Susan Ossman (Creative Director and Artistic Producer)
is an anthropologist and an artist who has made her home in France, Morocco, the UK and the US. In 2016-17 she is based in Berlin. Susan is known for conceiving and shaping fields for research across artistic and scholarly disciplines that include exhibition, performance and community engagement. Her recent collaborative projects include On the Line and Lifeworks as well as The Moving Matters Traveling Workshop (MMTW). While painting and installation art are central to her artistic practice, these collaborations have also led her to develop as a curator, performer and film and digital media producer. Susan is Professor of Anthropology and Global Studies at University of California, Riverside and has published extensively on globalization, migration, media, politics and aesthetics. Her book Moving Matters, Paths of Serial Migration provided the conceptual basis for the work of the MMTW.
Racheal Adair
is the web developer and designer for the Moving Matters Traveling Workshop. She also worked on the Mapquest Project in Riverside, CA, where she is an anthropology major at the University of California, Riverside. Racheal is interested in developing ways to combine multimedia and academia into digital works of art.
Ton Akkermans
is a musician in the Netherlands-based ensemble Del Silencio. He is the maker of all the metal percussion instruments used during the ensemble’s performances. He has worked as a blacksmith most of his life and has dedicated years of study to the properties of metals and their sounds.
Ghulamsakhi Alizada was born in Afghanistan where he earned a degree in economics from Aria University in Mazar-e-Sharif in 2013 BBA. He worked with a variety of German Human Rights organizations in Afghanistan from 2008-2013, work that led him to have to flee the country. He eventually settled in Hamburg, where he has become involved in performance and theater work, particularly with refugees. He is studying German and preparing for further study in arts management.
Kayde Anobile
draws inspiration from whatever country she currently calls home. She is interested in paradoxical outcomes and in the cognitive dissonance caused by presenting contradictory ideas simultaneously. The notion of “the other” and the uncanny space created where opposing ideas overlap are reoccurring themes in her work. She is currently represented by Tintype Gallery and has worked in the Zabludowicz Collection, both in London. She has a BFA from the SAIC (School of the Art Institute of Chicago) and an MFA from Chelsea College of Art and Design in London. She currently lives and creates in Istanbul.
Alexandru Balasescu
is an anthropologist, writer, curator and art critic who has also worked as a diplomat and a television producer. He was born in Romania and has lived in France and Iran. His work is centered on the relational aspects of the human body in both its cultural and material manifestations, the economy, and the environment – natural, built, cultural, lived. He is co-founder of subliant/3:1, 4 and has published books and articles on transportation, Islamic fashion, urbanism and art, most notably his work, Paris Chic, Tehran Thrill. Aesthetic Bodies, Political Subjects, ZETA Books 2007.
Barbara Bernardi
creates atmospheres by collecting and producing images, sounds, moments and voices and editing them to shape new stories. Born in Padua, she studied film directing in Milan and earned a Master in Fine Arts in London. She was a director for an Italian music TV channel before moving to Berlin in 2008, to dedicate herself to art and video-making. Barbara’s work has been exhibited and screened across Europe and has won many prestigious awards. She often collaborates with various artists like a poet, performers and musicians. Her latest adoptive land is Island, where she was the Gil Artist Residency artist in Akureyri in January 2017.
Adam Berg
a Los Angeles-based artist, who works in video, painting and sculpture. He holds a Ph.D. in phenomenology and the philosophy of time and has studied both art and architecture. His art employs a wide range of methods, all of which are fused through an interplay of images, codes and imaginary transformations. Recent solo shows include 2013- Consensual, Edward Cella Art and Architecture, Los Angeles, 2012- Endangered Spaces, Santa Monica Museum of Art, Los Angeles and 2010- Evidence, Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Florence. He recently published Phenomenalism, Phenomenology, and The Question of Time: A Comparative Study of the Theories of Mach, Husserl, and Boltzman (Lexington, 2015). Adam teaches at Otis College and CalArts.
