When
October 7, 2021
1:00-2:00 PT

Admission
FREE

In this live-streamed conversation, Creative Capital Awardees Julia Christensen, Marcia Douglas and Hasan Elahi share their experiences and reflections as artists who balance full-time academic appointments and art careers. Bringing different perspectives from different artistic fields and universities, they will explore decision-factors and choices in entering academia, pedagogical identity in relation to artistic identity, how they negotiate and advocate, and how to stay sane as an artist academic. The conversation will include audience Q&A via YouTube chat.

Hasan Elahi is an artist whose work examines issues of surveillance, citizenship, migration, transport, and the challenges of borders and frontiers. His work has been presented in numerous exhibitions at venues such as SITE Santa Fe, Centre Georges Pompidou, the Sundance Film Festival, the Gwangju Biennale, and the Venice Biennale. His work is frequently in the media and has been covered by The New York Times, Forbes, Wired, and has appeared on Al Jazeera, Fox News, and The Colbert Report. Elahi has spoken about his work to a broad range of audiences such as Tate Modern, Einstein Forum, the American Association of Artificial Intelligence, the International Association of Privacy Professionals, TED, and the World Economic Forum. His recent awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Alpert/MacDowell Fellowship, grants from Creative Capital, Art Matters Foundation, the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art, and he is a recipient of a Hugh M. Hefner First Amendment Award. He is currently Professor and Director of the School of Art at George Mason University.

Julia Christensen is a multidisciplinary artist who explores systems of technology, consumerism, landscape, and change. She is founding president of the Space Song Foundation, a non-profit organization she founded with a team of space scientists and engineers with the purpose of designing space technology that outlasts obsolescence. Her work has been exhibited internationally at venues such as the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Eyebeam, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Pori Art Museum, Pori, Finland; Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York; Shrine Empire Gallery, New Delhi; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Christensen is the author of Upgrade Available published by Dancing Foxes Press in 2020, and Big Box Reuse, published by MIT Press in 2008. She has also written for magazines including Cabinet, Orion, and Print. In addition to her award from Creative Capital, Christensen was awarded the LACMA Art + Tech Lab fellowship (2017), a Guggenheim fellowship (2018), and has had artist residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Wexner Film + Video Studio, Media Archaeology Lab, and the Experimental Television Center. Christensen is associate professor of integrated media and chair of the Studio Art department at Oberlin College, where she has additionally served on the faculties of the Environmental Studies program and the Technology in Music and Related Arts department in the Oberlin Conservatory of Music.

Marcia Douglas is a 2020 Creative Capital awardee and the author of novels, The Marvellous Equations of the Dread, Madam Fate and Notes from a Writer’s Book of Cures and Spells as well as a poetry collection, Electricity Comes to Cocoa Bottom. Douglas’s work has appeared in journals and anthologies internationally. Her awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a U.K. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.  The Marvellous Equations of the Dread: a Novel in Bass Riddim was long-listed for the 2016 Republic of Consciousness Prize and the 2017 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.  She is a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Colorado, Boulder.