Lauren Bon
Lauren Bon and Metabolic Studio are a team of individuals that work together across a range of investigative platforms, transforming resources into energy, actions, and outcomes. Bon is a graduate of Princeton University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, holding degrees in architecture and the history and theory of art. Her solo exhibitions include Bees and Meat (Ace Gallery, Los Angeles); Not a Cornfield, a thirty-two-acre living sculpture on a plot of land between Chinatown and Lincoln Heights, Los Angeles; and Project Room: Hand Held Objects (Santa Monica Museum of Art). Bon has also produced large-scale urban and public works in such cities as Los Angeles, Belfast, Hong Kong, Edinburgh, and Belgrade. The Metabolic Studio has been involved in water issues in Los Angeles and eastern California’s Owens Valley since 2010.
Marisa Cooper
Marisa Cooper is the Charles N. Mathewson Director of Education at the Nevada Museum of Art. She has thirteen years of classroom teaching experience and has served in a variety of leadership roles ranging from STEAM (science, technology, engineering, applied arts, and mathematics) fair director to science program coordinator. She has a BA in communications and anthropology from the University of California, Davis, and a master’s degree in education and biology from the University of Nevada, Reno. She serves on the USGBC (U.S. Green Building Council) Nevada Green Schools Committee, the Nevada STEM Coalition’s STEAM task force, and the Nevada Department of Education’s committee to integrate arts and culture into STEM, and is the lead curriculum consultant for the Nevada Department of Education’s Green Ribbon Schools Program. She has a history of writing innovative and cutting-edge STEM and STEAM curriculum focusing on arts integration, ecoliteracy, and project-based learning.
Minerva Cuevas
A Mexico City–based conceptual artist, Minerva Cuevas is known for her research-oriented social practice that engages with pressing political and economic issues and the lives of everyday people. Many of her projects relate to corporate branding, especially with regard to entities that control natural resources, such as Big Oil and agribusiness. The aesthetic expression of her work ranges from site-specific installations (such as the new one she has created for the Unsettled exhibition) and video to public performances and interventions.
Julie Decker
Julie Decker, PhD, has served as director and CEO of the Anchorage Museum since 2013, after joining the museum as chief curator in 2011. She positioned the museum to be the key cultural institution in the Circumpolar North and a leader for discussions of the North throughout the world by establishing its Northern Initiative, which combines exhibitions, scholarship, public programming, and community outreach to explore the current and future state of the North through culture, community, and the environment.
Harley K. Dubois
Harley K. Dubois, a founding member of Burning Man and the Black Rock Arts Foundation, was city manager of Black Rock City for more than ten years, and oversaw both the Playa Safety Council and Community Services departments. She originated theme camp placement, the Greeters, Playa Info, and Burning Man Information Radio, and created and maintains a comprehensive training and self-development program for the Burning Man staff. She created and chaired the Grants to Artists committee and serves as a director on the board of Illuminate, an organization which rallies large groups of people to create impossible works of public art. In 2016 Dubois was named one of four founding board members of the Nation of Makers, an organization whose mission is to provide more Americans access to the spaces, communities, and tools to make more and consume less.
Bruno Fazzolari
San Francisco–based Bruno Fazzolari is a visual artist who began creating perfumes inspired by his experience of synesthesia (“seeing” scent). His visionary scents have become cult sensations, and have gained inspiration from such diverse sources as the Stanley Kubrick film The Shining (Room 237) and India ink pigment (Lampblack). He was commissioned to create a bespoke scent—conceived, compounded, bottled, and boxed by the artist—specifically for the Unsettled exhibition as an olfactory evocation of the Greater West.
Ana Teresa Fernández
Ana Teresa Fernández was born in Tampico, Mexico, and moved to the United States when she was ten. A political activist, performance artist, and painter, Fernández responded to the current debate over immigration from Mexico to the U.S. by creating Borrando la Frontera (Erasing the Border), a performance at the border fence separating Tijuana from San Diego in which she makes the fence disappear by painting it blue to match the sky. Her work touches upon issues of labor, the female body, and subjugation. Borrando la Frontera appears in two forms in the Unsettled exhibition: as a film of the 2012 performance, and as a painting based on the film.
William L. Fox
William L. Fox, director of the Center for Art + Environment, has been called an art critic, science writer, and cultural geographer. He has published fifteen books on cognition and landscape, numerous essays in art monographs, magazines, and journals, and fifteen collections of poetry. He is a fellow of both the Royal Geographical Society and Explorers Club, and the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, and National Science Foundation. He has been a visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute, Clark Art Institute, and the Australian National University, and is a guest researcher at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design.
