Independent Study and Dissertation Directors
Dr. Ofosuwa Abiola is Associate Dean, and Associate Professor in the Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts at Howard University. She received her Ph.D. in History from Howard University, and her research interests are African and African Diaspora dance and performance history. Dr. Abiola has written several books including, History Dances: Chronicling the History of Traditional Mandinka Dance; Historical Perspectives on Dance in Africa; and her latest book, Fire Under My Feet: History, Race and Agency in African Diaspora Dance.
Frederick Luis Aldama, aka Professor Latinx, is the Jacob & Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities and Affiliate Faculty in Radio-TV-Film at the University of Texas, Austin, as well as Adjunct Professor & Distinguished University Professor at The Ohio State University. He is award-winning author of over 48 books, including the International Latino Book Award and an Eisner for Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics.
Dr. Conny Bogaard is the executive director of Western Kansas Community Foundation in Garden City, Kansas. Conny has a museum background in the Netherlands and the United States. She also taught art history, museum studies and arts and cultural management at the college level. Her research focus is on inclusiveness and institutional dialogue. Conny joined the board of Humanities Kansas and currently serves as board chair of the Kansas Association of Community Foundation. Conny holds anMA in Art History and Museum Studies from the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands. She is the recipient of the 2016 Ted Coons Dissertation Award.
Romi Crawford, Ph.D., Is Professor in the Visual and Critical Studies and Liberal Arts departments at School of the Art Insitute of Chicago. Her research and courses explore areas of race and ethnicity as they relate to American visual culture (including art, film, and photography). She is co-author of The Wall of Respect: Public Art and Black Liberation in 1960s Chicago (Northwestern University Press, 2017).
Janet Donohoe is Professor Emerita of Philosophy andretired Dean of the Honors College at the University of West Georgia. Sheearned her PhD in Philosophy from Boston College. She has published extensivelyin phenomenology and hermeneutics with a focus on questions of place, builtenvironment, home and nature. She is author of Husserl on Ethics and Intersubjectivity (2nd edition, TorontoUniversity Press, 2016, translated into Korean, 2022); Remembering Places (Lexington Books, 2014); and editor of Place and Phenomenology (Rowman &Littlefield, Int, 2017).
Lewis R. Gordon is Professor and Head of the Department of Philosophy at UCONN-Storrs; Honorary President of the Global Center for Advanced Studies; Visiting Professor at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa; and Honorary Professor in the Unit for the Humanities at Rhodes University, South Africa. He co-edits the journal Philosophy and Global Affairs, the Rowman & Littlefield book series Global Critical Caribbean Thought, and the Routledge-India book series Academics, Politics and Society in the Post-Covid World. He is the author of many books, including Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization (Routledge,2021) and the forthcoming Fear of Black Consciousness (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
Sigrid Hackenberg is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and philosopher based in New York. She is the author of a study on G. W. F. Hegel and Emmanuel Levinas, Total History, Anti-History, and the Face that is Other (Atropos Press), and co-editor with Lenart Škof of Bodily Proximity (Ljubljana: Novarevija). Hackenberg received her B.A. from San Francisco State University (SFSU), an M.A. from New York University (NYU), and a Ph.D. in Media and Communications from the European Graduate School (EGS), Switzerland.
Jennifer Hall is an artist philosopher currently applying the frames of enactivism and disability aesthetics to highlight the power of invention by confronting embodied pain. As it becomes increasingly difficult,and perhaps less relevant, to distinguish between the biological and the mechanical, she deploys her own body as a site for performative events of transhumanist confrontation. Jennifer holds a PhD from IDSVA where she works with independent study students and is Professor Emerita at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design where she continues to teach in their graduate programs.
Alberto Hernandez-Lemus is an associate professor of Philosophy at Colorado College. He started his career in philosophy in aesthetics, writing on the cinema theory of Gilles Deleuze. He has gradually come to focus on social and political philosophy, particularly on philosophical issues pertaining to contemporary social movements in the global South.
