CULTURUNNERS CO-AUTHORS

Azra Akšamija is the Class of 1922 Career Development Professor and Assistant Professor of the Arts at MIT's Art, Culture and Technology Program. As an artist and architectural historian, Akšamija investigates the politics of identity and memory through clothing and wearable technologies, through civic scale cultural forms, such as religious architecture and museums, and within the context of history and global cultural flows. Her recent work focuses on the representation of Islam in the West, post-socialist.

Stephen Stapleton is Founding Director of Edge of Arabia. Stephen is an artist, curator, and the co-founder and director of Edge of Arabia. After encountering the artistic community in Abha, Saudi Arabia, during a journey across the Middle East in 2003, he founded the Offscreen Education Programme and Edge of Arabia as platforms for cultural dialogue between the Middle East and western world. He has published several books related to the Middle East, including Offscreen: Four Young Artists in the Middle East (Booth-Clibborn, 2004), Edge of Arabia (Offscreen Education, 2009), and Contemporary Art from Saudi Arabia, and won several awards for his work in the field of intercultural education.

CULTURUNNERS CO-CURATOR

Ava Ansari is the co-founder of The Back Room, a curatorial and pedagogical project which facilitates exchanges between artists and scholars in Iran and the U.S. Recent curatorial projects include Fixed Unknowns, Taymour Grahne Gallery, New York, 2014; I am Only a Reporter, Ardeshir Mohassess, Modern Section of Art Dubai, 2014; and A Call, a remote project with 80 performers between Tehran and New York. This project was conceptualized with Wafaa Bilal, and opened concurrently at Arran Gallery in Tehran and White Box Art Space in New York in 2011. She has presented work at Dixon Place, La Mama, Eyebeam, the AC Institute and the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, among others. She has previously worked at Aperture Foundation, New York; Shirin Gallery, New York; Basement Gallery, Dubai; and Silk Road Gallery, Tehran. She currently works at the Edge of Arabia, where she serves as an associate curator and the manager of the E.O.A. U.S. Tour. She got her B.A. in Public Relations and Journalism from Allameh Tabatabaei University in Tehran, and her M.A. in Art Politics from the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS

Orkan Telhan is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, and researcher whose investigations focus on the design of interrogative objects, interfaces, and media, engaging with critical issues in social, cultural, and environmental responsibility. Telhan is Assistant Professor of Fine Arts - Emerging Design Practices at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Design. He holds a Ph.D. in Design and Computation from MIT's Department of Architecture. He was part of the Sociable Media Group at the MIT Media Laboratory and the Mobile Experience Lab at the MIT Design Laboratory. He studied Media Arts at the State University of New York at Buffalo and theories of media and representation, visual studies, and graphic design at Bilkent University, Ankara. Telhan's individual and collaborative work has been exhibited in venues including the 13th Istanbul Biennial, 1st Istanbul Design Biennial, Ars Electronica, ISEA, LABoral, Archilab, Architectural Association, the Architectural League of New York, MIT Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York.

Madeleine Gallagher is an interdisciplinary artist, technologist and educator at MIT . Her practice embraces a wide variety of mediums, including traditional object making, photography, time-based media, and performance in order to investigate cultural phenomena related to technology and how media culture shapes human interactions. Her core process as an artist practitioner is rooted in painting. Her artwork has recently been presented at Berklee College of Music, MIT, Duke University, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Eli and Edythe Broad Art Center, Roulette NYC and Issue Project Room.Madeleine has collaborated with several musicians and artists including Scanner, Stephen Vitiello, Either/Or, D. Edward Davis, Adam Savje, embarker, evidence and Jane Rigler.

John Steiner is a performer, songwriter and visual artist working in audio, sculpture, electronic media and design. As a performer and songwriter, John's musical accomplishments are lengthy; aside from five successful international tours and two American tours, he has also enjoyed a long list of publishing credits. Many of his songs have been used on MTV, NPR, ABC, NBC, Showtime, as well as feature films.

