Geoffrey Baker is a Reader in the music department at Royal Holloway, University of London. He specializes in music in Latin America. His book Imposing Harmony: Music and Society in Colonial Cuzco (Duke University Press, 2008) won the American Musicological Society’s Robert Stevenson Award in 2010.

Associate Professor Brydie-Leigh Bartleet is Director of the Queensland Conservatorium Research Centre Griffith University, Australia. She is the Co-Chair of the International Society for Music Education’s Community Music Activities Commission, co-founder of the Asia Pacific Community Music Network, and serves on the Board of Australia’s peak music advocacy body, Music Australia. Bartleet is co-editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Community Music (with Lee Higgins).

Wayne Bowman’s primary research interests involve philosophy of music and the philosophical exploration of issues in music education. He is particularly concerned with music’s sociopolitical power, music and social justice and ethically informed understandings of musical practice. Dr. Bowman’s publications include Philosophical Perspectives on Music (Oxford, 1998), the Oxford Handbook of Philosophy in Music Education (Oxford, 2012), numerous book chapters, and articles in prominent scholarly journals.

Mary Schmidt Campbell is President of Spelman College, and dean emerita at NYU having served for over two decades as dean of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Public appointments include her service as Commissioner of Cultural Affairs for the City of New York, Chair of the New York State Council on the Arts, and, appointed by President Obama, Vice-Chair of the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities. Currently, Dr. Campbell is completing a biography of the collage artist, Romare Bearden, for Oxford University Press.

Gavin Carfoot is a Lecturer in Music and Sound at the Queensland University of Technology, Australia where he is currently postgraduate coordinator for music. As a musician, songwriter, and producer, Gavin has worked on a range of projects from touring with swing bands, writing and producing dessert reggae groups, and collaborating with pop artists from television shows such as Australian Idol and X Factor. His collaborative work in arts-based service learning won a Griffith Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2012, and his research has been published in forums such as Leonardo Music Journal, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, International Education Journal and the forthcoming Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Music Education, to name a few.

Rodney Diverlus is a Haiti-born, Florida-raised, and Toronto-based dancer, choreographer, and community organizer. Currently, Rodney is working with Decidedly Jazz Danceworks in Calgary, Alberta, Canada’s preeminent Jazz Dance Company. As an independent artist, Rodney has performed in and created works for a variety of companies and festivals, including the New Voices Festival, Annual Alberta Dance Festival, Cadence Ballet Company, Chimera Project’s Fresh Blood Festival, Kashe Dance, ReActive Dance Theatre, Obsidian Theatre, and Arise at Buddies and Bad Times Theatre.

Laura Dolp (lauradolp.com) examines the historical agency of music as a site of human transformation, including music and spirituality, the interrelation of music and sociopolitical spaces, storytelling, mapping and musical practices, and the poetics of the natural world. She is editor of a reception study of Arvo Pärt (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming) and co-contributor to The Cambridge Companion to Arvo Pärt (Cambridge University Press, 2012). Her articles have appeared in 19th-Century Music and the Journal of Musicological Research. Currently she is investigating the historical relationship between cartography and the musical score in a work entitled Maps and Music: Stories of the Cartographic Score. She holds a PhD in Historical Musicology from Columbia University.

David J. Elliott joined NYU in 2002 after 28 years as Professor and Chair of Music Education at the University of Toronto, Canada. Elliott is the author of Music Matters: A New Philosophy of Music Education (Oxford, 1995), co-author of Music Matters: A Philosophy of Music Education (Oxford, 2015), and Editor of Praxial Music Education: Reflections and Dialogues (Oxford, 2005/2009). As an award-winning composer and arranger and a professional jazz trombonist, Elliott has published many jazz choral and instrumental works with Boosey & Hawkes.

Born in Shiraz, Aria Fani holds a degree in comparative literature from San Diego State University. Currently, he is pursuing a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His essays and literary translations appear regularly in Peyk, Persian Cultural Center’s bilingual publication, and have been featured in PBS Tehran Bureau, Iran Nameh, Consequence, Reorient, Ajam Media Collective, and Jadaliyya.

