2018-19 Working Group Members
John Barton
Architectural Design, Stanford University
John Barton is the Director of Stanford's Architectural Design Program and the principal architect at Barton Architect. He received his BA and M. Arch degrees from U.C. Berkeley and worked at a number of Bay Area firms before founding Barton Architect in 1990. He has taught design and architecture at U.C. Berkeley, Cañada College, and San Jose State.
Tom Beischer
Architectural Design, Stanford University
Tom Beischer currently teaches architectural history and theory at Stanford and the California College of the Arts. He received a BA in art history from Stanford, an MA in art history from Williams College, and a PhD in history, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture from MIT. His scholarship has ranged from articles on 19th-century architecture to contemporary Asian art.
Abby Chen
Asian Art Museum of San Francisco – Chong-Moon Lee Center for Asian Art and Culture
Abby Chen is a curator, writer, lecturer, producer and art administrator. She is currently the Head of the Contemporary Art Department and Senior Associate Curator at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco – Chong-Moon Lee Center for Asian Art and Culture. Previously, she was the Curator and Deputy Director at the Chinese Culture Foundation of San Francisco. At CCF, she initiated the Xian Rui Annual Series in 2008, the first of its kind in the country supporting mid-career Chinese artists living in the US. Her other curatorial projects include Present Tense Biennial , Daily Lives at Yerba Buena Center For the Arts, and Contemporary Photography at Museum of Chinese in America in New York. In 2010, she organized Gender Identity Symposium, a multi-city forum in Guangzhou, Beijing and Shanghai, followed by the 2011 exhibition WOMEN on feminism, gender equality and social engagement in China. Her writings focus on cultural hybridity, marginalization and 1.5 generation. She is a contributing writer for Yishu, Art China, and East Morning Daily. She graduated with MA in Visual and Critical Studies at California College of Arts.
Janet Delaney
Independent Visual Artist
Janet Delaney is a fine art photographer based in Berkeley, California. Janet foruses her attention on urban issues. She is currently documenting the rapid transformation of the SoMa district of San Francisco, an area that was the focus of her earlier project, South of Market 1978-1986. She has recently released Public Matters, MACK, 2018, a book of photographs that celebrate parade and protest along side everyday life in 1980s San Francisco. Delaney has received three National Endowment for the Arts Grants and the Phelan Award. Her photographs are in collections such as the San Francisco Museum of Art, the de Young Museum, and the Pilara Foundation among others. Her work has been shown both nationally and internationally. In 2013 she published South of Market with Mack of London. This series was exhibited in a one-person show at the de Young Museum in San Frnacisco in 2019. Delaney taught at the University of California, Berkeley for over 12 years and has taught in the undergraduate and graduate programs at the San Francisco Art Institute as well as other Bay Area institutions. Her work is represented by Euqinom Gallery in San Francisco.
Lindsey Dillon
Sociology, UC Santa Cruz
Lindsey Dillon is a geographer with research interests in urban environments and social justice. Her research and writing is deeply engaged with political ecology, feminist geography, critical race theory, and science and technology studies. Dillon is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Santa Cruz. She is also affiliated with the Community Studies Program, the Environmental Studies Department, and the Science and Justice Research Center. Dillon co-founded and served on the steering committee of the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative.
Gordon Douglas
Urban and Regional Planning, San José State University
Gordon Douglas is the Director of the Institute of Metropolitan Studies and an Assistant Professor of Urban & Regional Planning at San José State University. Gordon Douglas is a multidisciplinary urbanist whose work sits at the intersection of urban political-economy, community studies, and cultures of planning and design. Through his research, teaching, and community work, Gordon aims to bring social and cultural analysis to the study of urban planning and development. Much of his research concerns questions of local identity, peoples' relationships to their physical surroundings, and social and spatial inequality in the city. He is currently finishing a book about people who create unauthorized but functional, civic-minded "do-it-yourself urban design" interventions in their communities and what these informal improvement efforts tell us about planning, participation, and privilege in the contemporary city.
Ala Ebtekar
Art & Art History and Institute for Diversity in the Arts, Stanford University
Shelley Fisher Fishkin
English and American Studies, Stanford University
Shelley Fisher Fishkin is the Joseph S. Atha Professor of Humanities and Professor of English at Stanford. She is Director of Stanford's American Studies Program and is also Co-Director of the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project at Stanford. She is the author, editor, or co-editor of forty-six books, and has published over one hundred fifty articles, essays and reviews, many of which have focused on issues of race and racism in America, and on recovering and interpreting voices that were silenced, marginalized, or ignored in America's past. Her most recent book is Writing America: Literary Landmarks from Walden Pond to Wounded Knee (Rutgers University Press, 2015; paperback, 2017). She holds a Ph.D in American Studies from Yale.
