Speaker Bios & Abstracts
Gerardo Aldana
Gerardo Aldana is a professor of Chicana/o Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of over 50 scholarly publications and three monographs on the History of Mayan astronomy, including most recently Calculating Brilliance: an intellectual history of Mayan astronomy at Chich’en Itza (University of Arizona Press, 2021). He has since also ventured into speculative fiction, with the Berggruen Institute online publication of “Citlalli in the Sky with Cnidaria” and a forthcoming novella in a Xicanx Futurism anthology (Riot of Roses, 2025).
“Divination and Science in Mayan Hieroglyphic Texts”
In this talk, we’ll begin with a review of some well-known examples of Postclassic Mayan astronomy. The goal here is to shift the focus from the scientific acumen apparent in these cases to an exploration of the textual descriptions accompanying the astronomical tables. In doing so, we’ll encounter much greater resonance with the divinatory contexts of the rest of the manuscript in which they are found. In turn, we’ll see a protracted historical tradition of “astronomical divination,” connected to earlier, Classic-period mythological inscriptions, speaking to a scientific interest in dialogue with nature as opposed to mastery over it.
Natalie Gosnell
Dr. Natalie Gosnell is an observational astrophysicist, artist, and Associate Professor of Physics at Colorado College. In her work as a teacher-scholar, she is committed to building bridges across disciplinary boundaries, particularly in the world of art-science. Her astrophysics research focuses on binary stars that have been fundamentally changed by the presence of their companion. Her co-created artistic work, The Gift, has been presented by Lincoln Center of the Performing Arts, the Fine Arts Center of Colorado Springs at Colorado College, Stanford University, and the Los Angeles Music Center as part of the Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time series. Dr. Gosnell is the recipient of a Cottrell Scholar Award from the Research Corporation for Scientific Advancement and was recognized with an Excellence in Teaching Award from Colorado College. Along with her close collaborator Janani Balasubramanian, she is a co-author of Undisciplined: Radical Strategies for Growing Artist-Scientist Collaborations, forthcoming from University of California Press (2026).
Art + Science: The Responsibility to Imagine
What is possible when artists and scientists truly co-create together? When we step beyond our disciplinary silos, what new questions can we ask? What new answers will we discover? I will discuss the expansive world made available by moving not just into a place of cross-disciplinary work, but into a place of undisciplined exploration.
Photo by LaFarge Holcim Foundation
John Ochsendorf
John Ochsendorf is the Class of 1942 Professor of Architecture and Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He served as Director of the American Academy in Rome from 2017-2020 and is currently the founding director of the MIT Morningside Academy for Design since 2022. He has collaborated with architects, engineers and artists on the design of award-winning structures around the world, including the Mapungubwe Interpretation Centre which was named World Building of the Year at the World Architecture Festival in 2009. His research has been supported by a Fulbright Scholarship to Spain, a Rome Prize, a MacArthur Fellowship, as well as grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Science Foundation. He is the author of Guastavino Vaulting: The Art of Structural Tile (PAP, 2010) and over 100 technical papers on sustainable design, masonry mechanics, and architectural structures.
On Structure and Form: Designing with Constraints
How should we design structures and architecture for a finite planet? How do we find cost-effective carbon reductions that improve quality of life? How do we evolve university education to make our teachings more relevant to societal challenges? This talk will demonstrate alternative futures for these questions and more, based on 20+ years of research at MIT.
Photo by Mike Vitelli
Gala Porras-Kim
GALA PORRAS-KIM (b. 1984, Bogotá; lives and works in Los Angeles and London) has had solo exhibitions at Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland currently on view; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver; Storefront for Art and Architecture, NY in 2024; Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul; the Fowler Museum, Los Angeles; Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Sevilla; Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City; in 2023; Gasworks, London, Amant Foundation, Brooklyn, and Kadist in 2022, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 2019 among others. Selected group exhibitions include the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Korea Art Prize at National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, 12th Liverpool Biennial in 2023; 34th Bienal de São Paulo, 13th Gwangju Biennale in 2021; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2021, 2017); Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2021, 2019); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2019, 2016); PinchukArtCentre, Kiev (2019); Whitney Biennial (2019, 2017). She was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University (2019), the artist-in-residence at the Getty Research Institute (2020-22). Her works are part of public collections at the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, DePaul Art Museum, Dallas Museum of Art, Seoul Museum of Art, Korea, FRAC Pays de la Loire, FR, and Tate Modern, UK.
Expanded data fields
Presenting projects that consider how institutions shape inherited forms and codes and conversely, how objects also shape and redefine the contexts in which they are placed. The works are about the institutional frameworks that define, legitimize and preserve cultural objects. Considering how historical material is represented and exhibited, they focus on how institutional methods and ideology is used to analyze and ultimately control narratives and access to knowledge.
Photo by Elliot Ross
Ronald Rael
Ronald Rael, Designer, Activist, Author, Technologist (La Florida, Colorado — Oakland, California)
Rael stands out as a visionary in both additive manufacturing and sustainability, having founded several pioneering companies dedicated to innovating materials and technology on a building scale. Among these, Emerging Objects, his 3D printing Make-Tank, has revolutionized 3D printing's sustainability by blending additive manufacturing with recycled, upcycled, and waste materials such as salt, paper pulp, coffee grounds, recycled car tires, and agricultural waste. Another groundbreaking venture, FORUST, which Rael co-founded, has introduced a game-changing approach to 3D printing by utilizing sawdust from construction industry waste, thereby advancing circular technology. His latest undertaking, Muddy Robots, represents a paradigm shift in building construction, seamlessly integrating humanity's oldest building material, raw earth construction, with cutting-edge additive manufacturing. This innovative fusion creates housing solutions with the potential to mitigate environmental impact by leveraging clay construction's exceptional thermal mass properties, thereby maintaining comfortable interior temperatures without relying on mechanical heating and cooling systems, consequently reducing CO2 emissions in the construction industry. His work is widely lauded, written about, and can be found in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, The London Design Museum, LACMA, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Renwick Smithsonian American Art Museum. He is the author of Earth Architecture, Printing Architecture, and Borderwall as Architecture: A Manifesto for the U.S. Mexico Boundary and is the Chair of the Department of Art Practice and Eval Li Memorial Chair in Architecture at the University of California Berkeley.
