ART AS A WAY OF KNOWING

Edith Ackermann

Edith Ackermann is Honorary Professor of Developmental Psychology at the University of Aix-Marseille 1, France, and is currently a Visiting Scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture. She studied with Swiss psychologist and philosopher Jean Piaget as well as mathematician, educator, and computer scientist Seymour Papert. Edith is interested in the intersections between learning, teaching, design, and digital technologies. A close advisor on the pedagogical development of PIE Institute ateliers at the Exploratorium, Edith will speak at the conference on the evocative, transformative, and “holding” powers of artifacts: their potential to bring about meaningful associations, to sustain engagement, and to capture human imagination.

Mark Allen

Mark Allen is an artist, educator, and curator. He is the founder and executive director of Machine Project, a nonprofit performance and installation space where they investigate art, technology, natural history, science, music, literature, and food in a disheveled storefront in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. Beyond their storefront space, Machine Project operates as a loose confederacy of artists producing shows at locations ranging from beaches to museums to parking lots.

Dennis M. Bartels

Dennis Bartels is the Executive Director of the Exploratorium. A science education and policy expert, he was appointed to the Education Working Group for the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology in 2009, and in 2010 he was one of two educators named to the Oceans Research and Resources Advisory Panel (ORRAP), which provides independent advice and guidance to the more than 20 federal agencies of the National Oceanographic Partnership Program. Dennis has testified before United States congressional committees including the full House Science Committee. He was elected an AAAS Fellow (on Education), and he's also a Fellow of the International Society for Design and Development in Education (ISDDE) and a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). In addition, he speaks internationally on science and mathematics education. Dennis holds a PhD in education administration and policy analysis from Stanford University.

D. Graham Burnett

D. Graham Burnett is an editor at Cabinet magazine and a member of the faculty at Princeton University. He studies the relationship between power and knowledge, and he writes on our changing understanding of nature and technology. Burnett was a Marshall Scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he completed a PhD in the History and Philosophy of Science, and he is the author of four books, including Descartes and the Hyperbolic Quest (2005) and Trying Leviathan (2007), which won the New York City Book Award. He is currently a Mellon Foundation "New Directions" Fellow working on a two-year initiative at the intersection of scholarship, artistic practice, and the sciences. Recent projects include a parafictional video collaboration with the artist Lisa Young, "Free Fall: The Life and Times of Bud 'Crosshairs' MacGinitie," and an ongoing fMRI-based experiment with neuroscientist Franco Pestilli on the cognitive representation of touch in the visual cortex. Graham and Chris Turner recently curated THE SLICE: Cutting to See at the Architectural Association Gallery in London.

Mel Chin

Mel Chin was born in Houston to Chinese parents and was reared in a predominantly African-American and Latino neighborhood. Classically trained, his analytical and poetic art evades easy classification. Alchemy, botany, and ecology are some of the disciplines that intersect in his work. He insinuates art into unlikely places, including destroyed homes, toxic landfills, and popular TV, investigating how art can provoke greater social awareness and responsibility. Unconventional and politically engaged, his projects also challenge the idea of the artist as the exclusive creative force behind a work of art. Mel also promotes works of art that benefit science or rejuvenate the economies of inner-city neighborhoods. In “Revival Field,” he worked with scientists to create sculpted gardens of hyperaccumulators—plants that can draw heavy metals from contaminated areas—in some of the world's most polluted sites. Mel received a BA from Peabody College and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.

K. C. Cole

A longtime science writer for the Los Angeles Times , K. C. is currently a professor at USC's Annenberg School of Journalism. Described by Amazon.com as "the Leonardo da Vinci of science writing," she is the author of eight nonfiction books, most recently Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens: Frank Oppenheimer and the World He Made Up —a memoir/biography of her mentor. K. C.'s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, Smithsonian, Columbia Journalism Review, Newsweek, Esquire, Ms., The Washington Post, and many other publications. Among her most treasured awards are the American Institute of Physics prize for science writing, the Los Angeles Times award for Explanatory Journalism, the Edward R. Murrow Award for “thoughtful coverage of scientific controversies” from the Skeptics Society, and the Exploratorium's Public Understanding of Science award, presented by Frank Oppenheimer a year before his death.

Matthew Coolidge

With a background in geomorphology and art, Matthew Coolidge is the Director of the Los Angeles-based Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), an interdisciplinary, research-based institution dedicated to the public understanding of how the nation's lands are “apportioned, utilized, and perceived.” With outposts throughout the country, CLUI is a compelling contemporary curatorial model incorporating artistic practice and field research into public education.

