INSTITUTE FOR DOCTORAL STUDIES
IN THE VISUAL ARTS
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).
Maria Patricia Tinajero holds a Ph.D. in Visual Art and Philosophy from the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts. Her work reflects a profound commitment to exploring the boundaries of art, philosophy, and the environment. Through her interdisciplinary approach, she seeks to inspire critical thinking and foster meaningful dialogue.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Jennifer Rissler (She/Her) is the Interim Executive Director of the 500 Capp Street Foundation. Jennifer holds a PhD from the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts. She is President of the Board of Directors of the College Art Association (CAA) and Chair Emerita of CAA's Committee on Women in the Arts. Jennifer also is President Emerita of ArtTable, Inc.; a former trustee of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine; a founding board member of Oakwood Arts in Richmond, Virginia; and Dean Emerita of the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Claire Raymond is the author of nine books of feminist theory and critical theory, on topics ranging from aesthetic theory to poetics to visual culture. Her newest book, Photography and Resistance: Anticolonialist Photography in the Americas, is forthcoming in 2022 from Palgrave Macmillan. She teaches for the University of Maine and for Bates College, and is based in coastal Maine.
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.
Khwezi Mkhize received his PhD in Africana Studies from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. He is currently lecturer in the Department of African Literature at Wits University, Johannesburg, and co-editor of the journal African Studies.
W.E.B. DuBois Institute for the Study of African and African American Research at Harvard University. Current projects include Ornamental Blackness: The Black Body in European Decorative Arts, a study of blacks in European decorative arts.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Shanté Paradigm Smalls is a scholar, artist, and writer. Smalls’ teaching and research focuses on Black popular culture in music, film, visual art, genre fiction, and other aesthetic forms. They recently finished their first scholarly manuscript, Hip Hop Heresies: Queer Aesthetics in New York City (forthcoming NYU Press),which won the 2016 CLAGS Fellowship Award for best manuscript in LGBTQ Studies. Dr. Smalls is currently an Associate Professor of Black Studies at St. John’s University in New York City.
William Edelglass is Director of Studies at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies and Associate Professor of Philosophy and Environmental Studies at Emerson College. Grounded in philosophy, environmental studies, and Buddhist studies, William’s writing and teaching is often interdisciplinary, engaging questions of ethics, aesthetics,practice, and the environment. He is chair of the board of directors of the International Association of Environmental Philosophy and co-editor of the journal Environmental Philosophy.
Natalie Loveless is an artist, theorist, curator. She is Associate Professor of contemporary art and theory in the History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture at the University of Alberta, located in ᐊᒥᐢᑿᒌᐚᐢᑲᐦᐃᑲᐣ (Amiskwacîwâskahikan) on Treaty Six territory (Canada). Her recent books are, How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research-Creation (Duke University Press, 2019) and Knowings and Knots: Methodologies and Ecologies in Research-Creation (University of Alberta Press, 2019).
Paul A. Kottman is Professor of Comparative Literature at the New School for Social Research, and Eugene Lang College, the New School for Liberal Arts. He is Chair of the Committee on Liberal Studies, and is affiliated with the Philosophy Department. He is the author of several books, most recently Love as Human Freedom (Stanford UP 2018). He holds the Abilitazione, Professore Ordinario in Filosofia, Estetica (Professor of Philosophy, Aesthetics) in Italy.
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).
Brian Massumi is Professor in the Department of Communication Sciences at the University of Montréal. He is the author of Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation and A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari (MIT Press).
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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.
Janet Donohoe is currently Dean of the Honors College and Professor of Philosophy at the University of West Georgia. Her research is grounded in phenomenology and hermeneutics. She is the author of several articles on phenomenology and place, a book on Husserlian ethics, a book titled Remembering Places (Lexington Books,2014) and has edited the volume Place and Phenomenology (Rowman & Littlefield, Int’l, 2017). She is the former book review editor for Environmental Philosophy, is co-director of the International Association for Environmental Philosophy, and serves on the editorial board for a number of philosophy journals.
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.
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.
