STEPHEN FARRELL & RICK VALICENTI DESIGNERS LISA DAVIS PAINTER JAN CASTRO ART WRITER GORDON MOORE PAINTER REBECCA CLEMAN VIDEO ARTIST ESTHER K SMITH & DIKKO FAUST PRINTMAKING CHRISTINE GRAY PAINTER TEDDY CRUZ ARCHITECT IAN WHITMORE PAINTER RACHEL BEACH SCULPTOR JOANNE JONES-RIZZI EXHIBIT DEVELOPER ROBERT BIRMELIN PAINTER MARY TING SCULPTOR GREG DRASLER PAINTER INNA ALESINA DESIGNER & AUTHOR EVELYN HANKINS CURATOR GARY STEPHEN PAINTER & SCULPTOR JK KELER DESIGNER JULIA FISH PAINTER DOUGLAS B DOWD ILLUSTRATOR SARAH HROMACK WRITER & DIGITAL STRATEGIST LAURE DROGOUL INSTALLATION & PERFORMANCE CHRIS MARTIN PAINTER MICHELLE GRABNER PAINTER & WRITER PAUL CHAAT SMITH AUTHOR & CURATOR TORKWASE DYSON SCULPTOR & INSTALLATION RON FISHER SCULPTOR CÔME MOSTA-HEIRT ARTIST JOHN BIELENBERG DESIGNER CASEY CAPLOWE CREATIVE DIRECTOR JOSHUA TO PRODUCT MANAGER

Product designer and author Inna Alesina discusses the interrelationship of materials and ideas. This lecture will conclude her residency in the MFA in Illustration Practice program where she challenged students to create object based solutions that integrate with personal narratives.

Rachel Beach is a Brooklyn-based artist originally from Waterloo ON, Canada. Her painted wood and aluminum sculptures combine elements of Minimalist thought and form with more diverse archeological and architectural influences. Ms. Beach received an MFA from Yale University in 2001 and BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1998.

John Bielenberg created Project M designed to inspire and educate young designers, writers, photographers, and filmmakers by proving that their work-especially their wrongest thinking-can have a positive and significant impact on the world. Project M has developed projects to help a conservation area in Costa Rica, Micro-financing in Ghana, New Orleans after Katrina, the community of East Baltimore, connecting households to fresh water in Hale County Alabama and addressing the the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Alabama. In his career, John has won more than 250 design awards, was nominated for 2 National Design Awards from the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, served on the AIGA National Board of Directors, and teaches at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. In addition, John was awarded the Skandalaris Award for Design Entrepreneurship from Washington University in St. Louis in 2009 and was granted an honorary doctorate degree from Maryland Institute College of Art in 2011.

Educated at The Cooper Union Art School and Yale University's School of Art, Robert Birmelin has had 49 one person exhibitions. His work has been acquired by 40 public collections including New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art, and the Hirshorn Museum. Among the various Art magazines and journals where articles on Mr. Birmelin's work have appeared are Art in America, American Artist, and Art Forum.

Casey Caplowe is the creative director and co-founder of GOOD, an integrated media company for people who want to live well and do good. Built as a collaboration of individuals, businesses, and nonprofits pushing the world forward, GOOD launched in 2006 with its magazine and soon followed with a website, videos, and events. The flagship magazine was named one of the hottest magazine launches of 2006 by Media Industry Newsletter, and won four Folio: Magazine awards and two National Magazine Award nominations in 2008. In its first year, the magazine was nominated for National Magazine Award for Best Overall Design, and earned second place in the Cooper Hewitt People's Choice Design Awards of 2008. He graduated from Brown University and grew up in Virginia.

Jan Garden Castro is the author of The Art & Life of Georgia O'Keeffe and co-editor of Margaret Atwood: Vision and Forms.

Rebecca Cleman is the Director of Distribution of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI). She is currently organizing a collaboration between EAI and The Fales Library for the preservation and distribution of unavailable works by the performance artist Stuart Sherman.