Amanda McDonald Crowley

Amanda McDonald Crowley, Director of Eyebeam in New York, is a cultural worker, curator, and facilitator who specializes in creating new media and contemporary art events and programs that encourage cross-disciplinary practice, collaboration, and exchange. She moved to New York in October 2005, relocating from her native Australia where she had been based while working nationally and throughout Europe and Asia. Amanda was Executive Producer for ISEA2004, the International Symposium for Electronic Arts 2004, held in Tallinn, Estonia; Helsinki, Finland; and on a cruiser ferry in the Baltic Sea. She was Associate Director, Adelaide Festival 2002, and in this position was also cochair of the working group that curated the exhibition and symposium "conVerge: where art and science meet." From 1995 to 2000 she was Director of the Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT), where she made significant links with science and industry by developing a range of residencies for artists in settings such as science organizations, contemporary art spaces, and virtual residencies online; developing cross-disciplinary master classes for artists and curators; as well as beginning to establish links with media artists and organizations in Asia.

Sean Dockray

An artist and writer based in Los Angeles, Sean Dockray is a cofounder, with Fiona Whitton, of TELIC Arts Exchange, a space in Chinatown, Los Angeles, which produces a critical engagement with new media and culture. Their flagship project, The Public School, a school with no curriculum, invites community members to propose, teach, and take classes in open academic sessions where participants can study subjects as diverse as Walter Benjamin's Arcade Project, Urban Foraging, and Chicano Muralism. Sean's video and sculpture have been shown at Gigantic Art Space in New York, the Cheekwood Museum in Nashville, and the Turtle Bay Museum in Redding, California. He has contributed to publications including Volume, Cabinet, and Bidoun magazines, writing about topics such as radio architecture, funeral homes, race riots, miniatures, and traffic control.

Jeff Dolven

Jeff Dolven teaches poetry and poetics (especially of the English Renaissance) at Princeton University, and is director there of the new Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities. He has written for Cabinet magazine about subjects from player pianos to quantitative meter to the U.S. Postal Service, and his own poetry has appeared in the Paris Review , the TLS, the Yale Review , and elsewhere. Jeff is a pioneer of the bunk bed conversation, having taken the top bunk in a discussion of sleep and poetry with Wayne Koestenbaum in 2010. With his chronic interlocutor, Graham Burnett, he also organizes the Poetry Lab series at Cabinet , which has held a séance with James Merrill and wantonly reassembled Sappho's fragments, among other brave experiments.

George E. Forman

George E. Forman, PhD, is Emeritus Professor at the University of Massachusetts and President of Videatives, Inc. George has written books that extend the theory of Jean Piaget to early childhood education: The Child's Construction of Knowledge and Constructive Play. He was president of the Jean Piaget Society from 1983 to 1985. George has also published books in the areas of early cognitive development and the educational value of digital media for young children. He worked for four years on Harvard's Project Zero early symbolization project as head of block play research. Since 1986, George has worked with the city of Reggio Emilia, Italy, to bring their educational philosophy to prominence in the United States by producing three documentary videos and coediting three editions of The Hundred Languages of Children (C. Edwards, L. Gandini, and G. Forman). He coinvented The Gravity Wall, a patented reconfigurable rollway found in over 300 children's museums worldwide. He has designed new media formats that layer computer graphics and digital video as hyperlinks under text. Upon retirement in 2003, he cofounded Videatives, Inc., to distribute these new digital formats to early childhood professionals.

Michael John Gorman

Michael John Gorman is the Founding Director of Science Gallery. He has extensive international experience in public engagement with science and technology, having created and developed public exhibitions and events in the United States, Europe, and Ireland. He was a lecturer in Science, Technology and Society at Stanford University and has held fellowships at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Prior to joining Science Gallery, he was Senior Manager for the Discover Science & Engineering program. He has published widely on the relationship between science and the arts in journals including Leonardo and Nature , and is the author of books including Buckminster Fuller: Designing for Mobility.

Andrea Grover

Andrea Grover is a migrant curator, artist, and writer. In 1998, she founded Aurora Picture Show, a now recognized center for filmic art that began in Grover's living room as "the world's most public home theater." She curated the first exhibition exploring the phenomenon of crowdsourcing in art (Phantom Captain, apexart, New York, 2006), and, with artist Jon Rubin, organized an exhibit in which worldwide participants created a photo-sharing album of their imaginings on Tehran (Never Been to Tehran, Parkinggallery, Tehran, Iran, 2008). She recently programmed an evening of films for Dia Art Foundation at The Hispanic Society of America, New York (Lessons in the Sky, 2009); and has inaugurated a new semiannual screening series, Menil Movies, with The Menil Collection. In Fall 2009 she curated 29 Chains to the Moon, an exhibition for Carnegie Mellon University's Miller Gallery, which continued her research into cooperation and distributed thinking across disciplines. She has an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a BFA from Syracuse University, and was a Core Fellow in residence at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She is presently a Warhol Curatorial Fellow at the STUDIO and the Regina Miller Gallery.

