Issue 2.1 Homepage

Nieves Ayress is a former militant with the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionario (Left Revolutionary Movement) in Chile, who was detained and tortured during Pinochet's dictatorship. After spending years in prison, she was exiled and then traveled throughout the world, finally settling in New York City. In 1987, she co-founded Vamos a la Pena del Bronx, a local grassroots community center in the South Bronx.

Jean Carlomusto and Jane Rosett co-curate, produce and direct AIDS: A LIVING ARCHIVE™, an ongoing interactive multi-media installation based on their photography, video and writings documenting the HIV/AIDS pandemic over the past twenty years. AIDS: A LIVING ARCHIVE™ features The Interactive Portrait Gallery. AIDS: A LIVING ARCHIVE™ was invited to premiere at the Museum of the City of New York to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the global HIV/AIDS pandemic. Carlomusto's works are unorthodox investigative reports on subjects that have been erased from history. She has created numerous videotapes about HIV/AIDS over the past 16 years. In 1987, Carlomusto founded the Media Production Unit at Gay Men's Health Crisis; and was also a member of Testing the Limits video collective and founding member of DIVA TV. She holds a Master of Professional Studies degree from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at Tisch School of the Arts, NYU, where she was also awarded the Distinction of Excellence in Video Production. Currently, Carlomusto is Associate Professor of Media Arts and Director of the Television Studio at Long Island University's C.W. Post Campus.

Mary Marshall Clark is the Director of the Oral History Research Office at Columbia University, the oldest and largest university-based oral history archive and program in the world. Clark is the co-founder, with Peter Bearman, of the "September 11, 2001 Oral History Narrative and Memory Project," a longitudinal oral history project in which life histories of over 500 people who were affected by the events and aftermath of 9/11 were conducted. Ms. Clark is also the founder of the "September 11, 2001 Telling Lives Project" in which oral history is used to strengthen families, communities, schools and immigrant neigborhoods in which economic as well as human loss and conflict were suffered in the aftermath of September 11. Clark is past president of the Oral History Association, and a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. She has also worked as a filmmaker and oral historian at the New York Times.

Anne Cubilié is Assistant Professor of English at Georgetown University. Her areas of research include transnational feminist cultural studies, media, gender and sexuality studies, testimonial theory, and atrocity studies. She recently completed a book titled, Limits of Culture: Testimonial Witnessing and the Constraints of Human Rights, and she has begun work on a second book project focused on Muslim women and international aid organizations. She also works as a consultant to the United Nations on gender, education and human rights.

Ann Cvetkovich is Associate Professor of English and Women's Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture and Victorian Sensationalism (Rutgers, 1992) and An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Culture (Duke, 2003). She has also published articles relevant to her interest in public feelings in the journals Camera Obscura, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, and GLQ, and in the edited collections Dancing Desires, Feminist Consequences, and Trauma at Home: After 9/11.

Judith Halberstam is Professor of Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of California at San Diego. Halberstam is the author of Female Masculinity and The Drag King Book (with Del LaGrace Volcano) and is currently finishing a book on transgender embodiment and starting a new project on queer temporality and subcultural lives.

Roger Hallas is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the English Department at Syracuse University, where he teaches film and media studies. He is currently writing a book on AIDS, bearing witness, and the queer moving image, and co-editing The Image and the Witness, a collection of essays on witnessing and visual culture. His publications have appeared in Camera Obscura, Canadian Journal of Film Studies, and Millennium Film Journal.

Alyssa Harad is an instructor at the University of Texas at Austin where she will receive her Ph.D. in English in August, 2003. Her dissertation, "Ordinary Witnesses," explores the literary's power to connect national historical trauma with everyday contemporary life.

Marianne Hirsch is Ted and Helen Geisel Third Century Professor in the Humanities at Dartmouth College where she teaches French, Comparative Literature, Women's Studies and Jewish Studies. Her books include Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory; The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism; the edited collection The Familial Gaze, and a special issue of Signs, 28:1, on Gender and Cultural Memory. She is currently writing a book with Leo Spitzer, entitled Ghosts of Home: Czernowitz and the Holocaust.

Sharon Holland is Associate Professor of African American Studies and English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is the author of Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity (Duke, 2000) which won the Lora Romero First Book Prize from the American Studies Association in 2002. She has published in the fields of African American, feminist, and queer studies and is currently at work on a second book project, "Between Fabrication and Generation[s]": Biology, Sex and Habitual Non-Belonging. Holland is also at work on a novel, How Bubba the Socrates Got to be Neither.

