BIOGRAPHIES

Rebecca Farr (USA) is an artist, Reiki energy worker and devoted practitioner of meditation. Her various studies have been guided by an endless curiosity of two words: enlightenment and embodiment. Her mediation and ritual practices have included Zen Buddhism, Native based ceremony, Christian mythology, Yogic and Hindu practices and quantum theory. As an artist, Rebecca is represented by Klowden Mann Gallery in Los Angeles and has exhibited in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami, Houston, Istanbul, Rotterdam, and throughout the Pacific Northwest. Her work is held in private collections both nationally and internationally. She recently completed two years as faculty artist in the education department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art where she developed a program for youth driven public works. 

http://www.rebeccafarr.com/

Denise Palma Ferrante (AUSTRALIA/ITALY), began studying cooking in 1993 out of passion and necessity. Eventually began selling/delivering home cooked vegetarian food to bars in London for a short period before taking over as a barman and manager at Two Floors and Hoxton Square Bar & Kitchen for several years. Once in Berlin in 2001 began working in the now infamous Ost Gut/Panorama Bar, which, once closed down, turned into Berghain. Retired from this in 2016. Throughout this period developed artistic practice through the mediums of photography, sculpture (with food), performance and installation. In 2009, together with Benjamin Huseby, founded the 'Bistro', a monthly supper club held in conjunction with the basso artists collective. The focus of the supper clubs was seasonal, local and foraged foods all made from scratch. This turned my focus onto catering and food events within the art industry. In 2013 began work as a food event producer/organiser. From 2013-2016 was the food curator for the Foreign Affairs festival at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele. In 2016 I began work with Bite Club Berlin, a summer street food market. In 2014 founded the OLIB CSA, a community sponsored agricultural group that receives organic vegetables directly from OLIB, an Anarchist collective organic farm outside of Berlin, in exchange for farm work and a monthly fee. Also in 2016 became a yoga instructor and am currently continuing my studies in yoga.

http://bistroinourstudio.blogspot.in/?m=1
http://biteclub.de/

Julian Cox (UK) studied social geography at university which sparked an interest in the relation between people, space, nature and the city. In 2010 he spent 18 months cycling from London to Mumbai. During the voyage he undertook several projects which documented the landscapes and experiences. These included: A documentation of bus stops through 18 countries, mapping campsites and a daily drawing. In London Julian has managed 2 community gardens; Southbank Centre roof garden and the Caravanserai. In both projects the focus was on art and gardening and the participation programmes reflected both fields and the space between them. Now he is based in Marseille where he runs 2 seed libraries and related growing projects and continues to draw, with a particular focus on space and lines.

http://cargocollective.com/juliancox

Sue Burge (UK) is a poet and freelance creative writing and film studies lecturer based in King’s Lynn in the UK. She worked for over twenty years at the University of East Anglia in Norwich teaching English, cultural studies, film and creative writing and was an Associate Lecturer in Creative Writing with the Open University. Sue is an experienced workshop leader and has facilitated sessions all over the world, working with a wide range of people – international students, academics, retired professionals from all walks of life, recovering addicts, teenagers and refugees. She has travelled extensively for work and pleasure and spent 2016 blogging as “The Peripatetic Poet”. Last year she received an Arts Council grant which has enabled her to write a body of poetry in response to the cinematic and literary legacy of Paris. Her poems have appeared in publications such as The North, Mslexia, The Lampeter Review, Stride, The French Literary Review, Brittle Star, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Cake and Orbis. In January 2017 she collaborated with ten other poets on responses to the 1916 documentary film “Battle of the Somme”. She is a committed vegetarian, loves cooking and experimenting with different tastes and spent many years as an allotment holder. 

www.sueburge.uk

Urara Tsuchiya (JA) lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland.
She works mainly with performance, video, ceramics, and live events, often incorporating soft sculpture, costumes, and home cooking. These function as props to set up an alternate environment for out of the ordinary behaviours to take place.