Jacqueline Francis
Visual and Critical Studies, California College of the Arts
Jacqueline Francis, Ph.D., is the chair of the Visual and Critical Studies Program at California Collect of the Arts. She is the author of Making Race: Modernism and “Racial Art” in America (2012) and co-editor of Romare Bearden: American Modernist (2011). With Mary Ann Calo, Francis is working on a new book about African-American artists’ participation in federally funded art programs of the 1930s and their impact on the emergent, US art market of the 1940s. Recently, she has published articles on contemporary artists Olivia Mole, Joan Jonas, Andrea Fraser, and (with Tina Takemoto) David Hammons, and on the hot topic of Fair Use. Forthcoming are essays on Romare Bearden (The Museum of Modern Art), Mickalane Thomas (Seattle Art Museum), and Kerry James Marshall (Kunst und Politik, Jahrbuck der Guernica-Gesellschaft). With Kathy Zarur, Francis co-curated the art exhibition Where Is Here for the Museum of the African Diaspora (October 2016-May 2017).
Cynthia Garcia
Modern Thought & Literature, Stanford University
Cynthia Garcia is a PhD candidate in the Program for Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford. Her work focuses on the violence of geographical displacement and placemaking through street art and multiple modes of narrative such as mapping, oral histories, and literary and cultural production, with the Mission District of San Francisco as her focal point. Cynthia holds a BA in Chicanx Studies and English from the University of California, Berkeley. Her scholarship is informed by her experiences as a anti-displacement organizer and her commitment to community-engaged research methods. She is a proud first-generation college student and is dedicated to diversifying the academy.
Nicholas Gamso
Creative Cities Fellow, Stanford University
Nicholas Gamso is an interdisciplinary scholar and teacher. He studies urban aesthetics, most often in counterpoint with the cultural politics of race, sexuality, and gender. In his work, Nick asks how artists and writers address gentrification and other contemporary urban phenomena, such as migrancy and carcerality. He has written on interventions by Kara Walker, Teju Cole, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, examining their uses of urban space and uncovering the themes of difficulty, ambivalence, exposure, and alienation. While at Stanford, Nick will devote his attention to finishing his book, which explores these topics in the context of New York City after 1975. Nick holds a Ph.D. from the City University of New York, where he taught from 2009-2016. In 2017, he joined the department of Social Sciences & Cultural Studies at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. He has received support from the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Nick's writings appear in Social Text, Third Text, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and the architecture journal Log.
Julia Grinkrug
Academy of Art University
Julia Grinkrug is a senior lecturer in architecture at California College of the Arts and Academy of Arts University in San Francisco Bay Area. Her work promotes social engagement in architectural education by forming alliances between academic institutions and community-based organizations. Leveraging international experience in architecture and urban design, Julia explores topics of cultural resiliency and architectural agency though practices of participatory design. Her research lies at the intersection of the ecological-scale macro vision and the human-scale micro action. Julia holds Masters of Architecture in Urban Design from Harvard University and Bachelor of Architecture with distinction from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology.
Rachel Heiman
Humanities Center Fellow, Stanford University
Rachel Heiman received her B.A. in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania and her M.A. and Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on the relationship between habits, sentiments, and spaces of everyday life and the volatility of cultural, political, economic, and environmental conditions. Her most recent book, Driving after Class: Anxious Times in an American Suburb (University of California Press, 2015) explores middle-class anxieties and suburban life in the United States during the economic boom of the late 1990s. Her previous book, The Global Middle Classes: Theorizing through Ethnography (School for Advanced Research Press, 2012) is a co-edited volume (with Carla Freeman & Mark Liechty) of ethnographic research on the middle classes from a global perspective. Her current project, for which she received a 2016 Summer Stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a 2016-2017 Post-Ph.D. Research Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and a 2018 ACLS Fellowship, explores changing notions of propriety, place, and domestic ideals in the United States amid efforts to retrofit suburbia for a sustainable future. She is currently an External Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center.