Kathe Hicks Albrecht is a nationally recognized leader in arts and education. After a career at American University, she was appointed to the National Council for the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). She also serves on the National Advisory Board for the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Her book The Machine Anxieties of Steampunk: Contemporary Philosophy, Victorian Aesthetics, and the Future was published in 2021. She also contributed an essay for The Aestheticization of History and The Butterfly Effect, edited by Nancy Wellington Bookhart. Albrecht received her BA in art history from UCLA, a master’s degree from American University, and PhD from the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts.
Jason Hoelscher is gallery director and an associate professor in the interdisciplinary art department at Georgia Southern University. Hoelscher received an MFA in painting from the Pratt Institute, certificates incomplex and emergent systems studies and network modeling from the New England Complex Systems Institute, and a PhD in visual art (emphasis: aesthetics and art theory) from IDSVA, where he completed his dissertation under the supervision of Brian Massumi. His book Art as Information Ecology was published in 2021 by Duke University Press.
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Raél Jero Salley is faculty in the History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), Founding Creative Director of The Space for Creative Black Imagination, Inc., Producer of Making Art History Now (a collaboration between Yale University and La Biennale di Venezia), and Curator of Looking Rights (Johns Hopkins University, supported by the Mellon Foundation). Salley is an internationally recognized advisor, creative, and scholar who makes conceptual art, teaches martial arts, leads yoga sessions, feeds a dog called Biko, waters Gloria’s plants, and is Mazie’s grandson.
Jonathan Lee began his career working in ancient Greek philosophy but finds himself now focused largely in contemporary French philosophy. His current research interests lie at the intersection of recent French philosophy, psychoanalysis, and aesthetics, and he writes regularly on experimental music, photography, cinema, and sound art. Professor Lee's teaching interests range from sound art to Africana philosophy, from speculative realism to the radical psychoanalytic tradition.
Marcelo Guimarães Lima, PhD, MFA, is a visual artist, art historian and writer. He studied Philosophy at the Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil, Studio Art and History of Art at the University of New Mexico, USA. He is the author of "Heterochronia and Vanishing Viewpoints" (Metasenta, Melbourne, 2012) and of essays, papers and articles on the History of Art, Philosophy, Art Criticism and Psychology of Art. He taught History of Art and Studio Art at the University of Illinois, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Goddard College, and the American University in Dubai, UAE, and was visiting scholar at the Universidad de Salamanca and Universidad Internacional de Andalucia in Spain.
Carolyn Jean Martin is an educator, artist and IDSVA alumna. She earned an M.F.A. in painting and an M.A. in the History and Theory of Contemporary Art from San Francisco Art Institute. Carolyn’s writing practice interrogates the impact of philosophic and aesthetic traditions on the construction of race and identity, with an emphasis on articulations of Blackness in the Western visual field. Her mixed media art practice examines narratives of ‘Americanness’ in contemporary culture. Carolyn has presented her work in exhibitions and conferences in the United States, Canada, South Africa, and China. She is currently the Chair, Arts and Cultural Studies Department at Berkeley City College.
Jason Mohaghegh is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Babson College. His work explores rising poetic, philosophical, and artistic movements across both East and West, with particular focus on concepts of chaos, illusion, violence, disappearance, delirium, silence, madness, apocalypse, night, and future. He has published nine books to date--including The Chaotic Imagination (Palgrave,2010); Inflictions: The Writing of Violence (Bloomsbury,2012); The Radical Unspoken (Routledge, 2013); Insurgent,Poet, Mystic, Sectarian: The Four Masks of an Eastern Postmodernism (SUNY,2014), and his latest volumes titled Omnicide: Mania, Fatalism, and the Future-In-Delirium (MIT Press/Urbanomic /Sequence, 2019) and Night: A Philosophy of the After-Dark (Zero Books, 2020). He is the director of the Future Studies Program and Director of Transdisciplinary Studies for the New Centre for Research & Practice.
Dr. Angela M. Mosley is an international artivist who epitomizes “live life out loud” by using the Arts as a medium to engage in social justice reform. A Blues performance artist, community developer, and educator reformer, her foundational research explores the women of the Blues and their contemporary advocacy of Hip-Hop womanism. She expands her work through STEAM initiatives to diversify the workforce for disadvantaged communities through nontraditional learning and 21st-century education reformation.