http://glasgowinternational.org/artists/urara-tsuchiya

Anna Tanner is based in Los Angeles. Born in Arkansas, Tanner’s work incorporates narrative, exploring the fantastic within the familiar that address the changing role humans have in terms of technology, nature, and folk values. She predominately works in oil painting, plaster, and at times papier-mâché and other mixed media. Tanner received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and MFA from the Glasgow School of Art in 2009. She was part of New Works Scotland Programme from Collective Gallery in Edinburgh, awarded residency at Studio Voltaire in London, Transmission Gallery, Glasgow, and currently is part of an artist teaching Fellowship with the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, California.  Her work can be found in a number of private collections in Netherland, UK, and US. 

http://annatanner.com/

Rafaela Lopez, born in 1988, Paris. She studied at Ecole Nationale des Arts Décoratifs de Paris (ENSAD), Villa Arson (Nice) and Royal College of Art from (London) from where she graduated in 2015. Her work focuses on creating collaborative and community projects that are reflecting on the social potentials of art and sculpture through various shapes such as video, performance or happening. She is currently in the board of artist run space DOC in Paris where she also has her studio. Rafaela Lopez's work has been shown in venues such as Studio Voltaire, Camden Art Centre, CNAC Villa Arson, Palais de Tokyo, Centquate in Paris.

http://rafaelalopez.net/

Petra Carman (Slovenia) is a community researcher holding a European/International Joint PhD in Social Representations and Communication with a special focus on Social Psychology and media studies including cults and criminal forensics. Her research interests include ecovillages, human-nature relationship, spirituality, and prefigurative politics. Currently, she is a resident of the Braziers Park School of Integrative Social Research where she is, among others, working on developing alternative educational events and publishing community research. She has strong ties with the ecovillage movement, and in the future aims to be more involved with Gaia Education, facilitating social and worldview dimensions of ecovillage design education.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Petra_Carman

Gleb Vyacheslavovich Toropchin (RU), born October 3, 1990, Associate Professor at Novosibirsk State Technical University, Foreign Languages Department (Technical Programmes); Novosibirsk State University of Economics and Management, Department of Global Economy, International Relations and Law. Graduated Summa Cum Laude from Kemerovo State University in 2012, majors: International Relations; Translation & Interpretation (English and German). Obtained Ph.D. in Modern and Contemporary History (Cand. Sc. in History) at Tomsk State University in 2015. Took part in international conferences and fora in Russia, UAE, Germany, Azerbaijan, Switzerland, France, Austria and Kazakhstan. Published more than 60 scholarly papers (including a monograph printed in Germany).

http://ciu.nstu.ru/kaf/persons/75783
https://nstu-uni.academia.edu/GlebToropchin

Eric Heist (USA), as multimedia artist and co-founder of the alternative arts organization Momenta Art, explores the complexities of the relationship between the individual and the group. Investigating social politics, feminism, post-colonialism, cultural critique and critical race and class analysis, Momenta Art began as an exhibition space in Philadelphia in 1986. Founded by Heist along with artists Donna Czapiga, James Mills, Christina LaSala, and Timothy Aubry, the space relocated to New York in 1990, where it remains a presence of art making and cultural critique. Heist’s work is deeply connected to these ideas, often using cultural and historical reference to explore the dynamics of community and complex support systems. In addition to his work as the Director of Momenta Art, Heist has had shows at Schroeder Romero, Brooklyn, NY, Leslie Heller Gallery, New York, Invisible-Exports, New York, Islip Art Museum, East Islip, New York, and Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY.

