney's publications include Photography's Other Histories (edited with Nicolas Peterson, Duke University Press, 2003), The Coming of Photography in India (British Library, 2008) and Photography and Anthropology (Reaktion Books, 2011). His most recent book (together with the photographer Suresh Punjabi) is Artisan Camera (Tara Books, Chennai, 2013). He was awarded a Padma Shri by the Government of India in 2013 for contributions to Literature and Education.
Patricia Pisters is Professor of Film Studies at the Department of Media Studies of the University of Amsterdam and director of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA). She is one of the founding editors of Necsus: European Journal of Media Studies. She is programme director of the research group Neuraesthetics and Neurocultures and co-director (with Josef Fruchtl) of the research group Film and Philosophy at ASCA. Publications include The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in Film Theory (Stanford University Press, 2003); Mind the Screen (ed. with Jaap Kooijman and Wanda Strauven, Amsterdam University Press, 2008) and The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture (Stanford University Press, 2012).
Joel Salinas, MD, MBA, is a mirror-touch synaesthete, a neurologist, clinical fellow in behavioral neurology and neuropsychiatry, and a researcher at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. He has a clinical interest in preventive neurology and cognitive medicine, which defines the growing social interest in 'Brain Health.' Through clinical care, healthcare delivery innovations, and research, he focuses on enhancing population-wide brain health through interventions that prevent the onset and sequelae of neurologic disease as well as preserve and optimize cognitive functioning. Dr. Salinas has helped provide special insights into the editor's study of synaesthesia through his own experiences as a mirror-touch synaesthete.
Carolee Schneemann (b. 1939, Illinois) received a B.A. from Bard College and an M.F.A. from the University of Illinois. She holds Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degrees from the California Institute of the Arts and the Maine College of Art. Schneemann's work has been exhibited worldwide at institutions including the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (US), the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (US), the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (France), The Reina Sophia Museum, Madrid (Spain), and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (US). In 1997, a retrospective of her work entitled 'Carolee Schneemann, Up To And Including Her Limits', was held at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York. Schneemann's work is included in many important collections such as Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (France); Hamburger Bahnhof Museum, Berlin (Germany); Hirschhorn Museum, Washington D.C (US); Institute of Contemporary Art, London (UK); Institute of Contemporary Art, Chicago (US); Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (US); Museum of Modern Art, New York (US); New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (US); Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence (US); The Whitney Museum of Art, New York (US) and many others. In autumn 2015, the Museum Der Moderne Salzburg will hold a retrospective of Schneemann's work, curated by Sabine Breitwieser.
Fiona Torrance is a multiple synaesthete, predominantly with mirror-touch synaesthesia. She works part time for Moving On With Life & Learning (MOWLL) as a Technology Trainer for people with learning difficulties, and has her own Home Pet Grooming business. She has worked as Editor to the UK Synaesthesia Association, and has spoken publicly about her synaesthetic experiences. Fiona is currently completing the final stages of a PhD degree in Humanities and Social Science, researching how people with sensory and learning difficulties influence technology for work.
Jamie Ward is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Sussex. His research in the area includes its neural basis and development, the effects it has on cognition, and its relationship to typical modes of perceiving. Ward has contributed to the public understanding of synaesthesia through numerous talks and extensive media coverage, including a documentary produced for the BBC's Horizon series. He is the editor-in-chief of Cognitive Neuroscience, and the author of several books including The Frog Who Croaked Blue: Synaesthesia and the Mixing of the Senses (Oxford: Routledge, 2008).
Catherine Wood is Curator of Contemporary Art and Performance at Tate Modern since 2003, when she founded the live programme. She was curator of A Bigger Splash: Painting after Performance, and co-programmed the opening of the Tanks, Art in Action, in 2012. She has organised numerous performance events with artists including Mark Leckey, Joan Jonas, Katerina Seda, Keren Cytter and Boris Charmatz/Musee de la danse, as well as co-curating Pop Life (2010) and The World as a Stage (2007). She is author of Yvonne Rainer: The Mind is a Muscle (MIT/Afterall 2007) and writes for Artforum, Afterall, Frieze, Kaleidoscope, Mousse and Flash Art magazines. She recently curated Yvonne Rainer: Dance Works, which opened at London's Raven Row in July 2014 and is currently working on the opening programmes and displays for the new building at Tate Modern, opening in 2016.
Sha Xin Wei is Professor and Director of the School of Arts, Media + Engineering at Arizona State University. Sha also directs the Synthesis Center for responsive environments and improvisation with colleagues in AME and affiliate research centers. From 2005-2013 Sha was the Canada Research Chair in Media Arts and Sciences, and Associate Professor of Fine Arts at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. From 2001-2013 he directed the Topological Media Lab, an atelier-laboratory for the study of gesture and materiality from computational and phenomenological perspectives. Sha's research concerns ethico-aesthetic improvisation, and a topological approach to morphogenesis and process philosophy. He is the author of Poesis, Enchantment, and Topological Matter (MIT Press, 2013).
