JESSE DREW, Acting Director of Technocultural Studies
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.

FRAN DYSON, Associate Professor of Technocultural Studies
Frances Dyson (Ph.D), is an Associate Professor in Technocultural Studies, with a research and artistic focus on sound, new media and cyberculture in contemporary theory and practice.  For the past two years Dyson has been a researcher in residence at the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science and Technology, Montreal where her web based project  “And then it was Now” has recently been published (http://www.fondation-langlois.org/courriel/newsletter.html) Recent essays have appeared in Frakcija, special issue on Rhetoric, (Zagreb, 2006); Convergence: The Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, special issue on “Hybrid identities in Digital Media”, Winter, 2005 (London: Sage),  and the Biennale of Sydney Catalogue, Art Gallery of NSW, Australia, 2004 (also published on www.catherinerichards.ca/html/essays.htm) Book chapters have appeared in Catherine Richards Excitable Tissues (Ottawa Art Gallery) 2004; Uncertain Ground, (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales) 2000,  The Virtual Dimension: Architecture, Representation, and Crash Culture, (New York: Princeton Architectural Press) 1998, Immersed in Technology (Massachusetts: MIT Press) 1996; and Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio and the Avant-Garde, (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1992/94/2002).
For over a decade Dyson has also been a regular contributor to Australia’s premier audio arts program, The Listening Room (Australian Broadcasting Corporation), and her audio artwork can be heard on Australian Broadcasting Corporation (www.abc.net.au/classic) and Air America Radio archives  (www.somewhere.org/NAR/catalog/cataloglists/letters/artists_d-h.htm#dyson). Currently, Dyson is a member of the Technoscience, Culture and the Arts, and the Technovisual Cultures Research Interest Groups at UC Davis, and is completing a book on sound and new media.

DOUGLAS KAHN, Professor of Technocultural Studies
Douglas Kahn is the founding director of the Program in Technocultural Studies. He writes on the history and theory of sound in the arts, the arts and technology, and electromagnetism and the arts, from the late-19th Century to the present day. Books include Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (MIT Press, 1999) and Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio and the Avant- garde (MIT Press, 1992), which he co-edited, and he is an editor of the journal Senses and Society (Berg Publishers), and of Leonardo Music Journal. He is currently writing a book with the working title Sound No Sound: The Arts of the Electromagnetic Spectrum under a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship. He is affiliated with the Art History Program and Department of Music. Before coming to UC-Davis, he taught at in the Department of Media Arts and Production at University Technology, Sydney, in Australia. Please visit Dr. Kahn's website at http://www.douglaskahn.com/

ROSE MARY MILLER, Assistant Director for TCS
Rose Mary Miller has worked for the campus for 19 1/2 years and is currently employed as the Management Services Officer III for the Department of Art and Art History and Assistant Director for the Program in Technocultural Studies beginning in July 2000 to present. She serves as the Administrative Manager for the  complex group of departments and programs directly supervising technical and administrative staff. From April 1990 through July 2000, Rose Mary was the Assistant Director for Funds Management Unit in the UCD Financial Aid Office, where she was responsible for the development and monitoring of federal, state, and university funds for the campus. In addition, she held other administrative manager positions within the campus in the Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources, North Central Region and the Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital.  Prior to coming to the campus, she worked as a Corporate Officer for a Sacramento-based Savings and Loan and held various managerial positions at California State University, Turlock and California State University, Chico. Rose Mary obtained her Bachelor of Arts in Business Education/Administration with an emphasis in Personnel/Management and has taken several various courses specializing in computers within the business environment.

 

BOB OSTERTAG, Associate Professor of Technocultural Studies
Composer, performer, instrument builder, journalist, activist, historian, kayak instructor -- Bob Ostertag's work cannot easily be summarized or pigeon-holed. As a composer, he has released 21 CDs of music, 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.

JULIE WYMAN , Assistant Professor of Technocultural StudiesJulie 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.

GLENDA DREW , Assistant Professor of Visual Communication in Design , has exhibited screen-based designs that integrate text, image and sound throughout the United States. She investigates how information can be delivered creatively to stimulate a new way of engaging with ideas. She is interested in connecting and representing cultural and marginalized voices in visually accessible and appealing ways. She has concentrated her work in the area of media activism and has also worked as a professional web designer for over ten years. She holds a master's degree from San Francisco State University in Interdisciplinary Arts and Education.

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. He teaches classes in Writing in Education, American Literature, 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. In 2006 Andy was named “Educator of the Year” by the Associated Students of UC Davis.

MICHAEL NEFF is a computer scientist with interests in the arts, culture and the environment. His research focuses on tools for character animation and understanding movement. He is particularly interested in expressive aspects of motion, applying lessons from the performing arts to the creation of computational tools and the use of physical simulation to improve 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 and technical communities on campus. Before arriving at Davis, he taught in Kenya and was a post-doctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institut fuer Informatiks in Germany. He holds M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Toronto, a B.Engineering and Society from McMaster University and received the 2005 Alain Fournier Prize.

CAROLYN DE LA PENA, Assistant Prof. of American Studies
Carolyn Thomas de la Pena teaches courses on material culture, technology, foodways, and consumer culture. Her first book, The Body Electric: How Strange Machines Crafted the Modern American,is due out from NYU Press in April 2003. Her current projects include articles on Prada's recent local/global architectural design and 1904 radium experiments to lighten African-American skin, as well as a book project underway on the turn-of-the-century health business in Los Angeles.

 

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.