George E. Hein

Originally trained as a chemist, George Hein turned to science education and then museum education, joining Lesley University in 1975. He was a Fulbright Research Fellow in Science Education at Kings' College, London (1990); visiting faculty member at the University of Leicester Museum Studies Program (1996); Visiting Scholar at the California Institute of Technology (1998); Osher Fellow at the Exploratorium (1999); Visiting Professor at University of Technology, Sydney (2000); and Research Fellow at the Center for Education and Museum Studies at the Smithsonian Institution (2009–10). He is currently Guest Scholar at The J. Paul Getty Museum. He is the author, with Mary Alexander, of Museums, Places of Learning (AAM, 1998) and of Learning in the Museum (Routledge, 1998), as well as numerous articles on visitor studies, museum education, and museology. He has lectured widely in the United States and abroad including cultural tours in Brazil, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Mexico, Norway, Spain, and Taiwan. He has been active in the International Council of Museums/Committee for Education and Cultural Action (ICOM/CECA), serving as both secretary and president of CECA in the 1990s. His primary current interest is the significance of John Dewey's work for museums.

Madeleine Fuchs Holzer

Madeleine Fuchs Holzer is Educational Development Director at Lincoln Center Institute. She is responsible for the Institute's K–18 work in the New York metropolitan area, and for supervising and writing about new educational initiatives. Previously Director of Arts in Education at the New York State Council on the Arts, she holds a doctorate in Education from Teachers College, Columbia University; a master's degree in English (Creative Writing) from New York University; and a master's degree in Social Work from the University of Michigan. In addition, she has directed interdisciplinary programs at Cornell and New York Universities and served as project director for CD-ROMs on Romeo and Juliet and multicultural American poetry. Madeleine's essays and poetry have appeared in New York Newsday, Education Week, Black Fly Review, and Footwork: Paterson Literary Review , among others. Most recently, she has coedited Community in the Making: Lincoln Center Institute, the Arts, and Teacher Education. Her chapter entitled “Many Layered Multiple Perspectives” is in Teacher Education for Democracy and Social Justice.

Mildred Howard

Mildred Howard is a prolific mixed media and installation artist whose work draws on a wide range of historical and contemporary experiences. Creating "an architecture for the remainder," she questions perceptions and addresses misconceptions. Mildred uses a visual vocabulary shaped by "memory, history, family, identity and place," but seeks to engage the viewer in a "laboratory for creative dialogue" that transcends personal particulars and is transformational. She often uses found objects and personal memorabilia in her pieces to express "a respect for ancestors." Mildred has received numerous awards, including the Anonymous Was a Woman Fellowship; an NEA grant in sculpture; the Eureka Fellowship; a Rockefeller Artists Fellowship to Bellagio, Italy; and a Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Traveling Fellowship to Oaxaca, Mexico. Her work is included in the collections of the Oakland Museum; the San Jose Museum of Art; the Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford, Connecticut; the Washington State Art Commission; and the San Francisco Arts Commission.

Tim Hunkin

UK-based engineer, cartoonist, and artist Tim Hunkin has created museum exhibits for science institutions across the UK. He is the creator of the film Why Things Go Wrong about fail-safe engineering, and the Channel 4 television series The Secret Life of Machines, in which he dissects everyday household devices as a way to explain their workings and cultural histories. Tim is the author of Almost Everything There Is to Know, a compilation of his comic strip The Rudiments of Wisdom, first published in The Observer. He is also the author of the book Hunkin's Experiments, which describes a variety of science-based pranks, games, and curiosities. A longtime friend and collaborator of the Exploratorium, Tim's work, with its humorous and playful approach, deepens public understanding of the history of technics and the creative process of the engineer.

Jeff Kelley

A practicing art critic since 1977, Jeff Kelley has written for publications such as Artforum, Art in America, Arts Magazine, Artweek, Vanguard, and the Los Angeles Times. He has contributed catalogue essays for publications of the Centre Pompidou in Paris; the Mudima Foundation in Milan, Italy; the San Jose Museum of Art; the Des Moines Art Center; and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Jeff is the editor of Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life by Allan Kaprow, published by the University of California Press in 1993, and is the author of Childsplay: The Art of Allan Kaprow , a book on Kaprow's Happenings since the 1950s, which was published in October 2004, also by the University of California Press. Since 2001 Jeff has been the Consulting Curator of Contemporary Art at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, for which he is curating a series of exhibitions on contemporary Asian art.