Gina Hernandez
Arts in Undergraduate Education, Stanford University
Georgina Hernandez-Clarke is the Director of Arts in Undergraduate Education at Stanford. As Executive Director of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts, from 2001-March, 2011 Hernandez-Clarke developed a variety of art and curricular enhancements under the direction faculty director and Professor of Drama, Harry J. Elam, Jr. The Institute for Diversity in the Arts (IDA) is an interdisciplinary program in the humanities that involves students in the study of culture, identity and diversity through artistic expression. In March, 2011 she joined the Office of the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education (VPUE) in the newly created position of Director of Arts in Undergraduate Education. Hernandez is a primary resource for students and faculty interested in engaging with the arts in their courses and studies across all disciplines. Prior to her posts at Stanford University, Hernandez-Clarke has worked in non-profit arts development for the Arts Council of Santa Clara County, City of Long Beach, and various non-profit organizations. She has also worked as a freelance creative producer for independent film, video and live performance projects. She holds an M.F.A in Theater, Film and Television (UCLA) and received her B.A. in History from Stanford University (1989).
Betti-Sue Hertz
Curator, Arts Administrator, Writer and Educator
Betti-Sue Hertz is a contemporary arts curator, writer and educator working at the intersection of visual art, transcultural exchange and socially relevant issues. Current highlights include Public Arts Director at TLS Landscape Architecture for Lion Mountain Park, Suzhou, China; Project Curator at Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at UC Davis; and Co-Director of On Susan Sontag: Media, Modernity & Morality, an SFAI lead multi-venue season of programs to take place Autumn 2019. Hertz was Director of Visual Arts, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts 2008-2015, where she curated numerous exhibitions that often focused on global art and political agency. Her recent publications include "Roberto Matta: Convergences in Architecture, Landscape and Inscape" (2010) and "What Keeps Mankind Alive? 11th Istanbul Biennial (12 Sept-8 Nov 2009)" (2010).
Michael Kahan
Urban Studies, Stanford University
Michael Kahan is the co-director of the Program on Urban Studies at Stanford University, and a senior lecturer in Sociology. His interest in the historical transformation of urban space has led to publications on topics including the integration of streetcars in the 1850s, sanitation reform in the 1890s, the geography of prostitution in the 1910s, and redevelopment in California in the 1990s. He holds a B.A. from Yale and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, both in history.
Ian Klaus
Chicago Council on Global Affairs
Ian Klaus was a senior adviser for global cities at the US Department of State. In that role, he led urban diplomacy for the United States, engaging dozens of foreign ministries and development agencies from Africa, South America, North America, Asia, and Europe on urbanization and foreign policy issues. He also internally managed the State Department’s efforts to develop urbanization-related policies. Klaus was deputy united states negotiator for the United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Development, the first major implementing conference following the Paris Agreement on climate change. Prior to that he served as member of the policy planning staff in the office of the secretary of state, advising the secretary of state and director of policy planning on strategic issues surround the Arab Spring and multilateral diplomacy. From 2010-2011, he was the Ernest May Fellow for History and Security Studies at the Kennedy School of Government. He is a frequent commentator in Citiscope and the The Atlantic: CityLab and is the author of Forging Capitalism (Yale, 2014) and Elvis is Titanic (Knopf, 2007). He holds a PhD in international history from Harvard University.
Marci Kwon
Art & Art History, Stanford University
Marci Kwon specializes in the art and culture of the United States. Her research and teaching interests include the intersection of fine art and vernacular practice, theories of modernism, cultural exchange between Asia and the Americas, "folk" and "self-taught" art, and issues of race and objecthood. Her current book project, Enchantments: The Art of Joseph Cornell, explores the enchanted valences of Cornell’s protean artistic practice, showing how his use of formal strategies such as montage, scale, performance, and ephemerality allowed his work to transcend their modest material origins. Marci Kwon teaches in the Art & Art History department at Stanford University.
S. Topiary Landberg
Film & Digital Media, UC Santa Cruz
S. Topiary Landberg is a PhD Candidate in Film + Media Studies at U.C. Santa Cruz and a Mellon Curatorial Fellow at the Oakland Museum of California. She is an experimental media artist and film scholar whose doctoral research focuses on urban landscape documentary media. Her scholarship and creative work highlights collaborative forms of political and environmental activism that shape and transform the city. Part of Landberg's dissertation is an interdisciplinary documentary titled "Exit Zero: An Atlas of Once City Block." This work invites audiences to navigate through the history of a single central city block in San Francisco and provides insight into anti-freeway community activism and a long view of gentrification.