Jonathan Kalb is Chair of the Theater Department at Hunter College of the City University of New York and a member of Theater Ph.D. faculty at the CUNY Graduate Center. In addition to authoring dozens of articles, essays and interviews that have appeared in such journals as The New York Times Book Review, Theater, and Modern Drama, he has published award winning, book-length studies of Samuel Beckett and Heiner Müller.

Sarah Jones is a poet, spoken word performer, actor and playwright. A vibrant and multi-talented artist whose works earned her the distinction of being Ms. magazine's October 2000 "cover girl," she is the creator of three solo shows: Surface Transit, which won her a Drama Desk Award nomination; Women Can't Wait, which premiered at the United Nation's International Conference on Women's Rights; and Waking the American Dream, which premiered for the National Immigration Forum.

Rachel C. Lee is Associate Professor of English and Women's Studies at the University of California at Los Angeles, where she specializes in Asian American literature and performance culture. She is the author of The Americas of Asian American Literature: Gendered Fictions of Nation and Transnation (Princeton, 1999), which addresses current debates on the relationship among Asian American ethnic identity, national belonging, globalization, and gender. Her essays on location, territory, and critical regionalism in the context of Asian American cultural criticism have appeared in The Women's Review of Books, Cultural Critique, boundary 2, and various anthologies. Her more recent work includes an essay on women of color in relation to the institution of women's studies (Meridians, Fall 2000, rpt. in Women's Studies on Its Own, Duke, 2002) and a collection of edited essays on Asian Americans and cyberspace, entitled Asian America.Net: Ethnicity, Nationalism, Cyberspace (Routledge, 2003).

Daphne Lei is Assistant Professor in Drama at the University of California at Irvine. Her research fields include Asian and Asian American theatre, intercultural performance, and women in theatre. Her articles appear in Asian Theatre Journal, Theatre Research International, and other collections. This article is part of a larger project on Cantonese opera in the Bay Area from the Gold Rush through the present.

Peter Lucas teaches in the Department of International and Transcultural Studies at Teachers College, Columbia University. His teaching focuses on peace education and international studies in human rights. As a scholar, Lucas has studied school violence and school safety in New York, peace education in the schools, the role of photography and film in human rights witnessing, and violence and public safety in Rio de Janeiro. He is currently writing a book entitled The Mural of Pain: The Visual Representation of Violence and Peace in the Brazilian Human Rights Movement.

Meg McLagan is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at New York University, where she teaches in the graduate Program in Culture and Media. She recently completed an ethnography titled Skillful Means: Culture, Media, and Transnational Tibet Activism (Princeton, forthcoming). She is currently working on a new project on media and human rights.

Lorie Novak is an artist who has been using family snapshots in her work since the early 1980s. She is a professor of photography at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. Her work has been included in numerous exhibitions, volumes and collections including solo exhibitions at the International Center for Photography in New York; the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago; the Houston Center for Photography; Breda Fotografica, the Netherlands; Jayne Baum Gallery in New York; University Art Museum, Cal. State University, Long Beach; Addison Gallery in Andover, MA; Stanford University Art Museum. She has been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, a Louis Tiffany Foundation Fellowship, and residencies at the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center, MacDowell Colony, Yaddo and the Djerassi Foundation.

Ann Pellegrini is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Performance Studies at New York University. She is the author of Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race (Routledge 1997) and co-author, with Janet R. Jakobsen, of Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance (NYU, 2003). Her coedited volume Queer Theory and the Jewish Question will be published by Columbia University Press in Fall 2003.

Jorge Ramos is the winner of seven Emmy Awards for excellence in journalism. Mr. Ramos has been the anchorman for Noticiero Univision for the last fourteen years. He is the author of numerous best-selling books, including Lo que vi, No Borders: A Journalist's Search for Home, The Other Face of America: Chronicles of the Immigrants Shaping Our Future, and most recently Otra cara de America: historia de los inmigrantes lantinamericanos que estan cambiando a Estados. The recipient of numerous awards, including the prestigious Maria Moors Cabot Prize for excellence in reporting on Latin America, he also pens a weekly column about US and Latin American politics, which can be read in more than 35 papers in the United States and abroad.

Janelle Reinelt is Associate Dean and Professor of Drama in the Claire Trevor School of the Arts at the University of California at Irvine. Additionally, she is President of the International Federation for Theatre Research and Vice President for Research and Publications of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. She is the former editor of Theatre Journal. Her books include After Brecht: British Epic Theatre, Crucibles of Crisis: Performance and Social Change, Critical Theory and Performance with Joseph Roach, The Performance of Power with Sue-Ellen Case, and The Cambridge Campanion to Modern British Women Playwrights with Elaine Aston. Her current book project is titled Public Performances: Race and Nation in the Theatre of Our Time.