Nick Beauchamp is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Northeastern University and a member of the core faculty of the NULab for Texts, Maps and Networks. He received his Ph.D. from New York University in 2013, and prior to Northeastern was on the faculty of the Quantitative Methods in Social Sciences program at Columbia University. He works in the fields of US politics (political behavior, campaigns, political psychology, social media) and political methodology (quantitative text analysis, machine learning, bayesian methods, networks). His recent work has examined the interplay between speech, belief, and behavior in legislatures, campaign advertising, and online communication. His current projects include examining deliberation and long-term opinion change online; predicting state-level polling using Twitter textual data; predicting and explaining Supreme Court decisions using the text of legal briefs; and developing experimental methods for optimizing the persuasive effect of text treatments such as political advertisements.

Christoph Riedl is assistant professor for Information Systems at Northeastern University. He holds appointments at the D'Amore-McKim School of Business and the College of Computer & Information Science. He is a core faculty at the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks. He is also a fellow at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) at Harvard University and a fellow of the NASA Tournament Lab. He is recipient of a Young Investigator Award (YIP) for his work on social networks in collaborative decision-making. Before joining Northeastern University he was a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard Business School and IQSS. He received a PhD in Information Systems from Technische Universität München (TUM), Germany in 2011, a MSc in Information Systems in 2007, and a BSc in Computer Science in 2006. His work has been published in leading business and computer science journals including Management Science, Communications of the AIS, and International Journal of Electronic Commerce, and conferences including the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS).

Armin Akhavan has a BA in Urban Planning from Tehran University, Iran, an MS in Urban and Regional Policy from Northeastern University, and is currently studying for a MFA in Information Design at Northeastern. Since 2013, he has been working in projects ranging from scenario modeling, land-use planning, and data mining/predictive analysis to data visualization, web development and design. He is interested in working on web-based application projects aimed at perpetuating civic good. His other interests include interactive front-end design, web-mapping, and database development for web.

Darvish Fakhr is an artist and a painter. Born in 1969, Fakhr grew up in the U.S. before moving to Britain where his practice has been based for the last two decades. He currently lives in Brighton, Sussex. He is an award-winning artist in the field of Iranian portrait paintings. Of American/ Iranian heritage, Fakhr trained at the Museum School of Fine Arts, Boston and the Slade School of Fine Art in London. In 2004 he won the BP Travel Award and used the opportunity to go to Iran and paint local people in Tehran and Isfahan.

CULTURUNNERS PANEL DISCUSSION

MODERATOR

Renata Papsch is General Manager at Art Jameel.

PANNELISTS 

Azra Aksamija is Assistant Professor of the Arts at MIT's Art, Culture and Technology Program(see above for biography).

Husam Al-Sayed is a Saudi-based Palestinian filmmaker and founding member of the Telfaz 11, one of the Middle East's most influential Arabic online video networks based in Riyadh. With over seven million subscribers and over 750 million views throughout its network, Telfaz11 has attracted and helped launch some of the top creative internet talent in the Middle East. SALAR is a Dubai-based Iranian performance artist, electronic music composer and founding member of the Analog Room, a DJ and music platform in the Middle East with an international residency program for electronic music composers. Since launching in 2012, Analog Room has cultivated an extensive network of regional-grown electronic music composers and generated increased awareness about the medium.

Ava Ansari is Associate Curator Edge of Arabia US Tour (see above for biography).

Matthew Mazzotta is an artist, alumnus of ACT at MIT, inventor and lecturer at the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology. Mazzotta’s work evolves from an interest in exploring the relationship between people and their environments, as well as between each other. His practice is conceptual and manifests as participatory public interventions that aim at bringing criticality and a sense of openness to the places we live. These socially-engaged interventions allow for a re-entry of the physical and metaphorical landscapes of our lives by provoking conversations around exploring the local, questions of ecology, public involvement, community building, artist sensibilities, science, and dissecting the systems that make up our ‘everyday’. His work is about reversing the top down one-way exchange of ideas and allowing people to contribute in a more tangible way to their own environment. Often times these projects include working with community members, laborers, academics, engineers, builders, city governments, activists, artists, poets, and anyone else that is willing to be involved in something experiential and participatory.