Nicholas Galanin
Born in Sitka, Alaska, and educated in London and New Zealand, multidisciplinary artist and musician Nicholas Galanin (Tlingit/Unangax) has struck an intriguing balance between his origins and the course of his practice. His sculptural work appeared in the 2014 Art + Environment Conference exhibition Late Harvest. Using a wide range of media, Galanin creates pieces that deftly navigate the politics of cultural representation while simultaneously preserving his culture, provoking thought, and exploring new perceptual territory.
Lance Gilman
Lance Gilman holds the title of principal and director for L. Lance Gilman Commercial Real Estate Services, the exclusive brokerage firm for the Tahoe Reno Industrial Center (TRIC). He attended college in Texas, worked as a broker for Grubb & Ellis, and has started and owned numerous businesses in addition to being a contractor and developer. TRIC is widely hailed as a visionary project that links together warehousing, manufacturing, merchandise fulfillment, transportation, and digital infrastructure.
Marian Goodell
As Burning Man’s first CEO, Marian Goodell oversees its year-round staff of more than seventy employees and its annual operating budget of approximately $35 million. She is a cofounder of the management company that eventually became Black Rock City, LLC, which produces the Burning Man gathering. Throughout her leadership in the organization, she has been the director of business and communications, and also oversaw the Black Rock City Department of Public Works. She has steered the development of the Burning Man Regional Network, which is now on six continents, with more than 250 representatives in thirty countries. She is a founding board member of the Burning Man Project, the Black Rock Arts Foundation, and Black Rock Solar. Goodell holds a BA in creative writing from Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland, and an MFA in photography from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. She has worked in sales and public relations, and was a project manager for a software development firm.
Larry Harvey
In 1986 Larry Harvey founded Burning Man on Baker Beach in San Francisco and has steered its growth ever since. In 1997 he became a cofounder of Black Rock City, LLC, the gathering’s managing organization, and served as its executive director. He later went on to cofound and serve as the chairman of the board of the Black Rock Arts Foundation. In 2013 he cofounded Burning Man Project, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization with a year-round staff of more than seventy employees and an annual operating budget of approximately $35 million. He currently serves as its board president and chief philosophic officer. Harvey scripts and produces the gathering’s annual art theme, supervises the design and infrastructure of the iconic man sculpture, and is co-chair of its art department. He has spoken at Harvard University, Columbia University, Walker Art Center, the Commonwealth Club of California, Oxford University Student Union, London’s Southbank Centre, and Austin’s South by Southwest conference, and was interviewed by Charlie Rose on the latter’s television program in 2014.
Jonathon Keats
Jonathon Keats is an artist, writer and experimental philosopher based in San Francisco and Northern Italy. His conceptually-driven interdisciplinary projects explore all aspects of society through science and technology. In recent years, he has installed a camera with a thousand-year-long exposure – documenting the long-term effects of climate change – at the Arizona State University Art Museum; introduced a reciprocal biomimicry initiative – allowing non-human species to benefit from human technologies – at the Samek Art Museum; and exhibited extraterrestrial abstract artwork decoded from Arecibo Observatory radiotelescope data at the Judah L. Magnes Museum. Exhibited internationally, Keats's projects have been documented by PBS, Reuters, and the BBC World Service, in addition to Science, Flash Art to The Atlantic. He has lectured at institutions including UC Berkeley, the Long Now Foundation and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), which awarded him a 2015-16 Art + Technology Lab Grant. His latest book, You Belong to the Universe: Buckminster Fuller and the Future has recently been published by Oxford University Press, which also published his previous book, Forged: Why Fakes Are the Great Art of Our Age.
Rem Koolhaas
Rem Koolhaas cofounded OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture) in 1975. Widely recognized as one of the world’s leading architecture firms, OMA operates with nine partners and offices in Rotterdam, Beijing, Hong Kong, New York, Doha, and Dubai. Koolhaas heads the efforts of both OMA and AMO, the research branch of OMA, working in areas beyond the realm of architecture such as media, politics, renewable energy, and fashion. He graduated from the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London and in 1978 published Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan. In 1995, his book S, M, L, XL summarized the work of OMA in “a novel about architecture.” Koolhaas is a professor at Harvard University and in 2014 was the director of the Venice Architecture Biennale. His built work includes the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow (2015), Fondazione Prada in Milan (2015), the headquarters for China Central Television (CCTV) in Beijing (2012), Casa da Música in Porto (2005), Seattle Central Library (2004), Netherlands Embassy in Berlin (2003), and the Maison à Bordeaux (1998). Current projects include the Qatar Foundation headquarters, Qatar National Library, Taipei Performing Arts Center, Axel Springer headquarters in Berlin, and the Factory Manchester.