SILVIA MAZZINI, a philosopher and theatre author, works on the intersection of Aesthetics and Political Philosophy. She published on Arts and Politics in Pasolini, Bloch, and Vattimo, on tragic and comic thought and community theatre; currently she is writing on the Philosophy of Poverty. Before joining IDSVA, she was research fellow at the Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry and worked as Assistant Professor at the Humboldt University (where she also obtained her PhD) and at the Berlin University of the Arts. She taught History of late-modern Continental Philosophy at the University of Groningen (The Netherlands).
Dr. Cook is the Creative Director of Amicus Studio, her curating, interior design consulting, and multimedia art practice. Amy draws heavily on existentialism and ontology in her sympatico work as a therapist assisting clients in noticing and befriending the expansion and contraction of the heart. The process common to both enterprises is that of enlisting the courageous and ethical self to create and inhabit an invitational state of being.
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).
Paul Armstrong is former Dean of the College, Brown University, where he is currently Professor of English. Books include Play and the Politics of Reading: The Social Uses of Modernist Form (Cornell UP, 2005) and How Literature Plays with the Brain: The Neuroscience of Reading and Art (Johns Hopkins 2013) and Stories of the Brain: The Neuroscience of Narrative (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020).
Shannon Rose Riley, an interdisciplinary artist and scholar, is the author of Performing Race and Erasure: Cuba, Haiti, & US Culture, 1898-1940 and co-editor of Mapping Landscapes for Performance as Research. She performs and records with the Chicago-based performance/noise group, ONO. Their latest album, Red Summer (May 2020) is on American Dreams Records. Riley is Professor of Creative Arts and Chair of Humanities at San José State University.
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.
Ellen Grabiner, Ph.D., is a visual artist and writer, and Professor Emerita at Simmons University, Boston. As an artist/scholar Grabiner’s achievements range from creative works to more strictly scholarly endeavors Including a number of things in between. She’s exhibited paintings, drawings, image transfers,digital images, and animations from Boston to Berkeley, from New York to Washington D.C. Grabiner’s academic writing brings the eye of the artist/philosopher to the fantastical and the dystopian in James Cameron’s Avatar, Battlestar Galactica, the Handmaid’s Tale, and the films of Richard Linklater.
Donald R. Wehrs, Hargis Professor of English Literature, received his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. He specializes in novel genre and history, British eighteenth-century studies, literary theory, postcolonial studies, and comparative literature. He is author of three books on twentieth-century African fiction, editor or co-editor of four collections on literary theory and criticism, and has published in Poetics Today, Modern Philology, Literature & Theology, New Literary History, MLN, SEL, and ELH. He is currently at work on projects connecting ethics, literary history, and neurocognitive studies.
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.
Dr. Christopher L. Johnson was an independent scholar who served as Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies and Media at Eugene Lang College, and Assistant Professor of Jazz and Contemporary Music at the New School University in New York City. He held a doctorate in American Studies from NYU. Dr. Johnson had been a Fulbright Senior Scholar teaching and doing research at the University of Münster, Germany, and a Research Fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard University. He was also an accomplished musician, playing drums, saxophone, and the flute. Dr. Johnson’s book, Musicians’ Migratory Patterns: The African Drum as Symbol in Early America has been published posthumously by Routledge in 2020.
Ali Anooshahr received his B.A. from the University of Texas at Austin in 1998, and his M.A. (2002) and Ph.D. (2005) in Islamic History from UCLA. He was a CLIR-Mellon post-doctoral fellow in 2005-6 (cataloging Persian, Ottoman, and Arabic manuscripts at UCLA Library’s Special Collections) and Ahmanson-Getty Fellow in 2006-7. He taught at Saint Xavier University in Chicago (2007-8) and moved to Davis in 2008 as a scholar of “comparative Islamic empires” during the medieval and early modern periods. He is on the editorial board of the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient.
Ewa Ziarek is Julian Park Professor of Comparative Literature and Founder and Director of Humanities Institute, SUNY Buffalo, and author of An Ethics of Dissensus.
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.
Florian Grosser teaches philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley and at California College of the Arts, San Francisco. He is the author of the monographs Revolution denken. Heidegger und das Politische 1919-1969(C.H.Beck, 2011; 2nd edition 2020) and Theorien der Revolution (Junius,2013; 2nd edition 2018). The collected volume Heidegger in the Literary World: Variations on Poetic Thinking is forthcoming (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021).