Co-Founder, CUE/Center for Urban Ecologies and Professor of Culture and Urbanism, University of California San Diego, Teddy Cruz is an architect with a humane vision for metropolitan areas across America that breaks down physical and cultural barriers, mixing wealthy and poor, old and new, and public and private. Internationally renowned for his urban research on the Tijuana-San Diego border, his work focuses on traditionally overlooked poor, minority and immigrant communities and spaces, and has transformed border neighborhoods in California and communities in New York by creating affordable, quality housing and public infrastructure.

Over the course of nearly two decades, Lisa Corinne Davis has created a wide range of work--from collage to drawings to paintings and sometimes a mélange of all three--that examines her place in the world, and, by extension, the place of an individual in modern society. Her work is included in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

D.B. Dowd is an illustrator and writer who teaches communication design and American culture studies courses at Washington University in St. Louis. He earned his MFA in Printmaking at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Dowd began to pursue his interest in more democratic art forms in the late 1990s when he produced a weekly illustrated serial for the St. Louis Post Dispatch called Sam the Dog. Additionally, he has produced animated experimental films, including The Doughboy (2004) Scenes from Starkdale, Ohio (2006).

A native of Waukegan, IL, Greg Drasler received his BFA and MFA from the University of Illinois at Champaign/Urbana. Drasler has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in 1991 and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1993. Drasler's work can be found in the collections of Dow Jones, Inc.; Krannert Art Museum, Champaign, IL; University of Illinois, Champaign/Urbana, IL; New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, NY: and Thurston Twigg-Smith, Honolulu, HI.

Stephen Farrell is a graphic designer, typographer and collaborative writer. With Steve Tomasula, he released the imagetext novel, VAS: An Opera in Flatland (University of Chicago Press, 2004). Stephen has been featured in over 50 books and journals internationally including American Book Review, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Emigre, Design Culture Now, Metropolis, Eye and Wired.

Faust and Smith travel as visiting artists, lecturing, demonstrating, and making collaborative projects in art centers and universities. Their joint venture, Purgatory Pie Press has had solo exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum and London's Victoria & Albert Museum, with their work in collections include MOMA, Brooklyn Museum, the Whitney, the Tate, National Gallery of Art, Cooper-Hewitt, the Getty, Corcoran, San Francisco MOMA, and the Walker. Faust hand sets wood and metal type and experiments with letterpress as a printmaking medium and Smith edits and designs and hand sews books. She is also authored and co-designed three books has for the Random House imprint Potter Craft: How to Make Books; Magic Books & Paper Toys; and The Paper Bride.

Julia Fish produces paintings that approach abstraction but in fact derive from the imagery of her home, studio, and garden. Her work has been presented in twenty-one solo exhibitions since 1980, and was the subject of a ten-year survey exhibition at The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago in 1996. Curated /group exhibitions include : Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; MAK Center for Art and Architecture / Schindler House, Los Angeles; Martin-Gropius Bau, Berlinische Galerie, Berlin, among many others.

Evelyn Hankins joined the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in 2007. Before coming to the Hirshhorn, Hankins was curator of collections and exhibitions at the Robert Hull Fleming Museum at the University of Vermont. There, she curated an array of shows ranging from contemporary group shows to the reinstallation of the Museum's Native American collections. She also was an assistant curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where she worked on exhibitions of Edward Hopper, Alexander Calder, Thomas Hart Benton, and Elie Nadelman, as well as the sound and performance components of the 2002 Biennial. Hankins received her M.A. and Ph.D. in art history from Stanford University.

As a writer, editor, and digital strategist, Sarah Hromack is most interested in finding the intersections between visual culture and the Internet. She has collaborated on the launch of several websites, including the Whitney Museum of American Art's, which she currently manages; she also edits the museum's quarterly online magazine, Whitney Stories, which launched in July of 2011. She is a former web editor of Art in America (2009) and Curbed San Francisco (2007-2009).

