Panelist and Performers
Jennifer Colby
Jennifer Colby is an artist, curator, educator and community activist. In 1992 she co-founded Galeria Tonantzin, a women’s gallery in San Juan Bautista, California. She is a lecturer at the California State University, Monterey Bay in Liberal Studies; her academic degrees include a PhD in Humanities from the California Institute of Integral Studies, a master’s degree in Studio Art from California State University Fresno, and a master’s in Religion and the Arts from the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley. She also received BAs in Art and Biology.
Jennifer’s early love of marine biology has inspired her recent work in watershed arts. Her life-long work as a political activist has addressed issues of ecology, women’s rights, Latin American solidarity, union advocacy, anti-racist work and advocacy for multicultural education. In conjunction with the Monterey Bay WCA, her Watershed Multimedia Team received two California Stories grants from the California Council for Humanities to produce collaborative projects/exhibitions on local watersheds. She also received the 2007 Monterey County Champion of the Arts, Arts Educator award. In addition, Jennifer has served as the director of contemporary art at the Bade Museum, Berkeley and has curated and juried over 142 exhibitions. She founded the Monterey Bay Chapter of the WCA in 1990 and served as WCA National president from 2006-08. Her personal artwork explores themes of deep ecology and women’s stories. She lives in an oak forest with her recycling husband and two daughters in their twenties who enjoy organic gardening, art and music.
Susan Leibovitz Steinman
Melding art, ecology and grassroots activism, California artist Susan Leibovitz Steinman engages multi-group collaborations to create street-front installations that revitalize blighted natural and cultural landscapes. Exhibited internationally, her sculptures, paintings and installations marry found and organic materials to comment on personal/political issues. Select awards: National Park Service Art & Community Landscapes residency; San Francisco Potrero Nuevo Fund Prize. She is editor/co-founder of WEAD, Women Environmental Artists Directory.
Joyce Cutler-Shaw
Joyce Cutler-Shaw is an artist of intermedia, including drawings, installations, public projects and artist books. She has exhibited internationally since the 1970s; her artworks are represented in significant museum, university and library collections world- wide. Joyce’s work has been informed by her continuing role as Artist-In-Residence at the School of Medicine at the University of California San Diego where she is working on an independent fine art project titled “The Anatomy Lesson,” a contemporary re-vision of a traditional theme. She approaches the body as the matrix of the human condition: her subjects are human identity and the natural world; her themes are evolution, transformation and survival.
For more than thirty years Joyce’s public projects and commissions have been creating a dialogue across disciplines concerning issues of the environment. The essential nature and use of water have been of continuous interest, beginning with her 1982 United Nations project, “Waters of the Nations/Messages from the World,” in honor of the 1980-90 UN Water Decade to achieve pure water and sanitation throughout the world – a goal less realized now than then. Her recent project of several years, “Of Water and the River/Meditations on the Rio Grande,” was exhibited in 2009 at New Mexico State University, Las Cruces. This initial investigation of the complexity of water issues in the Southwest included collaboration with engineers and regional historians; the project addresses concerns paralleled in many water crises emerging internationally. More detailed information on these projects is available at www.JoyceCutler-Shaw.com.
Ruth Wallen
Ruth Wallen is a multi-media artist whose work is dedicated to promulgating an ecological ethos. Her installations, photographs, performative lectures and artist books have been exhibited widely. Solo exhibitions range from Franklin Furnace to New Langton Arts, innumerable group exhibitions from Virgin Territory at the Long Beach Museum of Art to “Weather Report: Art and Climate Change,” at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Colorado. She is particularly interested in working outside the gallery and creating interactive “nature walks” and web sites, including “The Sea As Sculptress,” recently commissioned by the Exploratorium. Her critical writing focuses on race, gender and ecological art. She is currently working on “Cascading Memorials,” a project looking at probable futures in the wake of climate change and suburban sprawl, and writing about ecological art. She is on the faculty in the interdisciplinary arts MFA program at Goddard College and as a lecturer at the University of California, San Diego. She was a Fulbright lecturer at the Autonomous University of Baja California, Tijuana.
Samantha Fields
Samantha Fields was born in Cleveland Ohio in 1972. After receiving her BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art, and her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art, she moved to Los Angeles, where she is currently an Associate Professor of Art at California State University, Northridge. Her work is represented by Kim Light/Lightbox Gallery in Los Angeles. She has an extensive exhibition history, including shows at Melanee Cooper Gallery in Chicago, The Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, Solway Jones Gallery in Los Angeles, Dirt Gallery in Los Angeles, POST Gallery in Los Angeles, Domestic Setting Gallery in Mar Vista, California, Suzanne Hilberry Gallery in Detroit, Lemberg Gallery in Birmingham, Michigan, The Jones Center for Contemporary Art in Austin, Texas, and Galerie Enholm Englehorn in Vienna, Austria. She has also participated in the community based collaborative exhibitions REBEL REBEL and East West Trading Post at artist Annie Shaw’s innovative Los Angeles project space, The New Chinatown Barbershop. With her husband, artist Andre Yi, she co-founded the Los Angeles-based website zerodegreesart.com, which documents their community of artists and critics. Her work has been reviewed in the Los Angeles Times, ArtWeek, Art in America, The Detroit News, The Detroit Free Press and the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
Deborah Thomas
Deborah Thomas is a fine artist and teacher living in Los Angeles who has studied and taught art history, literature and American culture and worked as an independent curator in addition to maintaining a fine arts practice. She initially studied the Méthode Martenot in Geneva and non-representational painting with Richard Pousette-Dart in New York; her work has been exhibited in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Switzerland. Recently she has been creating conceptual installations and mixed media works and organizing independent curatorial projects in and around Southern California. She enjoys experimenting in both conceptual and material dimensions and working with themes such as family and the remembered past, or local landscape and the environment. As a member of SCWCA’s EcoArt group and the Arroyo Arts Collective, Deborah explores artistic and environmental concerns rooted in an appreciation for the “local.” She has taught at the Universities of Geneva and Bern in Switzerland and at Vassar College; currently she teaches art history, contemporary art and critical theory at Pasadena City College, Glendale College and the Los Angeles Academy of Figurative Art.