Art and Architecture at the Frontier
Ronald Rael will explore how play serves as a fundamental strategy for innovation within his practice. From pioneering advancements in 3D-printed earthen architecture to provocative social interventions at the U.S.-Mexico border, Rael’s work demonstrates that curiosity, experimentation, and a spirit of play can drive both technological breakthroughs and social change. By embracing play as a method of discovery, his studio has developed new material processes, challenged architectural conventions, and reimagined the role of design in activism. Through case studies and personal insights, Rael will reveal how play is not just a mode of creativity but a powerful tool for reshaping the built environment and its cultural narratives.
Risa Wechsler
Risa Wechsler is the Humanities and Sciences Professor at Stanford University and Director of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC), and a faculty member in the Department of Physics at Stanford and the department of Particle Physics & Astrophysics at SLAC. She is a leading cosmologist whose work addresses some of the most profound questions about our universe — how it formed, what it is made of, how it is structured, and what its future holds. Dr. Wechsler’s research focuses on understanding the evolution of galaxies, the large-scale structure of the universe, and the nature of dark matter and dark energy, using sophisticated simulations and state-of-the-art observational data to explore these enigmatic forces that shape the cosmos.
Her work has been instrumental in major international collaborations such as the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), which aims to unravel the mysteries of dark energy by mapping the positions of millions of galaxies, and the Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), an ambitious decade-long survey that will reveal the changing night sky in unprecedented detail. Recent work also explores the formation and cosmological context of the Milky Way, and probes of dark matter with small-scale cosmic structure. Dr. Wechsler's work combines detailed models of the universe with the new 3D maps created by these surveys to understand the hidden forces that govern its expansion and evolution and to understand our place in it.
Amanda Williams
Amanda Williams is an artist who uses ideas around color and architecture to illuminate the complex ways that value, both cultural and economic, intersects with race in the built environment.. Through an interdisciplinary practice that brings spatial and aesthetic theory to bear on real social issues, Williams is clarifying the role of the artist in reimagining the future of civic space. Amanda has an ongoing practice of elevating seemingly mundane objects and spaces to a renewed and often reformulated status of importance. Her work is in several permanent collections including the MoMA NY; The Art Institute of Chicago; and the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. Amanda is co-author of a forthcoming permanent monument to Shirley Chisholm in Brooklyn. Williams’ breakthrough series, Color(ed) Theory was named as one of the world’s 25 most significant works of postwar architecture by the New York Times. She is a founding member of the Black Reconstruction Collective and sits on the boards of the Terra Foundation and the Pulitzer Arts Foundation. Williams has been widely recognized, including designation as MacArthur Foundation Fellow. She is a graduate of Cornell University and is a proud Chicagoan.
Camille Utterback
Camille Utterback's interactive installations, generative, site-specific, and reactive works engage participants in a dynamic process of kinesthetic discovery and play. Utterback's work explores the aesthetic and experiential possibilities of linking computational systems to human movement and gesture in visually layered ways. Her work aims to focus attention on the continued relevance and richness of the body in our increasingly mediated world.
To create her projects, Utterback combines various sensing and display technologies with the custom software she writes. Whether expressed in the form of architectural-scale projections, custom LED lighting, or intimate sculptures with embedded LCD screens, Utterback’s work engages participants in a process of embodied discovery as they explore the possibilities and behaviors of her physically engaged systems.
Utterback's extensive exhibit history includes more than fifty shows on four continents. Recent shows include Black Out - Silouhettes Then and Now at the National Portrait Gallery (2018), Watch This! at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (2015), and a solo shows at the Stanford Art Gallery and Emerson College's Urban Arts’ Media Art Gallery in Boston, MA (2017). Utterback’s work is represented by Haines Gallery in San Francisco.
Utterback's work has been collected by The Smithsonian Museum of American Art, The Thoma Foundation, The La Caixa Foundation in Barcelona, Spain; Itaú Cultural Institute in São Paolo, Brazil; Henderson Development Corporation in Hong Kong, China; The Orange County Museum of Art in California; Hewlett Packard; The 21c Museum and Hotel, Louisville, KY; The Pittsburgh Children’s Museum;The Whitney Museum’s Artport website; and many private collectors.
Awards include a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (2009), an IBM Innovation Merit Award for her solo show Animated Gesturesin the Boston Cyberarts Festival (2007), a Transmediale International Media Art Festival Award (2005), and a Rockefeller Foundation New Media Fellowship (2002).
Utterback holds a U.S. patent (2004) for video tracking software she co-developed with collaborator Romy Achituv for their Text Rain installation.
Large scale commissions include works for The Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (2016), The Liberty Mutual Group executive corridor in Boston, MA (2013), The FOR-SITE Foundation (2012), the City of Sacramento, California (2011), the City of San Jose, California (2010), and the City of St. Louis Park, Minnesota (2009).
Utterback has been an professor in the Department of Art & Art History at Stanford since 2013. She also holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of Computer Science.
Contact:
Stanford Arts Institute
artsinstitute@stanford.edu