Jason Luger
Environmental Design, UC Berkeley
Jason Luger is an urban geographer with research interests focusing on global urban social movements and activism, art geographies, urban political economy, the interplay between material and digital space, and economic development. He is also a planning consultant/practitioner, with global experience in the public and private sectors in economic development and neighborhood revitalization. Jason is also teaching in the Global Urban Humanities Initiative at UC Berkeley, and has previously offered courses in urban studies and planning at the University of San Francisco and San Francisco State University. Jason is the co-editor of the volume Art and the City: Worlding the Discussion through a Critical Artscape (2017), and his research has been featured in academic journals such as CITY, Antipode, Geoforum, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, and Media and Culture. He is an assistant editor for the Journal of Urban Cultural Studies.
Katherine Mezur
Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley
Katherine Mezur is a lecturer of comparative literature at UC Berkeley. She is a scholar/artist whose research focuses on transnational dance/theatre performance, gender studies, and new media performance in the Asia-Pacific region. She is author of Beautiful Boys/Outlaw Bodies: Devising Female-likeness on the Kabuki Stage (Palgrave Macmillan), a history of the kabuki female gender performance and its contemporary practices, aesthetics, and politics. Her current research/practice focuses on the migrations of corporeal cultures through performance and visual art, which includes contemporary butoh’s ‘diaspora’ and dance theatre/media works by North-East Asian artists. She is advisor/director for the ‘New Dance’ grant program at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco, CA). She holds a PhD in Theatre and Dance, emphasis on Asian Performance, from the University of Hawai'i, Manoa.
Cameron Mirhossaini
Computer Science and Mathematics, Stanford University
Cameron Mirhossaini (Class of 2020) is studying Computer Science at Stanford, with an emphasis on biocomputation. While interested in STEM-related fields, Cameron also has a strong affinity for Iranian arts, culture, and languages. Born in the U.S., his parents maintained strong roots in Iran, thus, throughout his childhood, he was privileged with biannual, summer-long visits to his grandparents’ homes just outside of Esfahan. With such close proximity to one of the cultural capitals of Iran, he developed a devotion to retaining all aspects of his heritage, thus Cameron has taken many Iranian Studies courses throughout his time at Stanford and has developed integral relationships with the Iranian Studies faculty. Cameron plans on culminating his studies and experiences into an interdisciplinary honors thesis or capstone about the experiences of diasporic queer Iranian artists throughout North America and Europe.
Jenny Odell
Art & Art History, Stanford University
Jenny Odell is a lecturer in the Art & Art History department at Stanford University. She is a multi-disciplinary artist and writer based in Oakland, California. Her work generally involves acts of close observation, whether it's birdwatching, collecting screen shots, or trying to parse bizarre forms of e-commerce. In one of her favorite projects, she created The Bureau of Suspended Objects, a searchable online archive of 200 objects salvaged from the San Francisco dump, each with photographs and painstaking research into its material, corporate, and manufacturing histories. She is compelled by the ways in which attention (or lack thereof) leads to consequential shifts in perception at the level of the everyday. Her book, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, was recently published by Melville House in 2019.
Lyndsey Ogle
Theater, Dance, & Performance Studies, UC Berkeley
Lyndsey Ogle is a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley. Ogle is an interdisciplinary artist and curator exploring the intersections of cultural discourse, narrative and technology through performance, public engagement and online content. Her current research interests include socially engaged practice, social networks as performance, interdisciplinary discourse and identity-making within digital culture.
Grant Parker
Classics and African Studies, Stanford University
Grant Parker is an Associate Professor of Classics at Stanford University. He joined Stanford from Duke University in 2006. He teaches Latin and other topics in Roman imperial culture; he has worked on the history of collecting and on historical maps. His books include The Making of Roman India (2008) and The Agony of Asar (2001). He has edited a major volume, South Africa, Greece, Rome: classical confrontations. His current research projects focus on memorialization and public history, in both Rome and South Africa (including comparison).