Andrée Singer Thompson
Andrée Singer Thompson is a long-time Bay Area artist and teacher who exhibits internationally and nationally. Much of her sculpture and interactive and educational site-specific installations deal with individual and communal survival issues. She often collaborates on public art projects involving community participation; her main focus since 2005 has been environmental and social justice activist art. Andrée lives in Berkeley, teaches at Laney College, and gives workshops around the country. She developed and taught a summer Eco-Art Literacy program and works actively in the eco-art movement as a member of the board of directors of the Women Environmental Artists Directory (WEAD); she is also on the Peralta District Sustainability Committee. Andrée lives in a yellow house with purple steps and has chickens and compost in the garden.
Daniella Russo
Daniella Russo (www.mindzone.com) is the executive director of the Plastic Pollution Coalition, a global organization of groups who share a vision of a world free of plastic pollution. She is a media activist, a social activation strategist and a business executive who is passionate about the role of the public in driving societal and behavioral shifts. She believes that the foundation of every progressive society is an engaged and educated public and applies her experience into creating public engagement. Daniella is a frequent speaker on the role of new media for social activation that drives change.
Beverly Naidus
Beverly Naidus has been making art about social and personal concerns for over three decades. She works in many mediums, allowing the content to determine the form. Audience participation (story telling and game playing) in response to her installations and artist’s books has been a significant part of her work for many years. Topics in her work include healing from environmental illness, body hate and fear of difference, nightmares about nuclear war and the ecological crisis and dreams for a reconstructed world. She is currently working on a site-specific, eco-art project that involves bio-remediation of toxic soil, community story telling and permaculture. Her work has been exhibited internationally and written about in many books and articles. After many years of participating in the New York City and Los Angeles activist art worlds, she now resides on Vashon Island, WA with her husband, Bob Spivey, founder of SEEDS (www.socialecologyvashon.org), and son. She teaches art for social change in the Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences program at the University of Washington, Tacoma. The curriculum of that program is highlighted in her recent book, Arts for Change: Teaching Outside the Frame (New Village Press, 2009). She travels frequently to lecture, lead discussions and workshops on art for social change. More of her work and writings can be seen at www.artsforchange.org
Capacitor
Capacitor, San Francisco’s interdisciplinary dance company, is renowned for conceptually- rich, bound-breaking performances. Capacitor artists collaborate with members of the scientific community to create mind-expanding, heart-gripping live performance.
From the movement of the human diaphragm to the story of evolution, from the behavior of electricity to genetic manipulation, from the birth of the moon to the cycles of digestion – natural and synthetic processes form the basis for Capacitor’s study of performance. Capacitor encourages contact with scientific concepts in ways which allow audiences of all ages to see patterns and relationships inherent in nature and the cosmos. Through performance, Capacitor personalizes large, abstract concepts and in doing so, transcends cultural barriers – widening the scope of basic human experience. Capacitor will perform an excerpt of their new work, “The Ocean Project” at the Elements Eco-Art Conference. For more about Capacitor, visit http://www.capacitor.org/.
Deborah Munk
Sculpture Garden at Recology
Deborah Munk is the director of the Artist in Residence Program at Recology San Francisco and has spent the last ten years working with artists who make art out of garbage. She was the assistant editor of “Parallels and Intersections, Women Artists in California” published by UC Press, in 2002 and is a graduate of San Francisco State University and holds a Masters Degree in Educational Technology focusing on art and media. Deborah also manages the Environmental Learning Center at SF Recycling & Disposal where she teaches children and adults the importance of sustainability and recycling.
Tierney Thys
Tierney Thys has worked with the National Geographic Society in numerous ways: as a filmmaker, science media product developer and consultant, research grantee, expedition leader and as a lecturer. She served as Director of Research for Sea Studios Foundation that co-produced with National Geographic the acclaimed PBS series, Strange Days on Planet Earth and The Shape of Life. The Strange Days project won Best Series at the Wildscreen Festival–the environmental equivalent of the Oscars®. A world expert on giant ocean sunfish, the ocean’s heaviest bony fish, Tierney is also an active researcher and member of the Census of Marine Life. She serves on the braintrust for the annual Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED.com) conference and on the exploration task force for Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry. She is currently working with National Geographic Kids Entertainment developing a large-scale transmedia project about water for children ages 3-6 and their parents.
Don’t miss any of these exciting speakers and performers! Register here: http://elements.eventbrite.com/.
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