Ariane Koek

Ariane Koek leads International Arts Development at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva, Switzerland, home of the Large Hadron Collider. She has created CERN's first Cultural Policy for Engaging with the Arts and CERN's first artist-in-residence program, having won the Clore Fellowship, an international award for cultural leadership. For 16 years, she was an award-winning BBC producer and director, working in both radio and television, producing BBC Radio flagship cultural discussion programs such as Start the Week, presented by Jeremy Paxman, and In Our Time, presented by Melvyn Bragg. She also commissioned, produced, and directed new writing and plays for Radio 3's The Verb, including the first BBC co-collaboration with the acclaimed Artangel: Nick Silver Can't Sleep by Canadian artist Janice Kerbel.

Robert La Frenais

Rob La Frenais is a curator and critic who has commissioned and produced interdisciplinary and visual art projects since 1987. Since 1997 he has worked with The Arts Catalyst as curator. Before that he was a freelance curator and organizer working in different European contexts, including the 1990 and 1992 Cities of Culture in Glasgow and Madrid. In 1979 he founded the groundbreaking Performance Magazine. He has a PhD in curatorial practice across disciplines from Brunel University, London, and is an honorary Doctor of Arts at Dartington College of Arts. He was recently curator-in-residence at Srishti School of Art, Bangalore. With The Arts Catalyst he advises on cultural activities in the International Space Station, set up the world's first Artists Airshow, and curated a number of major touring exhibitions in museums and galleries nationally, most recently Interspecies about artists working with animals. He speaks at and chairs conferences internationally, most recently at Paralelo at the Museum of Image and Sound, Sao Paulo. He is planning a new exhibition about artists living and working on the moon.

Adam Lerner

Adam Lerner is the Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver and Chief Animator in the Department of Fabrications. He was the founder and Executive Director of The Laboratory of Art and Ideas at Belmar until The Lab merged with the MCA Denver in March 2009. He was the Master Teacher for Modern and Contemporary Art at the Denver Art Museum from 2001 to 2003, and he was the Curator of the Contemporary Museum, Baltimore, before coming to Colorado. He was the youngest member of the Brooklyn Squares, Square Dance Club, at age 9. He received his PhD from the Johns Hopkins University and his master's from Cambridge University. He was a predoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (1997–8) and a Livingston Fellow of the Bonfils-Stanton Foundation (2008–10), awarded to emerging leaders in the nonprofit sector.

Roger Malina

An astrophysicist and editor, Roger Malina is a coinvestigator for the Supernova Acceleration Probe Mission, which seeks to understand the nature of dark energy in the universe. Formerly, Roger was director of the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Marseille and the Center for EUV Astrophysics at the University of California, Berkeley. Roger also serves as chairman of the board of Leonardo, the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology; as the president of the Observatoire Leonardo des Arts et Technosciences; and as Executive Editor of Leonardo Publications. He is cochair of the International Advisory Board of the Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts and a member of the International Academy of Astronautics. Drawing on his extensive experience and depth of insight, Roger will speak at the conference on collaborations between artists and scientists in research laboratory contexts.

Geoff Manaugh

Geoff Manaugh launched BLDGBLOG, a popular website about "architectural conjecture, urban speculation, and landscape futures," in the summer of 2004. A former senior editor of Dwell magazine and, now, contributing editor at Wired UK, Geoff has taught at Columbia University, the University of Southern California, and the University of Technology, Sydney. The BLDGBLOG Book was published by Chronicle Books in 2009, and was selected by Amazon.com as one of the 100 Best Books of the Year.

Nicholas Michelli

Nick Michelli is Presidential Professor in the City University of New York's PhD program in Urban Education where he teaches courses on public policy, education policy, and teacher education and directs dissertations dealing primarily with policy, democracy, social justice, urban education, and teacher education. He currently works with the University of Wisconsin System and various private institutions to develop assessments using performance evaluation that do not rely on high stakes testing. He also consults with Zayed University, a university for women in the United Arab Emirates, on improving teacher education. Prior to his full-time work at the Graduate Center, he was CUNY's University Dean for Teacher Education, responsible for teacher education across more than twenty of CUNY's campuses and collaboration with the New York City public schools. For twenty years he was Dean of the College of Education and Human Services at Montclair State University, where he is professor and dean emeritus. He is the coauthor of several books. His latest book , Teacher Education Policy in the United States: Issues and Tensions in an Era of Evolving Expectations, coauthored and edited with David Imig and Penny Earley, will be published in April 2011.