Andreea Campeanu
is a photojournalist, specializing in both news and documentary photography. She recently finished an MA in Visual Anthropology at Berlin’s Free University. Andreea has lived and worked in Romania, Sudan, South Sudan, Madagascar, Lebanon, the Central African Republic and Spain. She is passionate about documenting issues related to displacement, migration and the effects of conflict, and also covers stories about arts, fashion and sports in marginalized countries and communities. Andreea’s work has appeared in, among others, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, Paris Match, The Guardian and Newsweek. She has also regularly worked for Reuters, AFP, and various NGOs and UN agencies.
Oscar Cano
is a Mexican-Dutch pianist and didgeridoo player. He is part of Del Silencio, a music ensemble that embraces diverse musical traditions coming from Tibet, aboriginal Australia and Europe. For Oscar the didgeridoo opens a void of silence. As a didgeridoo player, he is fascinated by the textures created by the instrument in combination with his voice. Whales and baboons with their incredible and extreme sound-worlds are his greatest teachers.
Blanca Casas-Brullet
probes the relationship between the body and social and cultural environments and shifts between language and visual signs in photographs, video, drawing, sculpture and performance. She is particularly interested in the poetic charge of translation and the strangeness that results from literal translations of metaphors into images. Her three “homelands” are languages: Catalan, Spanish and French. Her work has been exhibited throughout Europe, in Latin America, South Africa, Taiwan, South Korea and Canada. She is the chief designer and coordinator for the MMTW memory book project.
Paulo C. Chagas
has written more than 100 pieces of music and his works have been performed in the United States, Russia and throughout Latin America and Europe. He is currently researching interactivity and gesture, finding relationships between image, movement and sound and is developing a new facility and center for research, the Experimental Acoustic Research Studio (EARS). He is Professor of Music at University of California, Riverside.
Sébastien Chauvin
is a sociologist with attachments in France, the Netherlands and the United States. He teaches at the University of Lausanne. His research interests include migration, citizenship, gender, precarity, sexuality and social theory. After completing a collective study of migrant protests for legal status in France, he has been exploring the politics of mobility impacting people of various class and sexual backgrounds. Together with Olga Sezneva, he has begun a long-haul, unfinished effort to unpack the relationships between virtual goods, commodification, materiality and (im)mobility.
Claudia Egholm Castrone
is a communication designer from Denmark. She likes to express herself visually, exploring different forms of visual communication, documentation and storytelling. She has lived in Denmark, Palestine/Israel and Germany and finds inspiration in strangers and unfamiliar places.
Nathanael Dorent
is a Franco-American architect and designer. In 2003 he founded Kalanke, a development NGO that has carried out architectural, artistic and educational projects in Mali and France. His work on « Transitory Cities », a proposal for a modular and flexible city responding to mass migration was awarded the Andre Arfvidson Architecture Prize from the French Academie des Beaux Arts in 2010. His prizes also include the Interior Design Best of Year (2013) and the Surface Design Award (2017). Nathanael’s work has been widely published and presented in exhibitions internationally (France, UK, USA, Italy, Sweden) including at the Serpentine Gallery Map Marathon 2010 . Besides his architectural practice, he teaches at ENSA Paris-Malaquais and Strate Ecole de Design.
Helen Faller
is an anthropologist and writer who has lived in the US, France, England, Russia, Kazakhstan and now Germany. She produces international cultural events that use the arts to effect visceral changes in people’s worldviews and is completing a book about Silk Road warrior women called Love Feasts: A Memoir of Dumplings and Divorce on the Silk Road.
Petra Fantozzi
is an Italian-Hungarian photographer who works on issues of identity. After studying photography at the International School of Art in Terni, she refined her visual language at the Ostkreuzschule für Fotografie in Berlin. Since 2000, she has been living between Berlin and Italy. Her video performance “Létező falak, Existing Walls“ (2015) was part of „Erfüllbare Träume? Italienerinnen in Berlin“, an exhibition at the Museum Europäischer Kulturen in Berlin (2015-2017). She participated in the Replay (2016) and Fragile (2017) exhibitions organized by Artisti Italiani. She produced the video “Nächster Halt“ (2016) about migrants in Berlin with Eloisa Guarracino. “When the Moon called Me Daughter“ (2017) is her latest photographic work. It initiates a new approach she calls emotional photography.