Eveljn Ferraro investigates Italian national identity within transnational scenarios through the lenses of migration from and to Italy, the connections between literature and other media, liminal spaces, and postcolonial studies. Currently she is writing about the role of intermediality in the testimonial literary work of Italian Jewish author Ebe Cagli Seidenberg. She is a Book Review Editor for Altreitalie, an International Journal of Studies on Italian Migrations in the World. She is Adjunct Lecturer of Italian Studies at Santa Clara University, California.

Born in Southern Spain, Coco Guzman/Coco Riot is a visual artist currently living in Toronto, Canada. Coco is the artist behind the internationally distributed project Genderpoo, an on-going installation work questioning the notion of normalcy through washroom-sign-like drawings and community workshops. Coco is also the author of Llueven Queers, the first, Spanish graphic novel on queer life.

Naomi Jackson is an Associate Professor in the School of Film, Dance and Theatre at the Herberger Institute of Design and the Arts at Arizona State University. Her articles appear in such publications as Dance Research Journal, Dance Chronicle, Contact Quarterly and Dance Research. Her books include, Converging Movements: Modern Dance and Jewish Culture at the 92nd Street Y, Right to Dance/Dancing for Rights, and Dignity in Motion; Dance, Human Rights and Social Justice (edited with Toni Shapiro-Phim). Her current research is on dance and ethics.

Sandra Jeppesen is an activist-scholar who participates in social movements for radical change through direct action, grassroots organizations, and social justice research. Currently Associate Professor at Lakehead University Orillia in the department of Interdisciplinary Studies, she is Program Coordinator of the Media Studies program. She co-founded the Media Action Research Group (MARG, mediaactionresearch.org), a collective researching with autonomous media activists who create queer, feminist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and anti-colonial media.

Eric Kluitenberg teaches cultural and media theory at the Art Science Interfaculty in The Hague, and he is the editor in chief of the Tactical Media Files, an online documentation platform for Tactical Media. Kluitenberg’s publications include: The Book of Imaginary Media (2006), Delusive Spaces (2008), Open, Journal for Art and the Public Domain: “Hybrid Space” (2006) / “(Im)Mobility” (2011), Legacies of Tactical Media (2011), and Techno Ecologies (2012). He is co-editing an extensive anthology on Tactical Media, together with David Garcia, which will be published by MIT Press (2016).

Anna Kruzynski, Associate Professor at the School of Community and Public Affairs at Concordia University, seeks to conjugate activism and intellectual work. Although she has been active in mainstream community organizations and social movements, her heart lies with the more radical fringes of the global justice movement. Her research activity, using participatory action research methodologies, aims to help activists document and reflect on their activism.

Liz Lerman is a choreographer, performer, writer, educator and speaker, and the recipient of numerous honors, including a 2002 MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellowship and a 2011 United States Artists Ford Fellowship in Dance. A key aspect of her artistry is opening her process to various publics from shipbuilders to physicists, construction workers to ballerinas, resulting in both research and outcomes that are participatory, relevant, urgent, and usable by others. Her collection of essays, Hiking the Horizontal: Field Notes from a Choreographer, was published in 2011 by Wesleyan University Press and released in paperback in 2014.

Tyson E. Lewis is an Associate Professor of Art Education at the University of North Texas. His research focuses on educational logics that interrupt, suspend, and render inoperative contemporary constructs of learning, life-long learning, and the learning society. He is also author of the book The Aesthetics of Education: Theatre, Curiosity, and Politics in the Work of Jacques Rancière and Paulo Freire (London: Continuum, 2012), and is co-editor of Art’s Teachings, Teaching’s Arts: Philosophical, Critical, and Educational Musings (New York: Springer, forthcoming).

David Montgomery is the director of the Program in Educational Theatre in the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development at New York University (NYU). He is a specialist in drama education, theatre for young audiences, directing, new play development, arts based research, teacher training, and drama across the curriculum. In 2012 he published a book co-written with Dr. Robert Landy, director of the Drama Therapy at NYU, from Palgrave Macmillan entitled, Theatre for Change: Education, Social Action, Therapy.

Diane Mullin is Senior Curator at the Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota. Her curatorial work focuses on modern and contemporary art. She has curated numerous exhibitions including SAD: Illuminating a Northern View of Darkness (2007), Paul Shambroom: Picturing Power (2008), Common Sense: Art and the Quotidian (2010), and Local Time (2015). She is a member of the graduate faculty at the University of Minnesota and is adjunct professor in the MCAD MFA program.

