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Felipe Cervera is the director of UCLA Center for Performance Studies.
His current research foci are the politics of performance and outer space, performance pedagogy, and planetary methodologies for research and teaching in performance studies.
His current book project, tentatively tiled Endless Planets, based on ten years of ethnographic work is an monograph about space artists working in the context of the New Space race.
Cervera is the Deputy General Editor of Performance Research. He holds a status-only appointment as Graduate Faculty at the Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies of the University of Toronto. He is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, University of the Arts Singapore.
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Vivian Appler is a scholar/artist with areas of expertise in the science performance, feminist performance, practice-as-research (PaR), devised theatre, and puppetry. She is co-editor of the edited collection, Identity, Culture, and the Science Performance: Volume 1: From the Lab to the Streets (2022)as well as its sister volume, From the Curious to the Quantum (2023).
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Maaike Bleeker is interested in how bringing together Theatre and Performance Studies with other fields of knowledge illuminates what happens in making and watching performances of various kinds, how humans interact with other humans as well as with non-human agents like robots or instruments, and how experiences and ways of understanding come about in such interactions in the theatre, in daily life, and in scientific research.
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Evan Moritz is a writer, researcher, director, and performer who explores the outer limits of Science Fiction and Fact through both artistic practice and academic research. He is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto and co-chair of the Cultural Studies Association’s Performance Working Group.
He is interested in the outer limits of science-fiction and fact with research exploring relationships between colonization of planetary bodies, the future of settler colonialism, the loss of liveness in the communication gaps between planets, global catastrophe on Earth and off, utopias, dystopias, and the impact of science fiction on contemporary practices. -
Monica Geraffo (she/her) is a fashion historian and PhD student in Theater and Performance Studies at UCLA. Interested in performances of luxury, modernity, and nationalism, her dissertation explores the use of synthetic fabrics by couture designers in the Cold War Era. Her work can be found via writings in the Film Fashion & Consumption Journal and appearances with San Diego Comic Con and TEDxBoston. She also works as an independent costume exhibition preparator, primarily with FIDM Museum Los Angeles, and as a co-host of VoxPopcast, a weekly pseudo-academic roundtable podcast. Growing up as a historical reenactor and museum interpreter, she is dedicated to de-institutionalizing knowledge through public history and the study of popular culture.
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Anne W. Johnson a Professor in the Graduate Program in Social Anthropology at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City. She received her MA and PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin and holds a B.A. in Anthropology and Theater Arts from Brown University. She is a member of Mexico’s National System of Researchers, level 2. Her research interests include the social study of science and technology, the anthropology of the future, performance studies, historical memory, and material culture, and she has published books, chapters, and journal articles in these fields. Her current project, based on ethnographic research with the Mexican Space Agency, a university space instrumentation laboratory, and a series of art collectives, revolves around Mexican imaginaries of outer space and the future.
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Dr David Jeevendrampillai is an Anthropologist of Outer Space. His current research examines the curation, narration and use of Earth Imagery from the International Space Station. He is interested in the anthropology of the future, technology and modernity, the politics of knowing place and emergent conceptions of the human and the body, particularly concerning technology and data. His interests encompass but are not limited to discussions on land rights, post-cosmopolitanisms and colonialism. He is interested in bringing together the wide array of academic disciplines involved in space science to engage in a critical discussion around outer space. More here.
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Marie-Pier Boucher is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information, and Technology with a graduate appointment in the Faculty of Information. Prior to joining U of T, she was a Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for Art, Science and Technology + Program in Science, Technology and Society at MIT. She holds a PhD in Art, Art History and Visual Studies from Duke University.
Professor Boucher’s research focuses on the design of habitats for sustaining life in extreme environments. She is currently working on a book project which looks at the relationship between health, architectural design, and perceptual activity in a range of extreme environments (physical and symbolic) to examine how the changes in direction and orientation induced by levitation and microgravity can inform the design of Earth-based habitats. She is also working on an umbrella project, Interplanetary Habitation: The Earth, the Moon, Mars and the City, which investigates the socio-technical future of planetary life in relation to growing concerns over health and biotechnology, mobility and artificial intelligence. More here.
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Juan Francisco Salazar was born in Santiago, Chile, and migrated to Sydney in 1998. He is an interdisciplinary researcher, author and documentary filmmaker whose academic and creative work explore the coupled dynamics of social-ecological change and is underpinned by a collaborative ethos across the arts, science and activism. He is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow (2020-2024) with a project on critical social studies of outer space that continues his decade long cultural research on Antarctica. During this work in Antarctica (2010-2020), he led the Antarctic Cities project, with a team of 15 researchers in five countries and co-founded the international Antarctic Youth Coalition in 2020. More here.