Anna Livia Friel
is an Italian-Irish architect based in Venice. Her interest in the public sphere led her to projects about the social experience of the city. She has designed several “transitorial spaces” in the form of itinerant pavilions and lighting design projects. She took part in the 14th Venice International Biennale of Architecture with the research group Ground Floor Crisis. Their project focused on the transformation of private and public spaces in historical cities. Long on the move between Venice and Donegal, Anna is presently living in Paris and preparing her next move, to Beirut, where she will pursue doctoral research.
Trangdai Glassey-Tranguyen
is a syndicated journalist, a poet and an anthropologist. She has authored five books of bilingual poetry, and her poems have been translated into thirteen languages. Her research on the Vietnamese diaspora in the US, Europe, Australia, and Asia has appeared in scholarly journals, as well as the international media. Trangdai has won many awards for her writing and research, including a Fulbright grant to Sweden. She holds an M.A. in History from CSU Fullerton and an M.A. in Anthropology from Stanford University.
‘Gluklya’ (Natalia Pershina Yakimanskaya)
is an artist based in St. Petersburg, Russia. She works within different collective projects, including Chto Delat’? and The Factory of Found Clothes, as well as doing her own research, which combines performance, environmental works, situationist actions, video and direct contact. Her main focus is on women and socially vulnerable groups: migrants, the unemployed and war veterans. Gluklya’s work has been exhibited in Russia and abroad. Recent shows include 2012- MUMOK, Vienna, 2011- The Staatliche Kunsthalle, Baden Baden, 2011- Shedhalle, Zurich, 2011- SMART Project Space, Amsterdam, 2011- Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid, 2011- Kunsthalle, Vienna, 2010- ICA, London and 2011 & 2009- The Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven.
Rickerby Hinds
is Professor of Playwriting at the University of California, Riverside. He is the creator and director of the Califest Hip Hop Theater Festival and one of the pioneers of the theatrical genre know as Hip-Hop Theater. Hinds is originally from Honduras. He has twice received the Audrey Skirball-Kenis Award for best play. Rickerby is known for his unique ability to challenge conventional notions of the stage, while remaining respectful of its long history and traditions. His foundational Daze to Come changed the dramatic arts forever when it debuted in 1989. As the first ever full-length play to use the founding elements of hip hop as the primary language of the stage, he introduced the genre of hip hop theater to the world.
Erith Jaffe-Berg
teaches theatre history and performance at University of California, Riverside. Her work studies language and multilingualism in performance. Raised in Israel and Southern California, she later lived in Canada and the UK. She is a member of Son of Semele Ensemble, a Los Angeles-based theatre company. With Mathew McCray she directed the collaborative writing of Sea Seed, a play derived from her work with the MMTW.
Barbara James
has developed a “diary” of quilts sewn of the materials of her homes on four continents. Her “portfolio” is composed of friends who have become family/ wonderful memories / 3 adult children. Valuable items she carries wither include her best friend and husband Stephen James, with whom she performs for the Moving Matters Traveling Workshop.
Megan James
is a Los Angeles-based artist, born and raised in London, England and rural Germany. She has a background in pottery and worked as an archaeological illustrator in Belize and California. Her work deals with the individual and societal relationship with history and the history we are choosing to write at present.
Stephen James
is a poet and scholar of Southeast Asia. Born in the United States, Stephen began his migratory journey at the age of 18 months, spending the next 13 years in Vietnam and completing secondary school in Taiwan. He and his wife Barbara raised three children, living and working on the continents of Asia, North America and Europe.
Nadine de Koenigswarter
is an artist for whom music is an important influence. She has long frequented the milieu of free jazz. From 2003 and 2008, she spent long periods of time in Senegal where she lived among a group of migrant musicians of Guinean origin. Among these economic migrants, who make traditional instruments, time took on different forms from in the West, the rhythms of the days and language and music entered into Nadine’s manner of drawing and led her to develop a technique for producing rhythmic perforations to fashion large, mesmerizing works on paper. Nadine’s work has been displayed throughout Europe and in the US.
