Category: ARI Artists

T.J. Demos

T.J. Demos ARI Supported Project: Going Nuclear: Contemporary Art, Radiation, and Militarized LandsGoing Nuclear assembles interdisciplinary researchers and artists focused on art’s relation to radiation and militarized lands. Addressing primarily North America and Indigenous lands—with comparison to other nuclear geographies including Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Marshall Islands, French Polynesia, and Ukraine—the project comprises two public-facing,…
Martin Rizzo Martinez

Martin Rizzo Martinez ARI Supported Project: Indigenous Testimonies at Mission Santa Cruz Film ProjectThis short film project features tribal members from the Ramaytush, Mutsun, and Amah Mutsun communities speaking about what they would like visitors to Mission Santa Cruz to understand about their tribal communities and the missions. By centering Indigenous Californian voices in the…
Tanya Merchant

Tanya Merchant Tanya Merchant is an ethnomusicologist whose research interests include music’s intersection with issues of nationalism, gender, identity, and the post-colonial situation. With a geographical focus on Central Asia, the former Soviet Union, and the Balkans, she has conducted fieldwork in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Russia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. She is an avid performer on…
Yiman Wang

Yiman Wang Transnational/trans-regional Chinese cinemas of all periods, Intra-Asian and cross-Pacific film remakes, Pan-East Asian celebrity culture, East Asian cultural studies, and Asian American cinema. Research Interests: Transnational connections of Chinese cinema.Border-crossing film remakes.Ethnic star studies, gender studies and critical race theory. Anna May Wong DV documentary and filmmaking in China.Early cinema.Postcolonialism.Translation studies.
Rebecca Wear

Rebecca Wear ARI Supported Project: You Will Get Used to It (YWGUTI) is a new play collaboration and Performance, Play and Design season selection between director Rebecca Wear and playwright Preston Choi (UC San Diego MFA). Choi shares, “On the ninth floor of a nondescript office building there’s a gaping hole in the wall oozing a…
Jimin Lee

Jimin Lee Jimin Lee is the head of the print media program and the director of the Contemporary Print Media research Center. Her work explores themes of mobility, displacement and labor on the personal and social level as seen in traffic, places of transport, or objects that move or are “in transit” — travel in…
Nelsen Hutchison

Nelsen Hutchison Nelsen Hutchison grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area where he began playing guitar and developing an eclectic taste for music at a young age. He went on to pursue his musical education by studying jazz guitar at Berklee College of Music before transferring to the New School for Jazz where he…
Michael Chemers

Michael Chemers Michael Chemers researches the “dramaturgy of empathy,” a wide-ranging and interdisciplinary inquiry that seeks to understand how performance culture fosters compassion and kindness (and conversely, fear and hatred). Michael is the creator of the ‘Ghost Light’ model of dramaturgy: a muscular, creatively engaged, artistically vibrant approach to dramaturgy that requires thorough historical understanding,…
Marianne Weems

Marianne Weems Marianne Weems is a theater and opera director and founder of the award-winning New York-based theater company The Builders Association, an influential ensemble that has created a significant body of work at the forefront of integrating media with live performance. With the company, she has created and directed 17 original large-scale productions and worked…
John Jota Leaños

John Jota Leaños John Jota Leaños is a Mestizo (Xicano-Italian-Chumash) interdisciplinary artist and animator concerned with the embattled terrains of history and memory as they relate to nation, power, and decolonization. A Professor of Film and Digital Media at UCSC, Leaños teaches courses on Chicanx and Indigenous cinema/media, sci-fi & speculative fictions, documentary animation, documentary…