Da-ka-xeen Mehner
Da-ka-xeen Mehner’s art practice fulfills his statement, “Culture is not something that’s frozen. It’s something that’s moving and living.” Born in Fairbanks, Alaska, Mehner describes his upbringing as half Tlingit/N’ishga and half hippie. His work combines traditional crafts such as woodcarving with photography and video to bring a contemporary perspective to indigenous art.
Michael Mikel
Michael Mikel is a founding board member of the Burning Man Project, director of Advanced Social Systems, ambassador, and a member of the Philosophical Center. He was a cofounder of Burning Man, which he joined in 1988, and a cofounder of Black Rock City, LLC, in 1999. In 1991 his concept car, The 5:04 PM, was the first art car at Burning Man. He edited the project’s first onsite newspaper, founded the Black Rock Rangers, and developed the logo design that has become the symbol of the Burning Man community. Mikel began his career in the 1970s as an electromechanical systems engineer for Fairchild Semiconductor, working on precursors of the personal computer in nascent Silicon Valley. In the early 1980s, he advised Caltrans on intelligent freeway systems in Los Angeles, developed the first robotic assembly line for Apple Computer’s Fremont plant, and cofounded San Francisco’s first tech startup, Jasmine Technology. He was a pivotal member of the Cacophony Society, a crew member of Survival Research Laboratories’ machine- performance group, and a former member of the underground Billboard Liberation Front. He is best known by his playa persona “Danger Ranger.”
JoAnne Northrup
JoAnne Northrup, curatorial director and curator of contemporary art at the Nevada Museum of Art, organized the exhibition Unsettled, the centerpiece for this year’s Art + Environment Conference, which explores the relationship between landscape and culture. For the 2014 conference she curated Late Harvest. Prior to her time in Nevada, Northrup was a Fulbright senior research scholar at the Center for Art and Media (ZKM, or Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie) in Karlsruhe, Germany. As chief curator (2008–11) and senior curator (2001–08) at the San Jose Museum of Art, California, she curated the first nationally touring survey exhibitions and authored the respective monographs on contemporary media artists Jennifer Steinkamp (2006) and Leo Villareal (2010).
Rubén Ortiz-Torres
Rubén Ortiz-Torres is a Mexican artist who has been based in Los Angeles since 1990. He draws from lowrider customizing, Finish Fetish style, and a quintessential Los Angeles story to create and inform his Power Tools sculptures, included in Unsettled. Spawned by a 1996 event in Los Angeles that pitted residents against the mostly Latino gardeners and landscapers who cared for people’s lawns and gardens, Ortiz-Torres’s work deals with issues of race, class, protest, and community organization.
Trevor Paglen
Holding a BA from the University of California, Berkeley, an MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago, and a PhD in geography from U.C. Berkeley, Trevor Paglen is an artist whose work spans image making, sculpture, investigative journalism, writing, engineering, and other disciplines. Paglen’s solo exhibitions have been presented at the Vienna Secession, Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, Frankfurter Kunstverein, and Protocinema in Istanbul. His work has appeared in group exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern in London, and numerous other venues. He has launched an artwork into distant orbit around earth in collaboration with Creative Time and M.I.T., contributed research and cinematography to the Academy Award–winning film Citizenfour, and created a radioactive public sculpture for the exclusion zone in Fukushima, Japan. He is the author of five books and numerous articles on such subjects as experimental geography, state secrecy, military symbology, photography, and visuality. Paglen’s work has been profiled in the New York Times, Vice, the New Yorker, and Artforum. In 2014 he received the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award for his work as a “groundbreaking investigative artist.”