Kyle “Guante” Tran Myhre is a hip-hop artist, two-time National Poetry Slam champion, activist, educator, and writer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He and/or his work have appeared on Upworthy, MSNBC, Racialicious, Feministing, MPR, Everyday Feminism, and the Progressive, and he has performed everywhere from the United Nations to the Soundset hip-hop festival to hundreds of colleges, clubs, and theaters across the country. Unapologetically social justice minded, he has shared stages with artists like Talib Kweli, Saul Williams, Brother Ali, Dead Prez, Sage Francis, Andrea Gibson, and many more. Guante also serves as a teaching artist on the rosters of COMPAS and TruArtSpeaks (where he also serves as Communication Director), engaging in writing and performance residencies with youth, as well as regularly facilitating workshops and classes on a range of social justice issues. He also writes regularly at http://www.guante.info, or follow him on Twitter at @elguante.

Yaara Ozery is a film scholar and PhD student at the Steve Tisch School of Film and Television at Tel Aviv University, Israel. She teaches film theory and Israeli cinema at Tel Aviv University and Sapir College. Her master’s thesis focuses on the ethics and aesthetics of reenactment in recent Israeli documentary cinema. She is currently investigating the politics and aesthetics of current Israeli women’s cinema.

Jennifer Parker  is the Chair of the Art Department and Founding Director of UCSC OpenLab Collaborative Research Center. Her research facilitates innovative, creative and collaborative research with art, community, design, technology, and science. Parker creates expandable multi-media art platforms to cultivate sites for sharing, questioning, and exploring interdisciplinary frameworks and experiences using the creative diversity of computational media, robotics and traditional visual art practices. Site-specific and environmental data have been some of the driving forces behind the conceptual framework of the platforms. These consist of real time air and water data collected from EPA’s pollution databases, sound files from the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, data parsed from UCLA’s research in upper atmosphere and space physics with on-site data from sensors. This research relates directly to the proposed MFA program goals in that the work is placed in spheres of social engagement, it’s interactive, collaborative and environmentally engaged. Parker’s work has been exhibited, performed and presented Silicon Valley and the Bay Area in places such as the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SF Camerawork, The LAB, Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, Bay Area Science Festival @ AT & T Park, SFMOMA, Southern Exposure, California Academy of Science, ZER01, Biennial, Tech Museum; Montalvo Art Center, Bay Area Maker Fair, and Kala Art Institute. Nationally Parker has exhibited at ISEA12 in Albuquerque, New Mexico; Kantor Gallery in Los Angeles, CA; CAF in Santa Barbara, CA;  the Bessie Schöenberg Theater in New York; the Tacoma Art Museum in Washington. Internationally, Parker has shown at the de Baile in Amsterdam, Holland; The War Memorial Museum in Seoul, Korea; the World Trade Center in Osaka, Japan; the Iskra History Museum in Kazanlak, Bulgaria; Califia Galerie and Školská 28 Galerie in the Czech Republic; Sala de exposiciones Parque García Sanabria Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Spain; and ArtSci Museum in Singapore. She is the recipient of several grants, awards, and fellowships including Artworks NEA, Art Matters, the New Forms Regional Grant administered by the Inter-Arts Program of the NEA, Epsilon/Alliance Environmental Art and Education, American Psychoanalytic Foundation Award, NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates, The New Jersey State Council of the Arts, and the Kate Neal Kinely Memorial Fellowship Award.

Researcher and performance artist, Sibylle Peters, studied literature, cultural studies, and philosophy, and worked at the universities of Hamburg, Munich, Berlin (FU), Bale, Wales, and Gießen. She is currently co-director of the PhD Program Performing Citizenship in Hamburg. Peters is founder and director of the Forschungstheater/Theatre of Research situated at the FUNDUS THEATER Hamburg, a theatre, where children, artists, and scientists collaborate as researchers.