Guillaume Lasserre
is an art historian and curator. He trained in France and the USA before participating in the transformation of the Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire and working in the direction of the cultural office of the French Central region. He was founding director of the Pavillon Vendome, a contemporary visual arts and of heritage project in Clichy, France that opened in 2013. He is now in charge of the visual arts unit at the Département des Hauts-de-Seine (Western suburbs of Paris). His latest curated exhibition is Paysage(s), l’étrange familier de Véronique Ellena, on view now and until July 23rd at the Domaine départemental de la Vallée-aux-Loups, Maison de Chateaubriand.
Juliette Levy
is Associate Professor of Latin American history at University of California, Riverside. Her research explores the historical formation of credit markets in Latin America within their legal, social, cultural and ethnic contexts. She has previous professional experience in finance and traditional media, and now uses digital and computational methods in research and teaching. She is building a digital archive of Mexican civil contracts, records and wills at the Rivera Library at University of California, Riverside, which is the basis for a large-scale project in financial intermediation during the Mexican Revolution, and has developed a learning game (http://zombies.digital) that is currently being expanded to include a VR component.
Tabassum “Ruhi” Khan
is a wanderer, story teller and filmmaker who has found inspiration in movement. At first, she followed her engineer father around India and the Middle East and then her own calling, which took her through clearing houses such as the Discovery Channel, National Geographic Channel, and STAR TV from Washington, DC, to New Delhi, to Hong Kong as a producer, director and channel manager. Currently she is an academic based in Southern California, mapping the story of the inevitability of change and the movement engendered by globalization, which sweeps away even those things imagined as inert and unchangeable.
Nicola Mai
is an Italian ethnographer and a filmmaker working as Professor of Sociology and Migration Studies at London Metropolitan University’s Working Lives Research Institute and the Mediterranean Laboratory of Sociology of Aix-Marseille University. His academic writing and films focus on the experiences and perspectives of migrants selling sex and love in the globalized sex industry in order to live their lives. Though experimental ethno-fictions and original research findings, he challenges the humanitarian politics of representation of the nexus between migration and sex work in terms of trafficking, while focusing on the ambivalent complexity of dynamics of exploitation and self-affirmation they implicate.
Inge Mandos is a vocalist who has researched Yiddish music, language and history for many years. She specializes in traditional ballads and songs of Ashkenazim and Sephardic Jews. She discovered unknown Yiddish songs from Eastern Europe which from 1928 to 1941 were performed by contemporary singers and were recorded on wax cylinder phonographs. She now performs together with these recorded voices. She also collaborates with the pianist Klemens Kaatz and the violinist Hans-Christian Jaenicke on the project “WAKS – Yiddish voices”. Their 2016 CD was nominated for „Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik”. She is also an ensemble member of the Yiddish-German cabaret “Schmattes” and the ensemble “Zimt – Sephardic songs”. In 2015, she produced the dance movie “Klasse” (class) together with Hannah Schwadron and Malia Bruker.
Lorenza Manfredi
is a Berlin-based Italian architect interested in the connections between people and the creation of space. Her fascination with in cities led her to leave Milan for Istanbul and then, Berlin; two cities she finds particularly fascinating.Besides her architectural work she is working on a doctorate at the IUAV University of Venice that addresses the relation between art, politics and public space, a topic that she also explores using various practices such as planning, drawing, painting, recording images and sounds and building, as well as more ephemeral ones like walking, initiating small communities and relational/exchange activities.
George Marcus
came to the University of California, Irvine, eight years ago, after many years leading the Department of Anthropology at Rice University, especially through the transdisciplinary period (1980s-mid 1990s) of excitement about new theories and critiques of culture. All along and particularly now, he has been interested in the interfaces—some pursued, some imagined, some barely conceived—between art performance, in its various genres, and its affinities with the pursuit of anthropological research. These have been a key concern of the Center for Ethnography, which he founded when he moved to Irvine in 2005.