Peggy Phelan
English and Theater & Performance Studies, Stanford University
Denning Family Director, Stanford Arts Institute
Peggy Phelan is the Ann O'Day Maples Professor of Theater & Performance Studies and of English at Stanford University, and the Denning Family Director of the Stanford Arts Institute. Publishing widely in both book and essay form, Phelan is the author of Unmarked: the politics of performance (Routledge, 1993); Mourning Sex: performing public memories (Routledge, 1997); and editor and contributor to Live Art in Los Angeles (Routledge, 2012). Phelan is also co-editor of Acting Out: Feminist Performances (University of Michigan Press, 1993) and The Ends of Performance (New York University Press, 1997). Her most recent publication, Contact Warhol: Photography Without End (2018), was co-authored by Richard Meyer and was published by MIT Press and the Cantor Arts Center.
Magie Ramírez
Creative Cities Fellow, Stanford University
Margaret Marietta Ramírez is a Xicana feminist urban geographer, whose work explores the interstices of racial capitalism, art-activism and urban space. Her current project documents the ways that artists of color disrupt discourses of gentrification, redevelopment, and state violence in Oakland, California through their art and activism, producing counter-topographies of the city they call home. Next she will explore the role of artists of color in the climate justice movement, and how their art is being used to envision equitable and sustainable urban futures for all peoples and species on the planet. Magie holds a PhD and MA in Geography from the University of Washington, a BA in Interdisciplinary Studies from UC Berkeley, and was a 2015 Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellow. Her forthcoming article, 'City as Borderland', is in press in Society & Space, which uses Gloria Anzaldúa's theorizations of the borderlands as an analytic to understand gentrifying cities. She is also co-authoring an entry on ‘decolonial geographies’ for Antipode's 50th anniversary collection, Keywords in Radical Geographic Thought, and co-editing the 'Indigenous Histories of Resistance' chapter of Anti-Eviction Mapping Project's edited volume Counterpoints: A Bay Area Atlas of Displacement. Otherwise she is engaged in anti-colonial and anti-displacement work in Oakland, and spends her days mothering two small humans.
Jasmine Reid
Anthropology, Stanford University
Jasmine Reid is a PhD candidate in the department of Archeology at Stanford. Her research marries heritage management, museology, and post-colonial studies to explore the ways in which a small network of museums in Johannesburg, South Africa narrativizes the history and legacy of forcibly removed, multiracial communities under apartheid. Beginning in the early 1950s, the apartheid government launched a decades-long campaign to destroy mixed-race communities and overlay the forcibly vacated lands with white-only neighborhoods. Reid is interested in how institutions founded to commemorate the displaced communities engage with the lived experiences of those who currently reside on these contested lands. More specifically, her research hinges on the question of how the tangible land and the intangible notion of home are invoked during these community interactions.
Rose Salseda
Art & Art History, Stanford University
Rose Salseda specializes in the visual art of U.S. Latinxs and African Americans. Her research interests include the politics of race in art and art history, visualizations of civil unrest in the United States, and the visual language of minimalism among other topics. Currently, Salseda is working on her first book manuscript, which foregrounds the 1992 Los Angeles Riots as a response to the injustices of state violence through the close reading of visual art made by two generations of artists. In addition, Salseda is a co-founder of the U.S. Latinx Art Forum (USLAF), a professional organization that champions artists and art professionals engaged in research, studio practice, pedagogy, and writing. As the associate director of USLAF, she develops initiatives to ensure equity for the field of Latinx art within academic and art institutions. She is also a core organizer of at land's edge, a pedagogical and public programs platform based in Los Angeles that nurtures the voices of cultural producers who are committed to social justice. Salseda's research has been supported by numerous institutions, including the Ford Foundation; the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens; and the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin among others.
Jennifer Scappettone
Humanities Center Fellow, Stanford University
English, University of Chicago
Jennifer Scappettone is an Associate Professor in the department of Department of English at University of Chicago, and a Stanford Humanities Fellow. She has devoted her recent research, writing, and teaching to the cultural topographies of modernity’s phantasms and underbellies, exploring literary artifacts and scenes from the built environment that manifest its uneven development and ideological vulnerabilities. Her work in poetics addresses language’s migrations and its contaminations across geographical and disciplinary borders through the current day. Her critical study, Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice (Columbia UP, 2014) shifts the gaze of modernist studies from the rising urban centers of Paris, London, and New York to their shadow at the imagined edge of Europe: Venice, a premodern cosmopolis whose apparent resistance to modernization renders it a haunt for artists and intellectuals grappling with the stakes and costs of modernity. Scappettone is also a poet with two collections: From Dame Quickly (Litmus, 2009), and The Republic of Exit 43: Outtakes & Scores from An Archaeology and Pop-Up Opera of the Corporate Dump (Atelos, 2017).