Michael Naimark

Michael Naimark is a research associate professor in the Interactive Media Division of the USC School of Cinematic Arts and was a fall 2009 adjunct professor in the Interactive Telecommunications Program of the NYU Tisch School of the Arts. He has recently served on the visiting committee of the MIT Media Lab, the board of directors of ZERO1, the Scientific Council of the Boltzmann Institute for Media Arts Research, and has been a member of the Society for Visual Anthropology since 1984. Michael has worked extensively with field cinematography, interactive systems, and immersive projection, exploring place representation and its consequences for 25 years. After receiving an undergraduate degree in cybernetic systems, Michael spent the late 1970s at MIT and was on the original design team for the Media Lab. As an independent media artist in the 1980s, he made artworks for the Paris Metro, the Exploratorium, the ZKM, and the Banff Centre.

Sina Najafi

Sina Najafi is editor-in-chief of Cabinet magazine and the editorial director of Cabinet Books. Sina has also curated several exhibitions, including “The Museum of Projective Personality Testing” (Manifesta 7, summer 2008, in collaboration with Christopher Turner); “Philosophical Toys” (Apex Art, summer 2005); “Odd Lots: Revisiting Gordon Matta-Clark's Fake Estates ” (White Columns and Queens Museum of Art, fall 2005, in collaboration with Jeffrey Kastner and Frances Richard); and the traveling exhibition “The Paper Sculpture Show” (in collaboration with Matt Freedman and Mary Ceruti).

Alva Noë

Alva Noë is a writer and philosopher at UC Berkeley, where he is also a member of the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences and the Center for New Media. For approximately the last ten years, his philosophical practice has concerned perception and consciousness. His current research focus is art and human nature. Alva is the author of Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness (2009) and Action in Perception (2004). The central idea of these books is that consciousness is not something that happens inside us—in our brains or anywhere else; it's something we do. Previously, Alva taught in the Department of Philosophy at UC Santa Cruz. He received a PhD in Philosophy from Harvard University, a BA from Columbia, and a BPhil from Oxford University. He is a research associate of the CNRS laboratory Institut Jean-Nicod in Paris. He was a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, a fellow of the Oxford Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience, and a research fellow at the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University.

Stephen Nowlin

Stephen Nowlin is Vice President and Director of the Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, where his curatorial practice has included many exhibitions on the intersection of art and science.

Simon Penny

Simon Penny has worked as an artist, theorist, teacher, and organizer in digital cultural practices, embodied interaction, and interactive and robotic art for 25 years. His works involve custom robotic and sensor systems including novel machine vision systems. His art and writing address critical issues arising around enactive and embodied interaction, informed by traditions of practice in the arts including sculpture, video art, installation and performance, and by ethology, cognitive science, phenomenology, human-computer interaction, robotics, critical theory, cultural studies, media studies, and science and technology studies. He edited Critical Issues in Electronic Media (SUNY Press, 1995) and founded the Arts Computation Engineering (ACE) interdisciplinary graduate program at the University of California, Irvine, in 2003. He was previously Professor of Art and Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, and also teaches in the Cognitive Systems and Interactive Media master's program at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain.

Lynn Rankin

Lynn Rankin is the Director of the Exploratorium's Institute for Inquiry, a national professional development center for K–6 leaders and practitioners of elementary science reform efforts. Lynn has extensive experience in professional development design. She was a cofounder and faculty member of the Association of Science and Technology Centers' Professional Development Institutes for museum educators, and served on the faculty of the NSF-funded Center for Informal Learning and Schools, a collaboration of the Exploratorium, King's College, and the University of California at Santa Cruz. She also served on the Committee for the Development of an Addendum to the National Science Education Standards on Scientific Inquiry, and on the National Institute for Science Education's Committee on Professional Development. Lynn has been the PI on numerous national projects such as the recently awarded US DOE Investing in Innovation grant to experiment with the integration of science and English language development (ELD).

C. E. B. Reas

Casey Reas's ongoing Process series explores the relationship between naturally evolved systems and those that are synthetic. The imagery evokes transformation, and visualizes systems in motion and at rest. Equally embracing the qualitative human perception and the quantitative rules that define digital culture, organic form emerges from precise mechanical structures. Based in Los Angeles, Casey has exhibited, screened, and performed his work internationally in galleries and museums. His images have appeared in publications including the New York Times, Print, and Wired . Casey is the recipient of a 2008 Tribeca Film Institute Media Arts Fellowship (supported by the Rockefeller Foundation). He recently worked on a video mural commission for the New World Symphony's new Frank Gehry campus, which opened on January 25, 2011. Casey is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. He holds a master's degree in Media Arts and Sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a bachelor's degree from the University of Cincinnati.

Jeannette Redensek

Jeannette Redensek is an art historian whose research focuses on the ways in which the sciences, and especially the social sciences of anthropology and geography, have shaped the forms and discourses of art and architecture in the twentieth century. She received her undergraduate degree from the Center for Experimental and Interdisciplinary Arts at San Francisco State University, and subsequently studied the history of architecture and urbanism at the Freie Universität Berlin, and the Graduate Center for the City University of New York (PhD). Her book-length history of the scientification of architecture and city planning in early twentieth-century Germany, based on her dissertation, is under review, and she is currently working on a study of the poetics of environment in Berlin from 1800 to the present. She worked in program development at the Exploratorium in the early 1980s and again from 2004 to 2007, and in curatorial positions at art museums in San Francisco and New York. Her publications include numerous exhibition catalogue essays for galleries and museums in New York, San Francisco, Berlin, and Taiwan. She is currently researcher at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in Bethany, Connecticut.

Peter Richards

Pete Richards is a senior artist at the Exploratorium. He worked with Exploratorium founder Frank Oppenheimer to set up arts programming and served as arts program director through 1998. He is best known for creating a wave-activated sound sculpture located on the San Francisco waterfront. Peter has permanent outdoor installations at Artpark in Lewiston, New York, and in several sites in California and Washington. He recently completed a major work for the Valley Metro Light Rail System in Phoenix, Arizona. He has taught at the Center for Experimental and Interdisciplinary Arts at San Francisco State University, Ecole d'Art Aix en Provence, at the San Francisco Art Institute, and Stanford University. He is a cofounder of McColl Center for Visual Art in Charlotte, North Carolina, and was a research fellow at the Studio for Creative Inquiry, Carnegie Mellon University. He is past chair of the Alliance of Artist Communities Board of Trustees. Currently, he's collaborating with Sue Richards on several public art commissions. Pete received a BA in sculpture from Colorado College and an MFA in sculpture from the Rinehart School of Sculpture.

Philip Ross

For the past fifteen years Philip Ross has been making research-based artwork that places natural systems within a frame of social and historic contexts. While this often takes form as sculptural installations, his recent work has included a trilogy of videos about microorganisms; founding and directing CRITTER, a salon for the natural sciences in San Francisco; and developing some LEED Transplutonic building materials. These diverse projects stem from his fascination with the interrelationships among humans, technology, and the greater living environment. His personal drive for making work about the organic world is born from a lifetime interest in biology. While he was terrible in high school science and math, his education emerged through a more direct engagement with materials and practices: as a chef he began to understand biochemistry and laboratory methods; as a hospice caregiver he worked with life-support technologies and environmental controls; and through his interest in wild mushrooms he learned about taxonomies, forest ecologies, and husbandry. Engaging with the sciences through an everyday practice is a route that is aesthetically, intellectually, and symbolically rich. In his various projects he shows what he finds interesting about the natural world and uses the lens of human artifice to achieve a specific focus of that view.

Susan Schwartzenberg

Susan Schwartzenberg is a senior artist at the Exploratorium, where she has been a curator, photographer, designer, and artist, and served as director of media. At the museum she has participated in many exhibit development and Web-based projects. She was a Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and has taught at the San Francisco Art Institute, the California College of Art, and Stanford University. As a photographer and visual artist, she has received numerous awards, and has taken part in residencies and exhibitions worldwide.

Steve Seidel

Steve Seidel holds the Patricia Bauman and John Landrum Bryant Chair in Arts in Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He is Faculty Director of the Arts in Education Program and a former director of Project Zero (2000–2008). At Project Zero, Steve was principal investigator for projects that studied the use of reflective practices in schools, the close examination of student work, and the documentation of individual and group learning. His current research includes Talking with Artists Who Teach, a study of working artists' ideas and insights into the nature of artistic development and learning. He is also working, in collaboration with Expeditionary Learning, on the development of a digital museum of student work. Steve and colleagues at Project Zero recently completed The Qualities of Quality: Understanding Excellence in Arts Education, a study of what constitutes quality in arts learning and teaching. Before becoming a researcher, Steve taught high-school theater and language arts in the Boston area for 17 years. He has also worked as a professional actor and stage director.