Will Roger Peterson
Will Roger Peterson discovered Burning Man in 1994 and cofounded Black Rock City, LLC. He founded and managed the Black Rock City Department of Public Works, is a founding board member of Burning Man Project, and is the vice president of Friends of Black Rock/High Rock. He is heavily involved in conservation efforts of the Black Rock Desert, which is the United States’ largest National Conservation Area (NCA). He served as chairman of the Sierra Front–Northwestern Great Basin Resource Advisory Council (RAC), and is currently a member of the RAC NCA Subgroup. Peterson is also an accomplished photographer and worked for nearly twenty years at the Rochester Institute of Technology as a photo chemist, administrator, associate professor, and assistant director.
Crimson Rose
As a cofounder of Burning Man, the Black Rock Arts Foundation, and Burning Man Project, Crimson Rose has focused her life’s passion and work on the arts and artistic expression. She began participating in the Burning Man gathering in 1991, and developed the organization’s art department, including the infrastructure, financial, and other support services that make possible the large-scale participatory artworks for which Burning Man is renowned.
Dennis Scholl
Dennis Scholl is a collector of contemporary art whose willingness to experiment and encourage artists and curators to push boundaries is well known in the art world. He is currently touring Marking the Infinite, a show drawn from his collection of work by Aboriginal Australian women artists, to six museums across North America. Scholl created a series of initiatives dedicated to building the contemporary art collections of museums, including the Guggenheim, Tate Modern, and the Pérez Art Museum Miami, which resulted in hundreds of patron-funded art acquisitions. He is a ten-time regional Emmy winner for his work on cultural documentaries, including films about Tracey Emin, Theaster Gates, and Wynton Marsalis, and is currently in production for a film about Clyfford Still.
Bonnie Ora Sherk
Bonnie Ora Sherk is a San Francisco–based landscape architect, planner, educator, and artist. Her work examines the interrelationship of plants, animals, and humans with the goal of creating sustainable systems for social transformation. In 1974 she launched The Farm, a seven-acre eco garden/art space, on the traffic meridians and underused spaces under a freeway overpass. The project, which lasted until 1980, also featured educational activities for children, internships, and performance art events before it was transformed into a public park. Sherk’s commitment to place has continued as A Living Library, a multiyear project with branches in San Francisco and New York City that helps unearth buried urban streams and turn asphalted public areas into educational art gardens. Often located on school grounds or city brownfields, these spaces are connected online and through networked community groups.
Bruce Sterling
Science-fiction writer Bruce Sterling is a cultural critic and futurist who defines truth as a “major consensus narrative.” He has archived dead media sites online, writes the Beyond the Beyond blog hosted by Wired, serves as a professor of internet studies and science fiction at the European Graduate School, and in 2005 was the visionary in residence at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. He also founded the Viridian Design Movement, which Sterling describes as “an environmental aesthetic ... of global citizenship, environmental design, and techno-progressiveness.” He and his wife split their time living in Croatia and his birthplace of Austin, Texas.
Frohawk Two Feathers
Frohawk Two Feathers (Umar Rashid) is a Los Angeles–based Afrofuturist whose practice is equal parts literary, musical, and visual. Bringing a hip-hop aesthetic together with an avid interest in American and world history, Two Feathers invents written narratives based on the colonial past of the imaginary Frengland Empire—what the world might have been if France and England had joined forces in the eighteenth century. His stories are rife with intrigue, assassinations, love triangles, and territorial conquest. For Unsettled, Two Feathers has created a new map of a portion of the Greater West.
Allison Warden
Allison Warden (Iñupiaq) is a performance artist, Twitter poet, and rapper whose stage name is AKU-MATU. Her humorous and iconoclastic work transforms traditional cultural knowledge by presenting it through a filter of contemporary forms of expression, promoting Native self-determination and making the stories and knowledge of the Iñupiaq people accessible to everyone. Her work focuses on land and natural resource use, personal history, and educating indigenous youth about their own culture.
Ann M. Wolfe
Ann M. Wolfe is senior curator and deputy director at the Nevada Museum of Art, where she also oversees the development of the Carol Franc Buck Altered Landscape Photography Collection. In her eleven years at the museum, she has curated and coordinated more than 135 exhibitions and authored twelve books. Her exhibitions include The Altered Landscape: Photographs of a Changing Environment (2011), American Indian Art of the Great Basin (2012), The 36th Star: Nevada’s Journey from Territory to State (2014), and Tahoe: A Visual History. Her books include Tahoe: A Visual History (2015), The Altered Landscape: Photographs of a Changing Environment (2011), Chris Drury: Mushrooms|Clouds (2008), and Suburban Escape: The Art of California Sprawl (2006).