Felip Martí-Jufresa
is a philosopher who explores the metaphysics of modernity, revolutionary politics, and diverse conceptions of the artistic and musical avant-garde. He has produced records with his musical group Ivo Naïf and written several books, including Música desconcertada (2009), La possibilité d’une musique moderne. Logique de la modernité et composition musicale (2012), Vigir i badar. Ontologia de la dominació i anarquisme metafísic (2016). He holds degrees from the University of Barcelona and Paris-VIII University. He teaches theory at the Institut Supérieur des Arts de Toulouse.
Beatriz Mejia-Krumbein
was born and raised in Colombia then lived in Germany, Mexico and the US. Her art deals with emigration, displacement, exploitation, violence and abuse, and implores viewers to confront the convoluted inequalities of our modern world. It has been widely exhibited in the US, Europe and South America and is in the collections of several museums, including the Los Angeles County Museum, Museum of Latino-American Art in Long Beach, The Museum of American Art of The Smithsonian Institution and the Museo de Antioquia in Medellin, Colombia.
Noha Mellor
is a native Egyptian, who resided in Denmark before moving to the UK. She is Professor of Media at Bedfordshire University and the author of several books about Arab media, most recently, Arab Journalists in Transnational Media.
Frans Moussault / Muso
has a strong affinity with traditional Zen. His music conjures images; sounds can be dark like a foggy forest or convey the movement of water emerging from the deep bottom of the sea. He plays bass clarinet for Del Silencio, an ensemble that finds its unique approach to sound by accepting harmony and inner silence, while respecting and marveling at the clashes of singular sounds and finding inspiration for music in them.
Lydia Nakashima Degarrod
is both a visual artist and a cultural anthropologist, who creates works that convey extraordinary experiences (shamanism, exile) and address issues of social justice. Her latest work, Geographies of the Imagination, explored the inner images of exile. Lydia has exhibited nationally and internationally. She is on the advisory board of the Asian American Women Artists Association, and is a member of the board of trustees of California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS).
Ioana PĂUN
is a director who trained at Goldsmiths College, London and UNATC Bucharest. Her action-research looks at the possibilities of art democratization and the extension of participative forms into reality. She works on subjects related to the behaviors of turbo-capitalism, employing techniques from theatre, technology and the social sciences to challenge the presumably permanent aspects of reality. Her recent actions confront contemporary dystopias and imagine situations in which the participants end up negotiating attitudes and policies of co-existence. Since 2012, Ioana has been working on a visibility platform for the “affection industry,” together with artists, journalists, nannies and housekeepers from Mexico, the Philippines, Romania and Puerto Rico. Foundations and arts institutions across Europe have supported her work, including Theatre Royal Stratford East, Museum for the Arts of the 21st Century/MAXXI in Rome, Medeea Electronique and The Onassis Cultural Centre in Athens, the Romanian National Cultural Fund Administration and The Schaubühne Theater in Berlin. Her performances have been produced in Palestine, the US, the UK, France, Austria, Romania, Czech Republic, Greece, Germany, Sweden and Italy.
Alice D. Peinado
is an Italian-Venezuelan anthropologist who settled in Paris, France, after traveling the world over. Her research and practice deal with issues related to design theory and practice and the role of anthropologists within design lead projects, as well as explorations of the links between ethnographic research and artistic practices. Alice is a co-founder of the Organe de Concretisation de Recherche, a collective bringing together two artists, a curator and an anthropologist. She was the Chair of the Design Management Department at L’Ecole Parsons à Paris and Director of Education of the Istituto Marangoni Fashion School in Paris. She is currently a freelance consultant in Design and Business Anthropology and a Visiting Professor at Strate College and INSEEC in Paris.
Katarzyna Puzon
is an anthropologist and translator who has worked and lived in Poland, Lebanon, Germany, and the UK. Her scholarly and non-scholarly interests revolve around mobility, performativity as well asvisual and material culture. For the past few years, she has focused on the intersections between heritage, memory and the city, previously in Beirut and more recently in Berlin where she examines the ways in which Islam is constructed through broadly understood heritage developments.
Katarzyna works at the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH) at the Humboldt University in Berlin.
