Shelley Etkin is a transdisciplinary artist, educator, and gardener based in Berlin, Germany with roots in the US/Turtle Island and Israel/Palestine. She works at the intersections of art and ecology, engaging with relations between bodies and lands through place-based knowledges. Her work integrates practices from dance/somatics, herbal medicines, pedagogy, and intersectional queer feminist community organising. Shelley’s bodywork and earth-care practices are dedicated to expanding perception, communication, and connectivity particularly with the plant world. ‘Landing‘ as a process and movement forms the grounds for her methodology.
Laurie Anne Roark is an archivist, editor, and arts worker. Interested in intersections of material culture and poetry, her research engages practices of collecting, artistic networks, and archival theory. Laurie comes to Transart as Projects Coordinator with attention to practices of organization and systems management.
Abi Tariq is an artist and cultural worker born in Karachi and based in Paris. Tariq holds a Masters of Fine Art from Transart Institute (Berlin/NY), a Bachelor of Fine Art from Parsons Paris (now Paris College of Art), and a Pakistani passport! Since 2023 they've taken on the role of Communications Director at Transart Institute.
Ladan is an artist and a mindfulness and stress-release coach focused on healing and restoration. She helps individuals and communities find the resources within themselves to process stress, find resilience and reconnect with their inherent joy and wellbeing.
Edward Shanken is best known for his scholarship at the intersections of contemporary art and new media. He has supervised dozens of MFA and practice-led Ph.D. students in the US and Europe and is committed to helping former students succeed in academic careers. He is Professor of Arts at UC Santa Cruz.
Dr. Jade de Montserrat was the recipient of the Stuart Hall Foundation Scholarship supporting her PhD (via MPhil) at IBAR, UCLan, and the development of her work from her Black diasporic perspective in the North of England. de Montserrat works through performance, drawing, painting, film, installation, sculpture, print and text.
Alex Grünenfelder is a Canadian and Swiss artist and designer studying the sensory and relational nature of landscapes. His projects employ performance, printed matter, informal pedagogy, and expanded sensory modalities of tasting.
Tereza Ruller (she/her) identifies as a mother, a communication designer, a researcher, and an educator. In her practice—The Rodina—Ruller investigates the performative and critical approach toward graphic design. Her transdisciplinary practice emphasizes the power of situation, playfulness, active spectatorship, and relations between human and nonhuman actors. Ruller’s work is deeply collaborative and consists of participatory events, spatial installations, virtual environments, and visual identities. Addressing critical issues of our time—such as ecological, social, and political crises—she seeks to develop collective shifts in perspective.
Peter Erik Lopez is a painter and former graduate of Transart Institute. He is a portrait artist whose portrait work led him further into an interest in personal narratives. This initiated an exploration of personal history by questioning the veracity of the family-album-as-archive and he produced work wherein he painted reconstituted images from his family albums, using symbols and disrupting the images in ways the trauma and inherited trauma eluded from the archive.
Liz Baxmeyer is an interdisciplinary sound designer, writer, and composer. She holds an MFA in Writing and Contemporary Media from Antioch University, Santa Barbara, CA, and an MA in Music, concentrating in electroacoustic composition, and music for media and the arts, from Bangor University, Wales, UK.
Luca Forcucci is an artist, composer, and scholar exploring the relationships between the sonic, consciousness, perception, experience, memory, and the body. His research and artworks are regularly presented worldwide and have won numerous national and international awards in well regarded contexts.
Gabriela Saenger Silva is an arts practitioner and researcher specialising in education and socially engaged practices. Socially engaged practices and community work Futurism Horticulture and food. She is a PhD candidate at the Exhibition Research Lab at Liverpool John Moores University.
Dr T J Bacon (she/they) is a trans-femme pansexual person with hidden disabilities. Her practice as an artist-philosopher foregrounds transgender studies, queer theory, crip theory and queer phenomenology to consider visual art, performance art, activism and curation. She has exhibited internationally for over 20 years and is also the founder and artistic director of Tempting Failure.
Angela Bartram, PhD, is an artist and artistic researcher working with objects, sound, video, drawing, print, performance events, curating, and published text. The subject concerns thresholds of the human body, gallery or museum, definitions of the human and animal as companion species and appropriate strategies for documenting the ephemeral.
Alexander (Sandy) Carson is a Canadian filmmaker whose work explores the intersections of collective practice and personal storytelling. He is on faculty at Yorkville University's Bachelor of Creative Arts program and has previously taught at Toronto Film School. Carson’s films have screened at events such as the Toronto International Film Festival, the Reykjavik International Film Festival…
Alison J Carr is an artist, mentor, and independent scholar. She works visually and creates performances. Alison has shown her work nationally and internationally in USA and Europe. Career highlights include being a Site Gallery Platform / Freelands resident and co-editing Sex on Stage, with Dr Lynn Sally, forthcoming, Bloomsbury.
Hadar Cohen is an Arab Jewish multimedia artist, healer and educator based in Los Angeles. She is the founder of Malchut, a mystical school teaching direct experience of God through heart centered spiritual traditions. Hadar is a Jewish mystic who works to build decolonial frameworks for worshiping God.
Yvette Chaparro is an artist and teacher, who through experiments on modularity and morphology, trying to understand families of objects, is now exploring new concepts such as typologies, the programme, and growth systems. Her professional practice can be considered an extension of her research, where she has worked on various families of objects
Chukwu-Emeka Chikezie is an international development practitioner with a focus on African development with a growing interest in taking systemic, holistic approaches to understanding and addressing development challenges, while trying to uncover and unravel the multitude of embedded assumptions that define “development”. To this end, dialogue now sits at the heart of Chukwu-Emeka’s practice…
Rodolfo Cossovich is a media artist with an engineering background. His position as faculty of NYU Shanghai Interactive Media Arts has allowed him to explore and research different robotic applications, focusing on ways that machines present traits of living beings.