http://eutopia.us/eric-heist/
http://www.artspace.com/eric-heist

Kayla Anderson (US) is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and organizer based in Chicago. She has participated in artist residencies and incubators at the Chicago Artists Coalition and Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, IL; Elsewhere: A Living Museum, Greensboro, NC; and ACRE, WI. She is a Visual Arts Fellow of the Luminarts Cultural Foundation. Her research interests include the Anthropocene, flat ontologies, post-humanism, non-human perception, animism, post-apocalyptic narratives, media art and technology. Her writing has been published in Leonardo Journal (MIT Press), the International Awards in Art Criticism (The Royal College of Art), MU TXT (MU Art Space, Eindhoven), Tijdschrift Kunstlicht (University of Amsterdam), The 3D Additivist Cookbook, and Aperture. In 2016 she was a participating artist and researcher at the Anthropocene Campus at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin and a Visiting Tutor at the Dutch Art Institute and the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in the Netherlands. In addition to her art practice, she has curated several exhibitions focusing on film, video, and new media art, including Code/Switch at Woman Made Gallery, Freeze Frame: Artists’ Books and the Moving Image at the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection, and [History] Under Construction at Gallery X, Chicago, IL. In her spare time, she organizes a monthly critique group for feminine spectrum media artists called Media Grrrl.

http://kaylanderson.com/writing-2/

Edgardo I. Garrido-Perez (PM), born and grown in Boca la Caja, an Afro-Caribbean township in Panama City, Panama, on late December 1970. Undergraduate studies at the Biology School of the University of Panama. Five years experience as field assistant at Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute -Barro Colorado Island Biological Station helped to perform his English and Field Biology passion. Then, Edgardo moved to Mexico for Ph.D studies in the Mayan Zone (Yucatan Scientific Research Center -Spanish Acronym: CICY). Germany's University of Goettingen welcomed him as Ph.D student where he got "magna cum laude" and then worked as Post-Doctoral fellow. His research in Panama and Mexico were about plant-plant interactions; particularly climbing plants related to trees. Yet Edgardo rapidly understood that achieving knowledge from plants in the Mayan Zone demands to learn from the history of human-forest interactions because of the activities, rituals, and cosmovisions related to land-use. Humans use forests for both spiritual and concrete food so Edgardo made some projects on food security in Latin America and the Caribbean, ranging from cosmovision, perceived biodiversity, and communication for Nature conservation by adjusting discourse based on the texts of Salsa songs. Currently working on Global Change, Edgardo checks how humans affect plant diversity, species composition, and capture of Carbon Dioxide. From 2014-2016 he has made it in the Ecuadorian Amazon by leading a multidisciplinary team combining biologists, local Kichwa indigenous, historian, and economists; the project is now in expansion to Europe -where human effects on forests are millenary. For studying human-forest relationships, Edgardo's methods range from numerical ecology to ethnography. As a lecturer, Edgardo applies field-based methods so both theories and practical skills are developed by introducing students into research projects and empowering their capabilities to formulate questions and acquire their own knowledge. Edgardo is Research Associate at the herbarium and Botanical Garden of the Autonomous University of Chiriqui, Panama.

http://edgardoga.jimdo.com
Peer-reviewed publications

Margaret A. McLaren (USA) holds the George D. and Harriet W. Cornell Chair of Philosophy at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida where she teaches Philosophy and in the Program of Sexuality, Gender, and Women’s Studies (SWAG). She received her M.A. and Ph. D. in philosophy from Northwestern University. She is the author of Feminism, Foucault, and Embodied Subjectivity (2002, State University of New York Press). Her articles on gender issues, women and human rights, multiculturalism, Foucault, feminism, and virtue ethics have appeared in several journals, including Social Theory and Practice, Journal of Developing Societies, Forum on Public Policy, Philosophy Today, and Hypatia, and book anthologies including, Feminism and the Final Foucault, Feminists Doing Ethics, and Florida Without Borders: Women at the Intersections of the Local and Global. She is currently working on a book tentatively titled: Transnational Feminist Approaches for Global Gender Justice, where she argues that the comprehensive model for social change and social justice employed by some grassroots women's organization in India could provide a useful model for a transnational feminist approach. The comprehensive social justice model successfully negotiates some pervasive tensions in feminist theory and philosophical discourse: between universal human rights and respecting cultural integrity, between political and civil rights and economic and social rights, between the local and the global, and between the individual and the collective.

https://rollins.academia.edu/MargaretMclaren