Andrea Puente
is a harpist. A native of Mexico City, she has played orchestral and chamber musician throughout Mexico, Europe and North America. She studied at the National Conservatory of Music of Mexico, and was selected as a Fellow at the Chopin Academy in Warsaw and then for the Nicanor Zabaleta World Masterclass in Spain. She was Principal Harp in the Orquesta Ciudad de Malaga in Spain, then with the Carlos Chavez Symphony Orchestra, the Orquesta del Teatro de Bellas Artes in Mexico City and the Jalisco Philharmonic in Guadalajara, Mexico. A founding member of the harp-flute duo Arpa y Aulos in Los Angeles, Andrea plays with a variety of orchestras in Southern California. She is an advocate and promoter of the legacy of Mexican opera composer Daniel Catan, adjunct faculty at College of the Canyons in California and Artist-in-Residence for Voices for Tolerance at the Los Angeles Opera.
Alejandro Ramirez
was born in Columbia. He studied filmmaking at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Bogota and holds a MFA in Fine Arts from Utrecht Graduate School of Visual Art and Design (MaHKU). His art focuses on the intersection of media, cinema, political discourse, economy and memory. In his most recent work, he researches the role of architecture, ideology and perception as they confront migration and economic processes. He tracks ideological transformations using speculation, science fiction, philosophy and improvisation as meanings to create alternative ways to read reality: Elements are often placed together using storytelling as “glue,” while blurring frontiers between fact and fiction. His work has been shown at Fotologia 6 in Bogota, 1st Tbilisi Triennial (Georgia) and GRID International Photography Festival in Amsterdam. He is based in Amsterdam.
Valentina Sartori
is a painter whose practice is participatory. She grew up on the cultural and physical borders between Italy and Austria and earned degrees in Decoration and Art Pedagogy in Italy and Spain. In 2005 she moved to Berlin to complete an MA Art in Context at the University of Art of Berlin. In 2013, her experience of having two children led her to develop a format of collective painting, “FAMILIENPORTRAET”. For this work she outlines her own and other families, friends and groups of people on walls or large pieces of paper, they fill in the rest. She has carried out the project in many refugee shelters across Berlin. The life-size portraits set up an opportunity to represent and reimagine oneself and a diffuse sense of belonging through a visual medium that requires no language.
Hannah Schwadron
is a dance researcher and performer whose creative and scholarly works address critical links between gender and race. She is currently preparing a book manuscript entitled The Case of the Sexy Jewess: Dance, Gender and Jewish Joke-work in US Pop Culture, which uses historical, ethnographic, and choreographic methods to mine questions of self-display. In the book’s multi-sited analysis of porn, burlesque, stand-up, swan parody, mainstream film and magazine spreads, Hannah makes a case for theory-practice methods that animate dance studies discourse, performance pedagogy and choreographies of the stage and page. She is Assistant Professor at Florida State University.
Priya Srinivasan
is a performance studies scholar and dancer who has lived and performed in India, Australia, the US, China and the Netherlands. Her scholarly and artistic work uses critical feminist performance and ethnography to explore the connections between labor, migration, history and dance. Srinivasan’s book Sweating Saris: Indian Dance as Transnational Labor seeks to understand dance as labor, and dancers not just as aesthetic bodies, but as transnational migrant workers and wage earners who negotiate citizenship and gender. She seeks to bring theory together with practice and continues to work as an experimental dance/theatre choreographer, who uses Indian performance practices to understand the effects of migration, history and power on gendered bodies.
Olga Sezneva
is a sociologist whose work focuses on migration, mobility and cultural encounters. She has written widely on forced migration and resettlement after World War II in Russia and Eastern Europe and is now studying digitization and media piracy. Her artistic collaborations include the production of the film The Wings of Migrants with Natalia ‘Gluklya’ Pershina. Originally from Russia, Olga spent many years in the United States before moving to Holland, where she is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam. She co-directs the University of Amsterdam’s Institute for Migration and Ethnic Studies and is Visiting Professor at the European University at St. Petersburg.
Aurélie Slonina
is a French artist who has lived and worked in Berlin and Los Angeles. She examines the ambivalent relationships that humans have with their environments in installations that explore the tension between mastery and control of nature. Her work has been exhibited in Los Angeles by Isabelle Le Normand, in Berlin with the support of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, at the Centre d’Art Contemporain of Belgian Luxembourg, at the Biennale d’art contemporain d’Anglet and at the Panorama Exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris.
