JESSE DREW (Ph.D), Associate Professor
Jesse Drew’s work as a media artist and writer seeks to challenge
the complacent relationship between the public and new technologies.
His media work has been exhibited widely at such venues as the San
Francisco Film Arts Festival, the ZKM in Germany, the World Wide
Video Festival (Amsterdam), Incident (Brussels), Taos Talking Pictures,
Dallas Film and Video Festival, the Mill Valley Film and Video Festival,
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the American Indian Film and Video
Festival, as well as international broadcast and cablecast outlets.
His writings have appeared in numerous publications and journals
as well as several anthologies, such as Resisting the Virtual Life
(City Lights Press) and Reclaiming San Francisco: History, Politics,
Culture (City Lights Press). Before coming to UC Davis he headed
the Center for Digital Media and was Associate Dean at the San Francisco
Art Institute. He completed his doctoral work at the University
of Texas at Austin in Radio-Television-Film. You can see his website at redrocketmedia.com/jesse.
ANDY JONES , Lecturer in the University Writing Program. For many years Andy coordinated the Computer-Aided Instruction Program for the Writing Program and the English Department, and the Faculty Mentoring Faculty Program for the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning. He teaches classes in Writing in Education, American Literature, Literary Theory, and Poetry; and in the past has taught The Beat Generation in Poetry and Film, Creativity and Technology, Film Theory and Criticism, and The Literature of Science Fiction. Andy’s 2006 book of poetry, Split Stock (co-authored with BRAD HENDERSON), features artwork from Sacramento Valley artists. An expert on instructional technology, Andy has also hosted the KDVS radio show “Dr. Andy’s Poetry and Technology Hour” since 2000, and the Poetry Night Reading Series since 2007. In 2006 Andy was named “Educator of the Year” by the Associated Students of UC Davis.
LYNN
HERSHMAN LEESON, Professor Emeritus
of Technocultural Studies
In 1999, the ZKM medamuseum cited Lynn Hershman Leeson as the "most
influential woman working in new media". She has worked in
photography, video, installation, interactive and net based works.
Her 53 videotapes and 7 interactive installations have garnered
many international awards. She has had over 200 exhibitions, completed
53 videotapes and 8 interactive installations. Two of her films
star Tilda Swinton, Conceiving Ada and Teknolust—which received
the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Award, and was released in North
Amereican in May. Her work is included in The Hess Collection, The
Museum of Modern Art, The ZKM Mediammuseum and others. A retrospective
and monograph is being planned for 2004. You can see her websites
at lynnhershman.com and agentruby.com.
MICHAEL NEFF , Professor of Technocultural Studies and Computer Science, is a computer scientist with interests in the arts, culture andthe environment. His research focuses on tools for character animation and understanding movement. He is particularly interested in expressiveaspects of motion, applying lessons from the performing arts to thecreation of computational tools and the use of physical simulation toimprove the quality of animations. He is also interested in gesture,non-verbal communication and biomechanics. He is cross-appointed to Computer Science and seeks to increase communication between the arts andtechnical communities on campus. Before arriving at Davis, he taught in Kenya and was a post-doctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute forInformatics in Germany. He received the 2005 Alain Fournier Prize and anNSF CAREER Award in 2009. Find more information on Assistant Professor Neff at http://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~neff/
BOB
OSTERTAG, Professor
of Technocultural Studies
Composer, performer, instrument builder, journalist, activist, historian, kayak instructor -- Bob Ostertag's work cannot easily be summarized or pigeon-holed. He has published 21 CDs of music, 2 films, and 3 books, and appeared at music, film, and multimedia festivals around the globe. As a journalist, his writings on contemporary politics have been published in many languages. Electronic instruments of his own design are at the cutting edge of both music and video performance technology. Born in Albuquerque in 1957, he dropped out of the Oberlin Conservatory after two years, and settled in New York City in 1978 and immersed himself in the "downtown" music scene of the period. He left music in 1980/81 to work in Central America, and became an expert on the region, with writings published in Asia, Africa, Latin America, Europe, and the US. In 1988 he moved to San Francisco and resumed his musical activity. His radically diverse collaborators have included the Kronos Quartet, avant garders John Zorn and Fred Frith, heavy metal star Mike Patton, jazz great Anthony Braxton, dyke punk rocker Lynn Breedlove, drag diva Justin Bond, film maker Pierre Hébert, and others. He is rumored to have connections to the shadowy media guerrilla group The Yes Men.
KRISS RAVETTO-BIAGIOLI, Associate Professor of Technocultural Studies is film and media scholar whose work focuses on the problem of representing and theorizing the violence produced by nation building, ethnocentrism, and sexism in a manner that does not play into a vicious cycle where moralism, media images, and language produce their own forms of violence. This research has resulted in The Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics, (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2001), ISBN: 13: 978-0-8166-3743-0, and her current book project, „Mythopoetic Cinema on the Margins of Europe. She has published articles on film, performance, installation art, and new media in Camera Obscura, Film Quarterly, Third Text, PAJ, Representations, Screen, Third Text and numerous collected volumes. Her interest in the "digital uncanny" and the culture of surveillance has inspired "Recoded" - the large international conference on the politics and landscapes of new media (http://www.abdn.ac.uk/modernthought/recoded/ and "Figures of the Visceral"(http://www.ed.ac.uk/schools-departments/film-performance-media-arts/news-and-events/the-visceral/figures-of-the-visceral).
JULIE WYMAN , Associate Professor of Technocultural Studies Julie Wyman is a filmmaker, performer, and scholar whose work investigates the body: locating, exploring, and inventing various situations in which the codes, conditions, and visceral experiences of physicality defy expectation. Her work has been screened internationally in festivals including the Mill Valley Film Festival, Taos Talking Pictures, South by Southwest, Women in the Director’s Chair, Mix (Sao Paolo), Out-in-Africa, (Cape Town), Queer Screen (Sydney), and venues such as the Roxie, Red Vic, Yerba Buena and Victoria Theaters in San Francisco, the National Film Theater in London, MoMA (New York), the Wadsworth Atheneum (Hartford, CT), the La Jolla MOCA, and the Museum of Fine Art in Boston. Her first full-length documentary, A Boy Named Sue, won a Sappho award for Best Documentary 2000 and, after national broadcast on Showtime in 2003-4, was nominated for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation’s Best Documentary Media Award. Wyman holds an MFA from UC San Diego’s Visual Arts Program. She taught at Queens College (CUNY) and the University of Hartford before arriving at UC Davis.
Please see Professor Wyman's website at http://www.iamjuliewyman.net/
Julie Wyman's is filming Cheryl Haworth at the Beijing Olympics. Julie's blog documenting Ms. Hawworth is at http://thepullofgravity.blogspot.com/
