Cripping Cyberspace: A Contemporary Virtual Art Exhibition
Artist & Curator Biographies
Katherine Araniello is a London-based artist using video, digital imagery and performance art to respond to contemporary themes around disability. She creates frameworks that challenge and alter preconceptions. This is done through subversive humor and presenting disability in fresh discourses. Her focus is to disrupt and use satire in current issues related to disability such as assisted suicide, media representation, prejudice, charity, ignorance and body aesthetics. Araniello received a First Class Honors for her BA in Fine Art from London Guildhall University in 1999 and was awarded the Owen Rowley Prize for her end of year film ‘Slapping’. In 2004 she completed her Master’s Degree in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, where she won the Warden’s Purchase Prize for her pop video, 'I Like That'. Her work has been shown at galleries including Tate Modern and Tate Britain and her video work has been screened at film festivals internationally. Araniello is currently an Arts Admin Associate Artist, which is an arts lab for the 21st Century; nurturing innovative, experimental and unusual performance, site-specific and interdisciplinary work. She is also a board member of LADA (Live Art Development Agency) in London.
Amanda Cachia is an independent curator from Sydney, Australia and is currently completing her PhD in Art History, Theory & Criticism at the University of California, San Diego. Her dissertation will focus on the intersection of disability and contemporary art. Cachia completed her second Masters degree in Visual & Critical Studies at the California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco in spring, 2012. Cachia received her first Masters in Creative Curating from Goldsmiths College, University of London in 2001. She held the position Director/Curator of the Dunlop Art Gallery in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada from 2007-2010, and has curated approximately 30 exhibitions over the last ten years in various cities across the USA, England, Australia and Canada. Her writing has been published in numerous exhibition catalogues, Canadian Art magazine, and peer-reviewed academic journals such as Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, and Disability Studies Quarterly. She has lectured and participated in panels at conferences widely, within the USA, Canada, Australia and Europe. Cachia is a dwarf activist and has been the Chair of the Dwarf Artists Coalition for the Little People of America since 2007.
Arseli Dokumacı (m.i.a. collective) is a postdoctoral researcher at Concordia University, Department of Communication Studies, Mobile Media Lab. She received her Ph.D. in performance studies from Aberystwyth University, following an MA in film and communication from Bahcesehir University and a BA in translation studies from Bogazici University. Arseli’s research lies at the confluence of performance and disability and explores disability in relation to performativity, movement and mobility in everyday life. As part of her PhD project Misfires that matter: Invisible disabilities and performances of the everyday, she created a two-hour ethnographic documentary on everyday practices and “affordances” of people with rheumatoid arthritis. Articles stemming from this research have appeared in Performance Research (“On Falling Ill”, 2013) and Disability in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (“Performance of Muslim Daily Prayer by Physically Disabled Practitioners”, 2011). Arseli exhibited her video work as part of Differential Mobilities Conference multimedia exhibition (Montreal, 2013) and presented her documentary over a dozen of international and national events (including invited presentations for medical professionals). In her current postdoctoral project, Everyday “taskscapes”: Experiencing the same geography with different disabilities,” Arseli follows a deaf, a blind and a physically impaired individual (all living in the city of Montreal) and films their everyday practices over the course of a year with the aim of creating a series of online video capsules. Arseli is the current chair of emerging scholars committee at Performance Studies international (PSi) and works as the project assistant for PSi#21 – the globally dispersed conference PSi will be holding in 2015. She is also a part of the organizing team for Trans-Montreal symposium 2015 and a member of the Performance and Disability working group at International Federation for Theatre Research. Together with Kim Sawchuk, Arseli will be co-convening a work group on performance and disability as part of Encuentro 2014, MANIFEST! Choreographing Social Movements in the Americas.
Cassandra Hartblay is a PhD candidate in the department of anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the United States. Her past academic work includes investigations of grassroots activism and education for children with disabilities in Russia and Kyrgyzstan. Her dissertation project utilizes performance ethnography methodologies and engaged scholarship to explore social inclusion of adults with disabilities in Petrozavodsk, Russia. This includes traditional ethnographic methods such as interviewing and participant observation, as well as arts-based research practices including social theater, collaborative digital archives, and installation art. Cassandra is the 2013 recipient of the Irving K. Zola Award for Emerging Scholars in Disability Studies, and a co-founder of the Carolina Coalition for Disability Justice at UNC-CH. Read more on her website, cassandra.web.unc.edu.
Sara Hendren is an artist, researcher, and writer in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She makes material art works and writes about adaptive technologies and prosthetics, critical design, the medicalized and biopolitical body, and cultural representations of disability and health. In 2012-13, she completed research in the program on Art, Design, and the Public Domain at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she was also a research fellow at the MetaLAB at Harvard. Projects at various stages include: an investigation of the inclined plane, one of Galileo's "simple machines," cardboard carpentry, personal genomics, and prosthetics for invisible conditions. She runs the Abler web site and is lecturing in fall 2013 at the Rhode Island School of Design.
Antonia Hernandez (m.i.a. collective) is a graphic and web designer. She finished a Masters degree in Media Studies at Concordia University. Mixing media practice and theoretical research, her interests involve the domestic side of digital networks, interfaces and alternative education. She works for the Mobile Media Lab, providing public and visual output to diverse types of research.
Laurence Parent (m.i.a. collective) is a PhD student in Humanities at Concordia University. She holds a MA in Critical Disability Studies from York University and a BA in Political Science from Université du Québec à Montréal. She lives in Montréal and is involved within the Québec Disability Rights Movement. In 2009, she co-founded a disability rights organization called RAPLIQ which aims to challenge ableism by doing direct actions and using creative means. She wrote, directed and produced her first documentary film-Je me souviens: Excluded from the Montréal subway since 1966- which has won the award of Emerging Artist at the 2010 International Disability Film Festival in Berkeley. She is involved in the project Montréal *in/accessible since its beginning in 2012. She directed Cripping the Landscape: Québec City.
Kim Sawchuk (m.i.a. collective) is a Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University. She holds a Concordia University Research Chair in Mobile Media Studies. She is the former editor of the Canadian Journal of Communication and a co-founder of the feminist media studio, studio XX. The current co-editor of Wi: Journal of Mobile Media, her research in mobile media studies focuses on geo-locational media, ageing and digital technologies, and the intersections between mobility studies and critical disability studies. A feminist media studies scholar, Sawchuk is interested in collaborative writing practices, with a special focus on new media art, wireless and mobile media technologies and the politics and culture of health and biomedicine. Her many publications include Sampling the Wireless Spectrum: the politics, poetics and practice of mobile media (2010) co-edited with Dr. Barbara Crow and Professor Michael Longford of York University. Other publications included Used/GOODs (2009) with artists and curators Gisele Amantea and Lorraine Oades. Embodiment (2007) is a collection of feminist writing on the body with artist-researcher Christina Lammer and curator Catherine Pilcher (Vienna). Other publications include Wild Science: Reading Feminism, Medicine, and the Media (2000) co-edited with Janine Marchessault and When Pain Strikes (1999), co-edited with the artists and curators Cathy Busby and Bill Burns.