Steven Reisner is Senior Advisor and faculty at the International Trauma Studies Program at New York University, and is Adjunct Professor both in the Program in Clinical Psychology, Columbia University, Teachers College and at the Psychoanalytic Institute of the New York University Medical School. In addition, Reisner is the director of Theater Arts Against Political Violence, which has helped create works of theater with Tibetan, Chilean, and Kosovar survivors of torture and exile in New York and in Kosovo. In an earlier career, Reisner was a director and actor, whose projects were performed at the Public Theater, La Mama E.T.C., Theater for the New City, and on tour in North and South America. He shared an Obie award for collaborative theater as a member of Joseph Chaikin's Winter Project.

Jane Rosett and Jean Carlomusto co-curate, produce and direct AIDS: A LIVING ARCHIVE™, an ongoing interactive multi-media installation based on their photography, video and writings documenting the HIV/AIDS pandemic over the past twenty years. Rosett has been photographing & writing about the HIV/AIDS pandemic for the past 20 years. Most recently, Rosett served as archivist, production consultant, and contributing photographer of the forthcoming book FACING AIDS: THE GLOBAL PANDEMIC, by Umbrage Editions. FACING AIDS: THE GLOBAL PANDEMIC is a three-format production, which also includes: HBO/MOXIE FIRECRACKER PRODUCTIONS film as well as a worldwide travelling exhibition sponsored by the United Nations. Rosett's work documents the birth & evolution of the people with HIV/AIDS movement, specifically through community-based organizing around issues of treatment activism. Rosett was a founder of the People with AIDS Coalition, NY, the Community Research Initiative, the National Association of People with AIDS, and the People with AIDS Health Group. Currently, Rosett is a Special Fellow at Harvard University's AIDS Institute.

Rebecca Schneider is Associate Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at Brown University. She is the author of The Explicit Body in Performance (Routledge 1997) and is currently working on a book called Playing Remains: Performance in Visual Culture. She has co-edited the anthology Re:Direction: A Theoretical and Practical Guide on 20th-century directing theory and practice (Routledge 2001). She is a contributing editor to TDR: The Drama Review and has published essays in several anthologies, includingPsychoanalysis and Performance, Acting Out: Feminist Performance, Performance and Cultural Politics, and the forthcoming After Criticism?: New Responses to Contemporary Art. She has lectured in Australia, Germany, Great Britain, Finland, France, Austria, and Switzerland as well as across the United States. As a "performing theorist" she has occasionally collaborated with artists, most recently in an installation by Hannah Hurtzig and Heike Roms at the British Museum in London as part of the London International Festival of Theatre.

Anna Deavere Smith has been hailed by Newsweek as "the most exciting individual in American theater." As both playwright and performance artist, Deavere Smith uses her singular brand of theater to explore issues of race, community and character in America. She was awarded the prestigious MacArthur Foundation "genius" Fellowship for creating "a new form of theater - a blend of theatrical art, social commentary, journalism and intimate reverie." Smith is perhaps best known as the author and performer of two one-woman plays about racial tensions in American cities Fires in the Mirror (Obie Award-winner and runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize) and Twilight: Los Angeles 1992 (Obie Award-winner and Tony Award nominee). Smith plays National Security Advisor Nancy McNally on NBC's The West Wing and co-starred in the CBS drama, Presidio Med. She has appeared in the films Philadelphia, Dave, The American President and on TV's "The Practice." The film version of Twilight premiered at the 2000 Sundance Film Festival. She also is the author of Talk to Me: Travels in Media & Politics. Smith is a tenured professor at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University and is affiliated with the NYU School of Law, where she teaches a course on "The Art of Listening." She is currently working on a new book, Letter to a Young Artist, and will appear in The Human Stain (Fall 2003), a new film starring Anthony Hopkins and Nicole Kidman.

Kathleen Stewart teaches anthropology and cultural studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She writes on political imaginaries and structures of desire in the United States. She has done fieldwork in West Virginia, Las Vegas, Orange County, CA, Austin, TX, and New England. She is the author of A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an "Other" America (Princeton, 1996). She is currently completing a yet untitled book on the private life of public culture, or the culture of impact, affect, and intimacy in the United States now.

Jason Tougaw is a Lecturer in the Writing Program at Princeton University. He is co-editor (with Nancy K. Miller) of Extremities: Trauma, Testimony, and Community (University of Illinois, 2002), and his writing has appeared in The Journal of Medical Humanities, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, and The Journal of the History of Sexuality. He is currently finishing a book entitled Strange Cases: The Medical Case History and the British Novel.