Nicola Shaughnessy is Professor of Performance and Founder and Director of the Centre for Cognition, Kinesthetics and Performance at the University of Kent. Her most recent publications include Applying Performance: Live Art, Socially Engaged Theatre, and Affective Practice (Palgrave, 2012) and the edited collection Affective Performance and Cognitive Science: Body, Brain, and Being (Methuen, 2013), and is series editor for Methuen’s Performance and Science volumes for which she is contributing a new collection: Performing Psychologies: Imagination, Creativity, and Dramas of the Mind.

Martin Scherzinger is a composer and associate professor of Media Studies at New York University. He works on sound, music, media and politics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with a particular focus on music of Europe, Africa, and America, as well as global biographies of sound and other ephemera circulating in geographically-remote regions.

A Czech/Nepali media-maker, dancer, and scholar, Sangita Shresthova is the Director of Henry Jenkins’ Media, Activism & Participatory Politics (MAPP) project based at the University of Southern California. Her work focuses on the intersection between popular culture, performance, new media, politics, and globalization. She is a co-author of Is It All About Hips?) was published by SAGE Publications in 2011.

Marissa Silverman is Associate Professor at the John J. Cali School of Music, Montclair State University, NJ. A Fulbright Scholar, Dr. Silverman has published invited chapters in recent Oxford University Research Handbooks, as well as journal articles in the International Journal of Music Education, the British Journal of Music Education, Research Studies in Music Education, Music Education Research, the International Journal of Community Music, Visions of Research in Music Education, and The New York Times. Silverman is also co-author of the 2nd edition of Music Matters: A Philosophy of Music Education (Oxford University Press), and co-editor of Community Music Today (Rowman & Littlefield).

Tom Turino was Professor of musicology and anthropology from 1987 to 2012 at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana (Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin in 1987). He published Moving Away From Silence: the Music of the Peruvian Altiplano and the Experience of Urban Migration (University of Chicago Press, 1993) and Nationalists, Cosmopolitans, and Popular Music in Zimbabwe (Chicago, 2000) for which he received the Alan Merriam Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology. In 2008 he published Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation (University of Chicago) and Music in the Andes: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture (Oxford University Press)..

Ana Vujanovic is a freelance cultural worker-researcher, writer, lecturer, dramaturge, and curator-in the fields of contemporary performing arts and culture. She holds a PhD in Theatre Studies from the Faculty of Dramatic Arts, Belgrade. She is a cofounder and a member of the editorial collective of TkH (Walking Theory), the Belgrade-based theoretical-artistic platform, and chief editor of TkH Journal for Performing Arts Theory . Her particular commitment has been to empower the independent scenes in Belgrade and former Yugoslavia (Druga scena and Clubture regija). She has lectured and given workshops at various universities and independent educational programs throughout Europe (Belgrade, Ljubljana, Amsterdam, Madrid, Giessen, Berlin, Bilbao, etc.) and has been an international visiting professor at the Performance Studies Department of the University Hamburg (2012-2015). She engages in artworks in the fields of performance, theater, dance, and video/film, as dramaturge, coauthor, and artistic collaborator. She publishes regularly in journals and collections (TkH, Maska, Frakcija, Teatron, Performance Research, TDR, etc.) and is the author of four books: Destroying Performance Signifiers, An Introduction to Performance Studies with A. Jovicevic, Doxicid, and Public Sphere by Performance with B. Cvejic. In recent years her research interest has been focused on the intersections between performance and politics in neoliberal capitalist societies, and she is currently researching the performance of the self in the 21st century.

David Wiles is Professor of Drama at the University of Exeter. His historical research has focused on Elizabethan theatre (including Shakespeare’s Clown, 1987), and on classical Greek theatre, where he has taken a special interest in questions of mask and performance space. He is author of Greek Theatre Performance (2000), Theatre and Citizenship: The History of a Practice (2011), and editor of the Cambridge Companion to Theatre History (2013).

Raz Yosef is Associate Professor and chair of the cinema studies B.A. program at the Film and Television Department, Tel Aviv University, Israel. He is the author of Beyond Flesh: Queer Masculinities and Nationalism in Israeli Cinema (Rutgers University Press, 2004), The Politics of Loss and Trauma in Contemporary Israeli Cinema (Routledge, 2011), and the co-editor of Just Images: Ethics and the Cinematic (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011) and Deeper than Oblivion: Trauma and Memory in Israeli Cinema (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013).