Semiconductor

For over a decade, Brighton-based artists Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt have worked with video, sound, and digital animation to explore our relationship to scientific knowledge. Their aurally and visually striking moving-image works, often created through residencies in scientific research environments, raise interesting and complex questions about artistic interpretation in relation to the pursuit of scientific truths. In the past five years, the Exploratorium Cinema Arts program has presented Magnetic Movie , a film born from a five-month fellowship at NASA's Space Sciences Laboratory at UC Berkeley that used special effects to artistically depict the hidden magnetic fields explored by the lab's research scientists; Brilliant Noise , a film that draws upon the raw data of solar astronomy captured by satellites orbiting the earth; and 200 Nanowebbers , a work that uses abstract and hand-drawn animation to suggest what it might feel like to be a part of the nanoscale world. Their current project, Heliocentric , is a three-screen installation that uses time-lapse photography and astronomical tracking to plot the sun's trajectory across a series of landscapes. As participants in Art as a Way of Knowing, Semiconductor will shed important light on the distinct discourses of art and science.

Robert Semper

Rob Semper, the Exploratorium's Executive Associate Director and Director of Program, coordinates the museum's overall program direction as well as relations with the external science, education, and funding communities. His areas of responsibility include the museum's exhibit, program, media, and teacher education programs; public understanding of research activities; and research in K–12 education and new media. Rob is the author of many journal articles and invited papers, and has been the principal investigator on projects that include developing new Internet resources, experiments using technology to enhance the museum visitor experience, and programs for teachers and museum educators. Awards include AAAS Fellow, 2006; and the NSTA 2006 Faraday Science Communicator Award. Before joining the Exploratorium in 1977, Rob taught physics and conducted solid-state and nuclear physics research. He received his PhD in solid-state physics from the Johns Hopkins University.

Adi Shamir

Adi Shamir holds a bachelor's degree in architecture from Cooper Union, and a master's degree in architecture and a PhD in the history of architecture from the University of California, Berkeley. As Executive Director of the Van Alen Institute (2006–2009), a national membership organization and fellowship research center named in honor of William Van Alen, architect of the landmark Chrysler Building, Adi led the Institute in developing programs dedicated to promoting and improving the design of civic architecture. Adi served as the College Dean at California College of the Arts (2000–2006), where she directed the Fine Arts, Design, Architecture, and Visual Criticism divisions. She has taught architecture and design theory at CCA, Rice University, UC Berkeley, and the College of Marin, Kentfield. Adi's design practice has focused on cross-disciplinary collaborations with artists in the production of theoretical architectural projects, built environments, landscapes, interactive media educational programs, and exhibition installations. Her architectural historical research explores early Modernist themes in diverse contexts with contributions to international architectural journals as well as published books, including Open House: Unbound Space and the Modern Dwelling (Rizzoli) and the upcoming Envisioning Gateway (Princeton Architectural Press).

Matt Shlian

Matthew Shlian is an artist, paper engineer, teacher, and collaborator. After graduating from Alfred University in 2002, Matthew spent three years working as a paper engineer in the field of commercial design. There he made movable paper contraptions, from pop-up books to greeting cards, artist books, and kinetic sculptures. In 2006 he received his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Currently he teaches three-dimensional foundations and paper engineering at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and works as a visiting research scholar at the University's Material Science department.

Stephen Thomas

Stephen Thomas came to The Oxbow School in the summer of 1998 as the Founding Director from his position as the chair of the art department at the Urban School of San Francisco, where he taught from 1984 to 1998. At Urban, Stephen taught studio art and art history courses and served as a grade-level dean. In 1990, Stephen was instrumental in developing the Aim High summer program at the Urban School site. In 1994, he was awarded a Klingenstein Fellowship to study at Columbia University's Teachers College. In the late 1970s Stephen worked at Crown Point Press, printing intaglio editions for artists. He ran his own printmaking business from 1980 to 1992. 

Gever Tulley

Gever Tulley is the primary teacher at the Tinkering School, aided by his indispensable wife Julie Spiegler and the inimitable Robyn Orr. By trade, he is a senior computer scientist, writer, and practicing sculptor. Julie is a professional playground monitor (and both teach paragliding at the Advanced Paragliding School), and Robyn's secret identity is still kept secret but she only uses her super-organizational skills for the good and the Tinkering School.

Margaret Wertheim

Margaret Wertheim is an internationally renowned science writer and communicator. She is the author of three books on the cultural history of physics, including the forthcoming Physics on the Fringe about “outsider science” and the role of imagination in theoretical physics. In 2003 Margaret started the Institute For Figuring, an independent Los Angeles–based organization whose mission is “to advance public engagement with the poetic and aesthetic dimensions of science and mathematics.” The IFF has created exhibitions for museums and galleries all over the world, including The Hayward Gallery in London, The Science Gallery in Dublin, the Chicago Cultural Center, and New York University. The IFF's Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef project, currently on display at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, is now perhaps the largest participatory art-science project in the world, engaging people worldwide from New York and London to Cape Town and Croatia.

