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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. -
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.
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Eleanor S Armstrong is a Space Research Fellow at the University of Leicester, UK, where she is building the Constellations Lab (on Outer Space & Feminism). The overarching focus of her research is on the coproduction of physical sciences and culture. Her primary research focuses on queer feminist approaches to social studies of outer space, particularly the presentation of femininities, feminisms, and femmes in public discourses and education about outer space. With Dr Divya M Persaud she built the conference Space Science in Context, a conference to connect scientists, humanities scholars, and activists working out the social situatedness of outer space. With designer Akvilė Terminatė, Armstrong runs EXO-MOAN a design studio that explores sex, intimacy, care, and consent in the contexts of outer space
More about her work can be found at:
https://ellietheelement.squarespace.com/ and https://le.ac.uk/people/eleanor-armstrongdescription
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Fiona Annis is a multidisciplinary artist who develops projects through a rigorous studio practice, combined with research residencies, interdisciplinary collaborations, and intergenerational mentorships. Guided by a process-oriented approach and a distinct interest for archives, her work is unique in that it spans photography, new-media, and sculpture, to engage material history from a deeply contemporary perspective. Her projects include exhibitions, artist books, video documentaries, and large-scale permanent public artworks.
Born in Glasgow, Scotland (1983) and raised in Manitoba, Fiona Annis lives and works in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal.Fiona’s work has been presented in national and international exhibitions including: the Guido Molinari Foundation (Montréal), AC Institute (New York City), the Canadian Centre for Architecture (Montréal), Goldsmith’s University (London), Low Salt Gallery (Glasgow), Museo Novecento (Naples), Gallery44 (Toronto), VU Photo (Québec City) and the Art Gallery of Alberta (Edmonton). Her artwork is featured in the permanent collection of the Museum of Civilization, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, and the public art collection of the city of Ottawa.
Fiona has been awarded national and international fellowships, including the Brucebo Foundation travel prize, held at the Capodimonte Museum of Astronomical Instruments in Naples; the Jarislowsky Prize, held at the Banff Centre for the Arts; and the Quebec Research Fund for Society and Culture, held at the Penumbra Foundation in New York City. With a master’s degree from the Glasgow School of Art and an interdisciplinary doctoral degree from Concordia University, Annis is currently assistant professor of research-creation in the Department of Art History, Cinema, and Audiovisual Media at the University of Montréal.
More at: https://fionaannis.com/about/
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Dr. Jennifer Crouch is an art-science practitioner and researcher working in sculpture, textiles, installation and image-making. The fleshy, detailed and textural nature of their work investigates the multi-scalar nature of embodied knowledges and how materials, sensations and biogeochemical cycles intersect and shape our subjectivities.
Jennifer has a background in physics and medical illustration, which informs their work as a public engagement professional, which they enact as an author and through interactive events and workshops such as those developed as a member of Jiggling Atoms. They are an associate lecturer on the MA in Art and Science at Central Saint Martins, a sessional lecturer in textiles at Morley College, and have taught in multiple universities on the topic of art-science, textile research methodologies and creative practice across the UK and Europe.
They were awarded their PhD in 2023 from the University of Portsmouth, titled Re-corporealising MRI Data: A Practice-based Investigation through Art and Science. Their thesis is an exploration of corporeal matter, embodied knowledge, disability studies, disease and MRI physics via queer feminist science studies, the critical posthumanities, and post-digital practices of sculpture, weaving textiles and illustrated cartographies.More at: https://jennifercrouch.com/ABOUT
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research plumbs intersections of the histories of science, technology, and the environment after 1945, with a focus on mobile waste and culturally contingent constructions of nature and sustainability. In addition to the environmental and technological history of outer space, I have also written about gender and sexuality in American aerospace culture and performances of scientific practice and interplanetary futurity at Earth analog habitats.
More at: https://www.orbital-decay.com/