Dr. Jessica Del Vecchio is a scholar/artist and the Senior Associate Director for Teaching Initiatives and Programs for Faculty at the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning at Princeton University. Prior to joining Princeton’s staff, she was an Assistant Professor of Theatre at James Madison University in Virginia. Her writing has appeared in Critical Stages/Scènes critiques, Contemporary Theatre Review, Theatre Journal, TDR, and Modern Drama, as well as several anthologies. She is currently working on her book manuscript, “Straddling Feminisms: Post-wave Pop Politics and Contemporary Performance,” in which she examines the new movement of feminist performance taking place in New York City’s experimental theatre scene. Jessica’s creative work also centers her interest in queer and feminist histories. Her dramaturgy credits include Lee Breuer’s Glass Guignol, a deconstruction of Tennessee Williams’s relationship with his sister and Jess Scott’s Ship of Fools, a multi-disciplinary exploration of female madness, presented at HERE Arts Center in New York City. She spent a decade writing, recording, and performing with the queer country trio Ménage à Twang and she is currently developing Songs of the Second Wave, a solo performance that considers the relationship between 1970s feminism and the women’s music of that era. Part documentary theatre, part concert, the piece is devised out of archival materials, interviews, and folk songs.
Hannes Schüpbach is a visual artist and writer based in Winterthur, Switzerland. In 2009 a selection of his works, including painting suites, performances, and silent 16mm films, was presented in the solo exhibition “Hannes Schüpbach: Stills and Movies”, curated by Adam Szymczyk at Kunsthalle Basel. Many of his pieces attend to the creation of art, such as his large-scale installation “Explosion of Words” revolving around the oeuvre of London-based poet Stephen Watts (Literaturmuseum Strauhof, Zurich, and Nunnery Gallery, Bow Arts, London, 2021 and 2022). Recent writing includes “Film and Poetry, Poetry and Film”, on Werner von Mutzenbecher (Kunsthalle Baselland, Basel / VfmK, Vienna, 2022), and “The Music of Buildings”, on the work of Vishwa Shroff (Tarq, Mumbai, 2022).
Once described in PR Week as the ‘Japanese Slovakian-American performance artist’, Renee O’Drobinak hails from a pretty unusual mix of cultures and professional experience. As a Communications Manager at Hawkins\Brown, she works with area specialists to creatively translate project milestones (and scribbled ideas on napkins) into compelling narratives about the practice’s work, communicating them across a range of mediums. Renee is a graduate of the Slade School of Fine Art and the London College of Communications; in another life, she is one half of the contemporary artist duo Ladies of the Press*, specialising in participatory artwork. In the past, she has co-led creative workshops for the likes of Tate, Southbank Centre and Wellcome Trust and has guest lectured on art and print at universities in London, Denver and Oslo.
Tom Barton is a practicing architect, living and working in London. In ten years of practice Tom has placed an emphasis on the reuse of existing buildings, taking both a technical conservation approach and, more recently, radical reinterpretation of existing structures within the city. Tom takes his inspiration in architectural practice from the likes of Aldo Rossi and Patrick Geddes, exponents of the now fully fledged conservation movement in Europe and the UK. Tom’s approach to building design beings with an understanding that each building is a form of cultural repository and his work in the commercial world of the central London property industry seeks to uncover and integrate the stories of the past people and cultures in new city place making. Tom’s interest in culture and stories extends to his interest in the domestic, and in particular to food. The deep cultural stories contained within recipes and in our built heritage are a source of inspiration in his daily domestic and architectural practice.
Avijit Mukul Kishore is a filmmaker and cinematographer based in Mumbai. He works in documentary films and inter-disciplinary moving-image practices. He is actively involved in cinema pedagogy as a lecturer and curator of film programmes. Kishore studied cinematography at Film and Television Institute of India, Pune and holds a bachelor’s degree in History from Hindu College, University of Delhi. His works have shown at Documenta 14 at Athens, Chicago Architecture Biennial, Dhaka Art Summit, Serendipity Art Festival, in addition to several film festivals like Berlinale, International Film Festival Rotterdam, CDH:DOX, Sheffield Docfest, IFFI, IDSFFK and academic and cultural spaces.
Rohan Shivkumar is an architect, urban designer and filmmaker practicing in Mumbai. He is the Dean of the Architecture course at the Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute for Architecture and Environmental Studies. He also a principal of the architectural and urban practice the ‘Collaborative Design Studio’ an urban research collective based in Mumbai. His work ranges from architecture, urban research and consultancy projects to works in film and visual art. He is interested in issues concerning housing, public space and in exploring the many ways of reading and representing the city. He has worked on many research and consultancy projects in the city of Mumbai in collaboration with governmental and non governmental organisations including projects like the Churchgate Revival Project and the Tourist District Project. Through the school, he has worked on research projects in Dharavi and the spaces of Dr Ambedkar in Mumbai. Rohan is the co-editor of the publication on an interdisciplinary research and art collaboration- ‘Project Cinema City’. He also curates film programmes and writes on cinema, architecture and urban issues. He has also made films on art, architecture and urbanism including ’Nostalgia for the future’, ‘Lovely Villa’, and ‘Squeeze Lime in Your Eye’.
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