Margarita Palacios (PhD New School for Social Research, New York, 2004), is a Chilean social theorist teaching at the Department of Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck College, University of London. She is the author of Fantasy and Political Violence:The Meaning of Anti-Communism in Chile (VS Research, Wiesbaden, 2009) and Radical Sociality: Studies on Disobedience, Violence and Belonging (Palgrave, 2013).
Ilya Parkins is Professor of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies in the department of Community, Culture and Global Studies at the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan campus. Her research sits at the intersection of queer feminist theory and fashion studies. She is the author of Poiret, Schiaparelli, and Dior: Fashion, Femininity and Modernity (2012), and the co-editor of Cultures of Femininity in Modern Fashion (2011), Fashion: New Feminist Essays (2020), and Fashion and Feeling: The Affective Politics of Dress (2023), as well as of special issues of Periodical Studies, Feminist Theory, Australian Feminist Studies and International Journal of Fashion Studies.
EL actively presents artworks and performances in the United States, Europe, and beyond, is a committee member of Bbeyond Belfast, and has been a member of the Boston-based Mobius Artists Group since 2009. Originally from the United States, she currently lectures in Digital Media at Huston School of Film and Digital Media, NUI Galway.
Toni-Lee Sangastiano is an Associate Professor of the Practice and Digital Media Specialist in the Department of Art & Art History, Medical Humanities Core Faculty, Massive Data Institute Affiliate Faculty, and a faculty mentor for M.S. in Data Science & Analytics at Georgetown University, Washington D.C. As a scholar of the carnivalesque and interdisciplinary artist, Sangastiano studies the postmodern sideshow's American and European processional origins, and its relevance to contemporary language, aesthetics, and media. Sangastiano earned a B.A. in Art with a concentration in illustration and graphic design from Fairleigh Dickinson University, an MFA at Montclair State University, she studied classical drawing and painting at the Angel Academy of Art in Florence, Italy, and earned a Ph.D. from the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts.
Dr. Janae Sholtz is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Alvernia University, Coordinator of Women's and Gender Studies, and Alvernia Neag Professor. She received her PhD from University of Memphis and MA from New School for Social Research. She is the author of The Invention of a People, Heidegger and Deleuze on Art and the Political, Edinburgh Press (2015), co-editor of Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Feminism: Alliances and Allies (Bloomsbury 2019) and French and Italian Stoicisms: from Sartre to Agamben (Bloomsbury 2020).
Michael R. Smith, Jr. received his PhD in Philosophy,Aesthetics, and Art Theory from IDSVA in 2013, where he continues to serve as an Independent Study and Dissertation Director. He is also a faculty member of the Humanities Department at Western Governors University, and teaches Art History at Northern State University. He has written and presented widely on topics related to modernism and the history of abstraction, and his forthcoming book from Bloomsbury Press in 2021, entitled Wittgenstein and the Problem of Metaphysics, will focus on the intersection of aesthetics,ethics, and metaphysics in the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein.
ELINA STAIKOU is a philosopher and transdisciplinary scholar, who has taught the history of ideas, philosophy and liberal arts at Goldsmiths, University of London and the University of Winchester, UK. Her research is focused on deconstruction, critical maternities, the life sciences and the ethico-aesthetics of decomposition. She is the author of Deconstruction at Home: Metaphors of Travel and Writing and of articles on philosophy, literature and biomedicine. She is a member of the editorial board of the journal Derrida Today and has participated in numerous international conferences. She has participated in several IDSVA symposia with talks on migration, hospitality, the ethics of eating, and the Nitrogen Anthropocene.
Stephens is a Full Professor at Pratt Munson and also teaches at Pratt Institute. She received her Ph.D. in Philosophy and Art Theory from IDSVA. Originally from Jamaica, Stephens curates various shows including conversationXchange, a series of exhibitions that create a platform for cultural exchange between artists based in the Caribbean and those within the diaspora. As a philosopher-artist-curator, she also creates installations, videos, large-scale photography, and paintings to explore issues related to cultural and individual identity and has exhibited nationally and internationally throughout various museums and galleries including the Everson, Frost Museum, and Circulo de Bellas Artes in Madrid.
