Career
Amaris has master's degrees in Performance Studies and in Interactive Telecommunications, both from New York University, and has contributed articles on performance and media to Theatre Journal , TDR: The Drama Review , and Explorations on Media Ecology, along with several edited collections. In 2011, she was a writing resident with Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts and, in 2012, she was a writer for The Next Web. She has presented her art and scholarship at nine international conferences and at more than 20 festivals, including such venues as Cambridge University, UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, and the Centro Cultural Recoleta in Argentina. After three years as a professor of performance studies and digital media at Colorado College, Amaris joined the Education Division of the Brooklyn Museum, where for a year she oversaw programs for college and graduate students and worked to bridge the gaps between performance, visual arts, and new media through public programs. In her capacity as a researcher and editor for Douglas Rushkoff, she worked with him on his books Program or be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age; Life, Inc.: How the World Became A Corporation and How To Take It Back; and Get Back in the Box: Innovation from the Inside Out.
Since 2011, Amaris has been based in the San Francisco Bay Area and has engaged actively with both the Art and Tech scenes.
Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that serves as a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical area of Santa Clara Valley. San Jose is Silicon Valley's largest city, the third-largest in California, and the tenth-largest in the United States; other major Silicon Valley cities include Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, Redwood City, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Menlo Park, and Cupertino. The San Jose Metropolitan Area has the third-highest GDP per capita in the world, according to the Brookings Institution, and, as of June 2021, has the highest percentage of homes valued at $1 million or more in the United States.
Hélène Cixous is a French writer, playwright and literary critic. She is known for her experimental writing style and great versatility as a writer and thinker, her work dealing with multiple genres: theater, literary and feminist theory, art criticism, autobiography and poetic fiction. Since 1967, she has published a considerable body of work consisting of some seventy titles, mainly published in the original French by Grasset, Gallimard, Des femmes and Galilée.
Ryan Thomas Gosling is a Canadian actor. Prominent in both independent film and major studio features of varying genres, his films have accrued a worldwide box office gross of over 1.9 billion USD. He has received various accolades, including a Golden Globe Award, and nominations for two Academy Awards and a BAFTA Award.
Silicon Alley is an area of high tech companies centered around southern Manhattan's Flatiron district in New York City. The term was coined in the 1990s during the dot-com boom, alluding to California's Silicon Valley tech center. The term has grown somewhat obsolete since 2003 as New York tech companies spread outside of Manhattan.
The Nuyorican movement is a cultural and intellectual movement involving poets, writers, musicians and artists who are Puerto Rican or of Puerto Rican descent, who live in or near New York City, and either call themselves or are known as Nuyoricans. It originated in the late 1960s and early 1970s in neighborhoods such as Loisaida, East Harlem, Williamsburg, and the South Bronx as a means to validate Puerto Rican experience in the United States, particularly for poor and working-class people who suffered from marginalization, ostracism, and discrimination.
Elizabeth LeCompte is an American director of experimental theater, dance, and media. A founding member of The Wooster Group, she has directed that ensemble since its emergence in the late 1970s.
Richard Schechner is University Professor Emeritus at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, and editor of TDR: The Drama Review.
Alix L. Olson is an American poet who works exclusively in spoken word. She graduated from Wesleyan University in 1997 and uses her work to address issues of capitalism, racism, sexism, homophobia, heterosexism, misogyny, and patriarchy. She identifies as a queer feminist.
Bob Holman is an American poet and poetry activist, most closely identified with the oral tradition, the spoken word, and poetry slam. As a promoter of poetry in many media, Holman has spent the last four decades working variously as an author, editor, publisher, performer, emcee of live events, director of theatrical productions, producer of films and television programs, record label executive, university professor, and archivist. He was described by Henry Louis Gates Jr. in The New Yorker as "the postmodern promoter who has done more to bring poetry to cafes and bars than anyone since Ferlinghetti."