Gareth Stanton
is an anthropologist and media academic who has worked in Morocco, Gibraltar and Bangladesh. Taking inspiration from Susan Ossman’s innovative treatment of the serial migrant, he is re-evaluating a trip he took around Ghana with his aging father, who was revisiting the country in 2011 for the first time in fifty years.
Lisa Strehmann
creates spaces and places where people from different backgrounds get together and enjoy the creativeness and peacefulness of life- including in districts which are not “attractive” from the perspective of contemporary aesthetic criteria and which are under-served when it comes to the arts. She enjoys boundary crossings, be they political or artistic, cultural or social. Her wanderlust led her to leave her native Berlin for France, where she settled for a decade, except for a year-long sojourn in Istanbul. She earned an MA in Urban and Territorial Strategies from Sciences Po Paris and now works as a coordinator of the Office for Refugees of the protestant Dinary Berlin North East.
Dennis W. Thompson II
is a musician and composer with the experience of moving and working in a number of different countries. He leads two choirs in Amsterdam, Sannaskoor and DoReMimi, both of which focus on the repertoire of world music. Based in Amsterdam-East, Het Sannaskoor choir performs songs and gospels from South Africa, Brazil, the USA, Indonesia, and of course from the Antilles and Suriname where most members come from. DoReMimi, with its base in Amsterdam-West, focuses on Eastern and Western European musical heritage. Bringing both choirs together, Dennis hopes to provide a unique blend of work music styles reflective of the current multicultural fabric of the city of Amsterdam.
Uthra Vijay
is an accomplished Classical Indian Music Vocalist who has trained in the Carnatic music form since the age of 5. She is equally comfortable working in the classical realm or experimenting with non-classical forms of music. Her compositional work includes setting classical and contemporary music for vocalists and dancers and creating soundscapes for experimental artists. Her primary goal is to open minds and hearts through music. In 2003 she founded the Keerthana School of Music in Melbourne pf which she is currently artistic director. She has also held many offices as a leader in Indian Migrant Communities of Melbourne. Her work on migrations projects incudes collaborations with musicians and choreographers in Australia, the UK, Germany and the Netherlands.
Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese
is a writer, translator and scholar who moves between English, Polish and Danish. Her plurilingual texts investigate translanguaging as a means of communicative habitation, anchoring home languages in new languages, revealing their hidden, etymological, affinities. She used psychogeography and flânerie to co-write Metropoetica. Poetry and Urban Space: Women Writing Cities (2013), where English spans Polish, Latvian, Slovenian, Icelandic and Finnish. Her English translations of contemporary Polish poetry have appeared in various anthologies, journals, and on the London Underground. Nothing More (2013) is her selection from Krystyna Miłobędzka and Salt Monody (2006) presents Marzanna Kielar. She examined the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, a serial migrant in Cognitive Poetic Readings in Elizabeth Bishop: Portrait of a Mind Thinking (2010). Elżbieta works at the Centre for Internationalisation and Parallel Language Use at the University of Copenhagen.
Fariba Zarinebaf
is writing a childhood memoir about growing up in pre-revolutionary Iran. She is a historian whose research focuses on the history of gender and law in the Middle East, urban and social history, pluralism and cosmopolitanism in Eastern Mediterranean cities. Her books include Crime and Punishment in Istanbul, 1700-1800 (University of California Press, 2010), and Women on the Margins: Gender, Charity and Justice in the Early Modern Middle East (Isis Press, 2014) and Galata Encounters: Cosmopolitanism in an Ottoman Port, 1750-1850 (in press).
Natalie Zervou
is a performer and dance scholar interested in the intersections between embodied practices and national identity construction. Currently, Natalie is a lecturer in the Dance Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research focuses on dance practices during the recent sociopolitical and financial crises in Greece and explores the ways that performances engage with the current European refugee crisis and respond to the shifting social landscape. Her choreographic work revolves around questions of belonging and migration and has been presented in Athens (Greece), Surrey (UK), Riverside (US), and Amsterdam (Netherlands).