Philosopher, documentary filmmaker, and video artist Giovanbattista Tusa is currently a Researcher in Philosophy and Ecology at the Universidade Nova of Lisbon. A Visiting Lecturer in Philosophy and Critical Theory in many institutions in Europe and the US, he is the co-author of De la Fin (Mimésis Visages, 2017), with Alain Badiou.
RobertT. Valgenti is Professor of Liberal Arts and Applied Food Studies at theCulinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, NY, USA. His research interestsinclude the philosophy of food, philosophical hermeneutics, and contemporaryItalian philosophy. Recent publications include essays on recipes, terroir, artistic improvisation, thephilosophy of food, the aesthetics of Luigi Pareyson, the hermeneutics ofGianni Vattimo, and the philosophy of comedy. He is also a translator ofacademic works from Italian into English, which include Luigi Pareyson's Truth and Interpretation (2013), GianniVattimo's Of Reality (2017), GaetanoChiurazzi’s The Experience of Truth(2017) and Dynamis: Ontology of theIncommensurable (2021), Alessandro Bertinetto’s Aesthetics of Improvisation (2022), and Federico Vercellone’s The Illegitimate Age (2025). He is currently a desk editor for the foodstudies journal Gastronomica and theResearch and Education Co-Chair for the Menus of Change University ResearchCollaborative (MCURC).
Louise Carrie Wales was raised in Belgium — initially educated by nuns, followed by a startling entry to a co-ed American boarding school, then eventually onto Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts for undergraduate and her initial graduate studies. She completed further Masters degrees at the Savannah College of Art and Design, where she also taught. She then received her PhD in Philosophy of Aesthetics & Art Theory from the Institute for Doctoral Studies In the Visual Arts.
In addition, Dr. Wales has traveled extensively through India, Southeast Asia, Europe, the British Isles, Africa and the Pacific Islands. Along the way, she developed a more concentrated interest in writing and photography. Currently, Dr. Wales is balancing art making and teaching in Connecticut. She's the proud mother of a grown daughter, who is an attorney.
Andreas Weber is a biologist, philosopher and non-fiction writer. His work deals with a re-evaluation of reality as alife, subjective, and deeply shared. He teaches ecophilosophy at the Berlin University of the Arts and is adjunct professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati. His latest books are Enlivenment. Toward a Poetics of the Anthropocene (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2019) and Sharing Life. An Ecopolitics of Reciprocity (New Delhi & Berlin, 2020).
Dr. Jason M. Wirth is professor of philosophy at Seattle University, and works and teaches in the areas of Continental Philosophy, Buddhist Philosophy,Aesthetics, Environmental Philosophy, and Africana Philosophy. His recent books include Nietzsche and Other Buddhas: Philosophy after Comparative Philosophy (Indiana 2019), Mountains, Rivers, and the GreatEarth: Reading Gary Snyder and Dōgen in an Age of Ecological Crisis (SUNY 2017), a monograph on Milan Kundera (Commiserating with Devastated Things,Fordham 2015), and Schelling’s Practice of the Wild (SUNY 2015). He is the associate editor and book review editor of the journal, Comparative and Continental Philosophy.
Santiago Zabala is ICREA Research Professor of Philosophy at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona and author of many books, including Why Only Art Can Save Us: Aesthetics and the Absence of Emergency (Columbia University Press, 2017). He has written for the Guardian, the New York Times, and Al-Jazeera. His latest book is Being at Large: Freedom in the Age of Alternative Facts (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020). You can also find him on Instagram at @beingatlarge.
Ilham Ibnou Zahir received her PhD at Goldsmiths’ College where her dissertation explored the unsettling relationship between ancient philosophy and techne/the art of healing-medicine. Currently, she is exploring the concept of the giver of knowledge/wisdom, through philosophical problems in the intertwined subjects of theology, history, architecture, and craftsmanship.