Christine Gray is a representational painter from Austin, Texas where she completed her BFA at The University of Texas in 2003. She received her MFA from University of California Santa Barbara in 2007. She has been the recipient of awards and residencies from The Bemis Center of Contemporary Art, The Golden Foundation, Jentel Artist Residency, 7 Below Arts Initiative, 1708 Gallery, and VCU School of the Arts.

Michelle Grabner is an artist and writer. She has exhibited her work at Musée d´art Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg; Stadtgalerie, Keil; Green Gallery, Milwaukee; Kunsthalle, Bern; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Daimler Contemporary, Berlin; Midway, Minneapolis; Rocket, London; INOVA, Milwaukee; Southfirst, Brooklyn; Gallery 16, San Francisco; Minus Space, Brooklyn; Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI; and the Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago among others.

Joanne Jones-Rizzi began her career in 1985 as an exhibit developer and cultural program leader at the Boston Children's Museum. During her 20-year tenure she was the lead concept and content developer for the internationally acclaimed Kid's Bridge exhibit, as well as TV & Me; Arthur's World; and Boston Black: A City Connects. She joined the Science Museum of Minnesota as a program and exhibit developer for the award-winning exhibit RACE: Are We So Different? which has now travelled to the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.

Jonathan Keller received a Bachelors of Fine Arts in Interactive Multimedia from the Minneapolis College of Art + Design in 1999 and a Masters of Fine Arts from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2007. Working at the intersection of craft, collection, and computation, Keller seeks to transcend & transform everyday digital elements through obsessive and generative processes. His online presence is felt widely throughout the internet, with video views in the millions, features on thousands of websites including NYTimes.com, BoingBoing, and the front page of Yahoo!.

Through the merger of the physical and the conceptual, Gordon Moore seeks to discuss the dual existence of the transitory and the fixed, the animate and inanimate, the permanent and the ephemeral. Born in Cherokee, Iowa in 1947, Gordon Moore graduated from the University of Washington, Seattle in 1970 and subsequently attended Yale, where he received his MFA in 1972. He received the National Endowment for the Arts-Visual Artists Fellowship (1980), the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award in Painting (1991) and the Adolph & Ester Gottlieb Foundation Award in Painting (2001).

New York painter Chris Martin is known for his strong, graphic, highly textured paintings. He graduated from Yale University in 1975, and lives and works in Brooklyn. He is the recipient in 2002 of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, in 1999 of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award, he has also been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a New York Foundation for the Art Fellowship.

Paul Chaat Smith is a Comanche author and curator whose work focuses on the contemporary landscape of American Indian politics and culture. Smith joined the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian in 2001, where he currently serves as Associate Curator. In 2004, he organized the permanent history exhibition at the core of the inaugural exhibitions at the museum. He is the co-author of Like a Hurricane: the Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee, a standard text in Native studies and American history courses and author of Everything You Know about Indians Is Wrong.

Joshua To founded BRUTE LABS in early 2006 as an experiment to explore what impact a small group of passionate but fully-employed young people could have. Since their inception, they have launched over 12 projects including implementing clean water projects in Africa, tackling childhood obesity through a program called RUN! and distributing maps to homeless people in Santa Monica to help them locate services available to them. For the past 5 years, Josh served as a Product Manager at Google leading technology development for global email communications to advertisers, publishers and users. Joshua founded a socially conscious clothing brand called RESONANCE during his sophomore year at University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). Joshua holds bachelors degrees in Design and Communication Studies from UCLA.

Rick Valicenti is the founder and principal of the design firm Thirst, where he has been creating and designing for over twenty years. His work has been featured in every major graphic design publication and he is also author of the book Emotion As Promotion. He received AIGA's Gold Medal for Lifetime Achievement in 2006; in 2011, he will receive Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum's National Design Award in Communications.

Ian Whitmore is a Brooklyn-based painter who incorporates many different themes into his paintings that convey a sense of rushed intrigue, depth and a chaotic sort of despair. His paintings seem to be grasping at life in a needy sort of way, wanting emotions and feelings of their very own, projecting them into the viewer with a force as strong as the movement in his works.