Lawrence Weschler

A New Yorker writer for the last two decades, Lawrence Weschler is the author of a dozen books of so-called “creative nonfiction,” including S eeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: Conversations with Robert Irwin , Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder , and Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences. Since 2001, Lawrence has been the director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University. He taught throughout the 1990s at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. Recently, he accepted the position of artistic director of the Chicago Humanities Festival. He is a two-time winner of the George Polk Award, and was also a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award. Additionally, he has affiliations with numerous small magazines, from the Virginia Quarterly Review to McSweeney's . A longtime fan of the Exploratorium, Lawrence explains, “Intellectually, one of the things I've long been interested in is the notion of returning to a time when the sciences were at the heart of the humanities, when there was a marvelous, polymorphous, promiscuous interaction between scientists, artists, wizards and inventors. The division between arts and sciences is only 300 years old at most. Before that, people like Michelangelo and Leonardo were as much scientists as artists. There was no distinction between the different interests they were pursuing.”

Karen Wilkinson

Karen is the director of the Exploratorium's Learning Studio, an atelier where artists, scientists, and educators gather to create new activities and exhibits based in inquiry and tinkering. She also directs the Tinkering Studio, a public space on the exhibition floor where visitors can engage in construction-based activities that integrate science, art, and technology. Karen sees her role at the Exploratorium as an advocate for making as a way of knowing and the ability people have to think with their hands. The studios provide environments for making and tinkering that offer people a chance to connect to their own learning in a deeply personal way. The Tinkering Studio team works to develop experiences with art, science, and technology that are playful and inquisitive, value aesthetics, and draw on the collaborative and participatory aspects that a museum can offer.

Dominic Willsdon

Dominic Willsdon is the Leanne and George Roberts Curator of Education and Public Programs at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. From 2000 to 2005, he was Curator of Public Events at Tate Modern. He has taught in the graduate programs in curating contemporary art at the Royal College of Art and California College of the Arts, and exhibition and museum studies at the San Francisco Art Institute. He is coeditor (with Diarmuid Costello) of The Life and Death of Images: Ethics and Aesthetics (2008), and a former editor of Journal of Visual Culture. In 2010, he was the inaugural Kress Fellow in Museum Education at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute.

David Wilson

David Wilson is the founding director of the Museum of Jurassic Technology. He received his MFA from California Institute of the Arts in 1974 and opened The Museum of Jurassic Technology (MJT) in 1988 at its current Culver City, California, location. Since its inception, the Museum has expanded both in terms of its public offerings, through exhibitions and associated programs, as well as in its public recognition and reputation. The MJT has exhibited internationally and David has lectured throughout North America and abroad. In addition, he has produced eight independent films, most recently under the auspices of MJT in conjunction with Cabinet, an arts and science-based cultural institution located in St. Petersburg, Russia. The latest of their collaborative efforts is entitled Bol'shoe Sovietskia Zatmenie or The Great Soviet Eclipse. Over the past decade, David and the Museum have been honored through numerous grants and awards. In 2001, the MacArthur Foundation granted him a Fellowship in recognition of his accomplishments at The Museum of Jurassic Technology.

Dennie Palmer Wolf

Dennie Palmer Wolf, who holds an EdD from Harvard, was trained as a researcher at Harvard Project Zero, where she led studies on the early development of artistic and symbolic capacities. She directed Project PACE (Projects in Active Cultural Engagement) at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, an organization that focused on children and youth as vital, but often ignored, forces in cultural planning. More recently, she has pioneered evaluation studies that build the capacities of organizations, funders, and the communities they serve, coauthoring More Than Measuring , a longitudinal study of the effects of arts-based learning, sponsored by Big Thought, a 50-organization consortium in Dallas. Dennie has published widely on issues of assessment, evaluation, and artistic and imaginative development. At the heart of her work is a commitment to increasing children and youth's access to learning featuring inquiry, innovation, and imagination both in and out of school.

Rosten Woo

Rosten Woo is a cultural producer living in Los Angeles. He is cofounder and former executive director of the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), a New York-based nonprofit organization dedicated to using art and design to foster civic participation. His work has been exhibited at the Cooper-Hewitt Design Triennial, the Venice Architecture Biennale, Netherlands Architectural Institute, Storefront for Art and Architecture, Lower East Side Tenement Museum, and various piers, public housing developments, tugboats, shopping malls, and parks in New York City. He has written about design, politics, and music for publications including the Village Voice, Rolling Stone, City Limits, and Metropolis Magazine. His first book, Street Value, was published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2010.