Tracie Morris is an American poet. She is also a performance artist, vocalist, voice consultant, creative non-fiction writer, critic, scholar, bandleader, actor and non-profit consultant. Morris is from Brooklyn, New York. Morris' experimental sound poetry is progressive and improvisational. She is a tenured professor at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
Kevin P. Ryan is an American investor and entrepreneur who has founded several New York-based businesses, including Gilt Groupe, Business Insider and MongoDB. Ryan helped grow DoubleClick from 1996 to 2005, first as president and later as CEO. Ryan continues to found and invest in companies through AlleyCorp, a venture capital firm he founded with Dwight Merriman in 2008. He holds a B.A. from Yale University and an M.B.A. from INSEAD.
Thomas P. Riccio is an American multimedia artist and academic. He received his BA from Cleveland State University in English Literature in 1978, his MFA from Boston University in 1982, and studied in the PhD program in Performance Studies at New York University from 1983 to 1984. Riccio has directed over one hundred plays at American regional theatres, off-off and off Broadway and has worked extensively in the area of indigenous and ritual performance conducting research and/or creating performances in: South Africa, Zambia, Burkina Faso, Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia, Europe, Russia, Siberia, Korea, India, Nepal, China, and Alaska. In 1993 the People's Republic of Sakha declared him a “Cultural Hero”.
Daniel Gallant is a theatrical producer, playwright, director, lecturer and actor based in New York City, New York. He has served as the executive director of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe and as director of theater and talk programs for the 92nd Street Y; he is also the author of the short story collection Determined to Prove, and the recipient of a 2022 Fulbright Specialist Fellowship and a 2016 Eisenhower Fellowship. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Time Out, the New York Daily News and the New York Post. Gallant is a lecturer and consultant in the fields of institutional marketing, social media and arts technology. Forbes called Gallant a "social media expert." NPR's Planet Money podcast called him "a genius at raising money for artists." According to The Wall Street Journal, "since late 2009, Mr. Gallant has exploited expanding social-media tools to grow the cafe from a small, volunteer-led venue best known for weekly poetry events to a thriving arts center with partnerships across the city".
Alexandra Grant is an American visual artist who examines language and written texts through painting, drawing, sculpture, video, and other media. She uses language and exchanges with writers as a source for much of that work. Grant examines the process of writing and ideas based in linguistic theory as it connects to art and creates visual images inspired by text and collaborative group installations based on that process. She is based in Los Angeles.
Paul Louis Ryan (1943–2013) was an American video artist and communications theorist. His video art encompassed water studies and demonstrations of what Ryan called “a yoga of relationships” or Threeing, culminating in his theoretical development of the Peircean relational circuit and Earthscore notational system.
Rabih Mroué is a Lebanese stage and film actor, playwright, and visual artist. Rooted in theater, his work includes videos and installation art; the latter sometimes incorporates photography, text and sculpture.
Adeena Karasick is a Canadian poet, performance artist, and essayist. Born in Winnipeg of Russian Jewish heritage, she is the distinguished author of 13 books of poetry and poetic theory, as well as a series of parodic videopoems, such as the ironic "I Got a Crush on Osama" that was featured on Fox News and screened at film festivals, Ceci n'est pas un Téléphone or Hooked on Telephonics: A Pata-philophonemic Investigation of the Telephone created for The Media Ecology Association, "Lingual Ladies" a post-modern parody of Beyoncé's "Single Ladies", and "This is Your Final Nitrous" a poetic response to the Burning Man Festival., and White Abbot, a parodic videopoem Karasick created during the writing of Salome: Woman of Valor, dedicated to the impossible anguish of forbidden love.
Ryan McHenry was a Scottish film director best known for the film Zombie Musical in which he received a nomination for the Best Director accolade at the 2011 British Academy Scotland New Talent Awards.
TNW is a website and annual series of conferences focused on new technology and start-up companies in Europe. The Next Web company was established in 2006 by co-founders Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten and Patrick de Laive in Amsterdam, Netherlands, and a technology news website of the same name was started in 2009. TNW's reporting has been sourced by Wired, Mashable, and the Huffington Post, among others.
Danielle Henderson is an American writer. She is best known as the creator of the "Feminist Ryan Gosling" blog and book of the same name. Henderson has written for the television shows Difficult People, Maniac, Divorce, and others.