Professor Philip Armstrong has published widely in the area of contemporary visual arts and culture, as well as essays on contemporary political theory. Publications include Reticulations: Jean-Luc Nancy and the Networks of the Political (U of Minnesota P, 2009), Jean-Luc Nancy, Politique et au-delà: Entretien with Jason Smith (Galilée, 2011), and (with Laura Lisbon and Stephen Melville) As Painting: Division and Displacement (MIT Press and Wexner Center, 2001). Translations include Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Disavowed Community and The Pleasure in Drawing, as well as the collected writings of Michel Parmentier.
Dr. Nico Jenkins is a theorist and artist whose work focuses on finitude and uncertainty. His most recent book, Echoes of Nothing (Punctum,2019) is a meditation on thinking the “between” between Dōgen and Heidegger, exploring gaps and spaces where their thinking overlap,converge, and dissipate. Jenkins is Visiting Associate Professor at MECA in Portland, Maine. He also teaches an intensive seminar on philosophy and craft at the European Graduate School in Switzerland.As a photographer,he chronicles the forgotten spaces of the contemporary semi-urban landscape.His photographs explore the ignored environments which exist just beyond the periphery of capitalism’s gaze.
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.
Giovanna Borradori holds advanced degrees from the University of Milan, Italy (“Dottore in Filosofia”) and the University of Paris, France (“Diplôme d’Etudes Approfondis”). She specializes in European philosophy of the 19th and 20th century. In recent years, her research has been focusing on the aesthetics of architecture and the philosophy of terrorism. She is the editor of Recoding Metaphysics: The New Italian Philosophy (Northwestern University Press, 1988) and the author of two books in English: The American Philosopher (University of Chicago Press 1993) and Philosophy in a Time of Terror. Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (University of Chicago Press, 2003), a “philosophy best-seller” translated into eighteen languages.
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.
Dr. Brooke Grabiec is a Visual Artist and scholar whose work focuses on the intersections between travel, philosophy, art, and fashion. Her research explores the democratization of fashion and art,and ways creative practices can move society towards betterment. Dr. Grabiec co-founded The Travel Almanac magazine, which considers the impact of place on creative production. Formerly, she Co-Founded and Directed of Parts & Labor Gallery, a non-profit mobile exhibition space that brought artwork into the changing context of public space. Her art installations have been exhibited internationally. Dr. Grabiec’s latest project is The GlassHouse, an interdisciplinary creative studio based in Los Angeles. She holds a PhD from IDSVA and a MA from Parsons School of Design.
Shelton Waldrep is Distinguished Professor and Chair of English at the University of Southern Maine. He is the author of The Space of Sex: The Porn Aesthetic in Contemporary Film and Television (Bloomsbury), Future Nostalgia: Performing David Bowie(Bloomsbury), The Dissolution of Place:Architecture, Identity, and the Body (Routledge), and The Aesthetics of Self-Invention: Oscar Wilde to David Bowie (University of Minnesota Press); the co-author of Inside the Mouse: Work and Play at Disney World (Duke University Press); and the editor of The Seventies: The Age ofGlitter in Popular Culture (Routledge).
Myron Beasley, Ph.D. is Associate Professor in the areas of American Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies at Bates College. His ethnographic research includes exploring the intersection of cultural politics and art and social change, as he believes in the power of artists and recognizes them as cultural workers; He has conducted fieldwork in Morocco, Brazil, the US, and Haiti. The Andy Warhol Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, and most recently the Reed Foundation (The Ruth Landes Award), have awarded him fellowships and grants, for his ethnographic writing about art and cultural engagement.
Christopher Yates holds a PhD in Philosophy from Boston College. He specializes in 19th- and 20th-century European philosophy, especially German Idealism, phenomenology, and aesthetics. He is the author of The Poetic Imagination in Heidegger and Schelling (Bloomsbury, 2013), and his articles have appeared in journals such as Comparative and Continental Philosophy, Philosophy and Social Criticism, Continental Philosophy Review, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Art historian and cultural theorist, Nausikaä El-Mecky specializes in attacks and censorship of art, from the earliest images until today. She is tenure track professor in art history and visual culture at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona.