Keynote speakers:
Professor Lizbeth Goodman - Chair of Creative Technology Innovation and Director SMARTlab Digital Media Institute, University of East London
with
Dr. Mick Donegan - Prinicipal Researcher in Assistive Technology and Multimodal Interfaces, SMARTlab
Professor Jane Davidson - University of Sheffield, UK and the Callaway-Tunley Chair of Music University of Western Australia
Oron Catts - Co-founder and director of SymbioticA, The Centre of Excellence in Biological Arts in the School of Anatomy and Human Biology, The University of Western Australia
Professor Graeme Sullivan - Columbia University, NY
Unfortunately Professor Kathy Faber-Langendoen from SUNY Upstate Medical University, New York has had to withdrawn from the Symposium for health related reasons. However ArtsHealth has been fortunate to secure Professor Lizbeth Goodman as the new keynote speaker for Session #3.
Professor Lizbeth Goodman
Chair of Creative Technology Innovation and Director SMARTlab Digital Media Institute, University of East London
Professor Lizbeth Goodman joined University of East London (UEL) as the new Chair of Creative Technology Innovation in 2005. She is also Founder and Director of the SMARTlab Digital Media Institute. An active researcher and community technology advocate, she has published and presented widely. She was awarded a Microsoft Community Affairs Senior Research Fellowship for development of SMARTclubs for disdvantaged youth in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (2--6-9).
Professor Goodman received the Lifetime Achievement Award for Volunteer Service to Women and Children in 2003, and was shortlisted and commended for a Times Higher Award in 2007. She was recently named the Best Woman In Technology (Public Sector and Academia) and BlackBerry Outstanding Woman in Technology by the corporate and government lead bodies judging the Blackberry Women and Technology Awards for 2008. She holds the Microsoft Community Affairs Senior Research Fellowship for her work on a new series of books on Digital Culture and real people: the Emergenc(i)es series with MIT Press. www.smartlab.uk.com
Professor Jane Davidson
University of Sheffield, UK/Callaway-Tunley Chair of Music University of Western Australia
Jane Davidson is Professor of Music Performance Studies at the University of Sheffield, UK and Callaway-Tunley Chair of Music, University of Western Australia. She has written more than one hundred scholarly contributions on performance, expression, therapy and the determinants of artistic abilities. Her edited volume the Music Practitioner (Ashgate, 2004) explores the uses of research for the practising musician. A former editor of the international academic journal Psychology of Music, she is currently Vice-president of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music.
Current research projects include: the expressive body movements of duettists; the adaptive value of music, including singing and personal identity; the development of 'talent'; the function of music in mental health settings; the music performances of the Temple Street musicians in Hong Kong; the process of music theatre directing, and the staging of Baroque works. These interests reflect her unusual background in music psychology and musicology, vocal performance and contemporary dance.
Jane has undergraduate and post-graduate degrees in music, vocal performance and contemporary dance, having studied in England at Newcastle, Leeds and London Universities, and at Laval in Quebec, Canada. She has won many prizes and scholarships, including a Rotary International Graduate Scholarship, and number of awards for singing. In her academic career, she has taught at undergraduate and post-graduate levels, contributing to courses on: psychological approaches to performance, development of musical ability, psychology for musicians, music therapy, music in the community, gender studies in music, opera and music theatre studies, vocal pedagogy and movement classes. She was a recent recipient of the University of Sheffield's 'Senate Award' for her innovatory teaching practices.
After much solo operatic performance, which included world premiere performances of operas at London International Opera Festival and a main role with the highly innovative and acclaimed Théâtre de Complicité, Jane turned her attention to a stage direction in opera and music theatre. Besides forming her own company Soundbodies, Soundmoves, she has collaborated extensively with companies including Opera North and Drama per Musica. Jane and Andrew Lawrence-King (The Harp Consort) have worked together on a range of Baroque music theatre projects, and have a series of new projects in the pipeline including the forthcoming Window to the Soul involving a cast of blind opera singers.
Oron Catts
Co-founder and co-director of SymbioticA, the Art and Science Collaborative Research Laboratory at the University of Western Australia
Oron Catts is an artist and researcher at the forefront of the emerging field of Bio-art, whose work addresses the ethical and social implications of life sciences research and application. In 1996, he co-founded of the Tissue Culture and Art Project with Ionat Zurr, to explore the possibilities of tissue culture manipulation and engineering as a form of artistic inquiry. Their work provocatively investigates the threshold between the living and the non-living. Among other things, they construct three-dimensional sculpture and installation composed of live tissue. Past projects include semi-living food and leather, in which the “steaks” and “jackets” were cultured in a laboratory setting to ironically interrogate the possibility of victim-less meat-eating and leather production, the Pig Wings Project, in which several pairs of wings made from pig bone marrow stem cells were grown, and Extra Ear-1/4 Scale, in which a miniature replica of Australian performance artist Stelarc's left ear was grown using human cartilage cells. Oron Catts has been a research fellow at the Harvard Medical School and has published and exhibited work internationally, including NY MoMA. Ars Electronica, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, National Gallery of Victoria (Australia) and much more.
Catts is Director of SymbioticA, which he co-founded in 2000 as the world's first research facility within a biological science department dedicated to hands-on artistic inquiry into the life sciences. SymbioticA was awarded the inaugural Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica in Hybrid Art in 2007 and has a thriving residency and academic programme.
Professor Graeme Sullivan, Columbia University
Graeme Sullivan is Professor of Art Education, Teachers College, Columbia University, and former the Chair of the Department of Arts and Humanities. He received his PhD from The Ohio State University, Columbus Ohio in 1984, and taught at the University of New South Wales, Australia from 1988, before taking up the position at Teachers College in January 1999. His particular scholarly interest involves an ongoing investigation of critical-reflexive thinking processes and methods of inquiry used in the visual arts. The overall aim is to describe, interpret and critique approaches to thinking particular to arts practice with the purpose of developing models of inquiry and studio-based research in universities and art schools.
Graeme’s research involves inquiries into the intellectual and imaginative practices of artists and the way the arts are mediated as a means of learning by cultural commentators, teachers and students. These ideas and approaches are described in his book, Art Practice as Research: Inquiry in the Visual Arts (Sage, 2005). He has published widely in the field of art education and in 1990 he was awarded the Manual Barkan Memorial Award for his scholarly writing by the National Art Education Association (NAEA) and the 2007 Lowenfeld Award for significant contribution to the art education profession. He is also the author of Seeing Australia: Views of Artists and Artwriters (1994). Graeme has fulfilled many professional roles and is the former Senior Editor of Studies in Art Education, the research journal of the NAEA. He maintains an active art practice and his Streetworks have been installed in several international cities and sites over the past ten years
Dr. Mick Donegan
Principal Researcher in Assistive Technology and Multimodal Interfaces, SMARTlab
Dr Mick Donegan is the Principal Research Fellow in Multimodal Interfaces, and the head of a new research group on Interfaces for Assistive Technology & Creativity at the SMARTlab. He has been working closely with James Brosnan, Lizbeth Goodman, Toby Borland and the London and Dublin INTERFACE teams to investigate the most appropriate, functional and aesthetically/emotionally empowering communication forms with and for people with disabilities. Mick joined SMARTlab from the Oxford ACE Centre, where he leads for the European Commission's CoGain project on cognitive systems and interfaces. He also directs the new charity SpecialEffect, creating bespoke games for people with severe physical disabilities.