Meg Shiffler
San Francisco Arts Commission
Meg Shiffler assumed the role of Gallery Director for the San Francisco Arts Commission in 2005. Shiffler is also a visiting faculty member in San Francisco Art Institute’s School of Interdisciplinary Studies graduate program. Prior to arriving in San Francisco, she worked in New York as a freelance curator, researcher and consultant for the New Museum of Contemporary Art; the Andrea Rosen Gallery; and the Ursula Meyer Art Conservancy. She co-founded, with Matthew Richter, the multidisciplinary art center Consolidated Works in Seattle, WA, and was the Gallery Director there from 1998 to 2003. Prior to that, she was the Director of 20th Century Masterworks at Meyerson & Nowinski Art Associates, and the Gallery Director for MIA Gallery, both located in Seattle. Meg attended the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in New York.
Joshua Stein
Radical Craft
Joshua G. Stein is the founder of Radical Craft and the co-director of the Data Clay Network, a forum for the exploration of digital techniques applied to ceramic materials. Radical Craft is a Los Angeles-based research and design studio operating between fields of architecture, art and urbanism. Radical Craft advances design saturated in history (from archaeology to craft) that inflects the production of contemporary urban spaces and artifacts, evolving newly grounded approaches to the challenges posed by virtuality, velocity, and globalization. Recent projects engage earthen materials that resist easy manipulation, whether in raw or consolidated states. Stein has taught at the California College of the Arts, Cornell University, SCI-Arc, and the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design. He was a 2010-11 Rome Prize Fellow in Architecture, and is currently Professor of Architecture at Woodbury University.
John Zarobell
International Studies, University of San Francisco
John Zarobell is the Department Chair of International Studies at the University of San Francisco. Formerly, he held the positions of assistant curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and associate curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He is a regular contributor to the San Francisco Art Quarterly (SFAQ) and the online journal Art Practical, has written for numerous exhibition catalogues and has published in Art History, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, and the Berkeley Review of Latin-American Studies. His books, Empire of Landscape (2010) and Art and the Global Economy (2017) were published by University of California Press.
Kathy Zarur
Visual Studies, California College of the Arts
Kathy Zarur is a curator and art historian with a focus on the art, visual culture and growing museum industry in the Middle East. Her recent exhibitions in San Francisco include Where Is Here (Museum of the African Diaspora, through April 2017) and Mashrabiya: The Art of Looking (San Francisco State University Fine Arts Gallery, through March 16, 2017). She was Assistant Curator at the 2011 Sharjah Biennial (United Arab Emirates), which was critically acclaimed by the BBC and Art Asia Pacific and hosted over 75,000 visitors. For the subsequent Sharjah Biennial (2013), she co-produced a live installation with forty singers for artist Wael Shawky; Shawky’s Sharjah Biennial Prize-winning project examined several related themes: the relevance of biennials to local communities and the hotly examined issue of labor rights in the Arabian Gulf. Over its two month run, the 2013 Biennial saw 90,000 visitors. Zarur has published articles for Broadsheet and Art in America on the Emirati Hassan Sharif, dubbed the first conceptual artist of the UAE, Wael Shawky and a review of the Palestinian art exhibition Made In Palestine, respectively. Zarur serves on Kearny Street Workshop’s Program Advisory Council (San Francisco).
2018-19 Working Group Schedule of Meetings
April 25, 2019
Rose Salseda
"Invisible Ruins: Mapping an Art History of the 1992 Los Angeles Riots"
April 11, 2019
Jacqueline Francis and Kathy Zarur
"Sanctuary"
February 28, 2019
Marci Kwon
"The Evasive Bodies of May's Photo Studio"
February 14, 2019
Gordon Douglass
"Problematizing Place, Placemaking, and Displacement in Contexts of Extreme Inequality"
January 31, 2019
Joyce Kozloff
"Joyce Kozloff: Representing and Mapping Cities"
January 17, 2019
Lindsey Dillon
"How Nature Makes Cities: Wetland Restoration on San Francisco’s Industrial Waterfront"
November 29, 2018
Abby Chen
"Art with Spatial Politics of (China)Town State"
November 8, 2018
Nick Gamso
"Quiet: Beneath the Creative City"
October 18, 2018
Magie Ramírez
"Sonic Geographies in a Borderland City"
October 4, 2018
Peggy Phelan
"Andy Warhol: Photography and the City"
