Katherine Brewer Ball is a writer based in Brooklyn. She teaches Performance Studies at Wesleyan University and is currently at work on a book project that traces contemporary black, latinx, and queer performances that break from the language of freedom to theorize escape. Brewer Ball curates performance and art events, including the New York City performance salon Adult Contemporary. katiebrewerball.com
Peter Eckersall is Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies and Executive Officer of the PhD Program in Theatre at the Graduate Centre, City University of New York. He works on contemporary performance practices in Australasia and Europe, with particular interests in Japanese performance and on dramaturgy. Recent publications include New Media Dramaturgy: Performance Media and New Materialism (with Edward Scheer and Helena Grehan, Palgrave 2017) and The Dumb Type Reader (co-edited with Edward Scheer and Fujii Shintaro, MTP, 2017). Peter serves as the Vice President of Performance Studies international. He is the dramaturge for Not Yet It’s Difficult (NYID), based in Melbourne, Australia.
Tyran Grillo completed his Ph.D. in Asian Studies at Cornell University in 2017, and is a Dorothy Borg Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University’s Weatherhead East Asian Institute, under the auspices of which he teaches on disability and film in East Asian contexts. He is a prolific arts critic—having published over one million words of essays, reviews, and other musings on his website, Between Sound and Space, and in various music-related periodicals—and a translator of 12 Japanese novels into English. He will be publishing a book on the German music label ECM Records in 2018 and is currently working on a manuscript about representations of animals in contemporary Japanese literature.
Ellie Hisama, Professor of Music, came to Columbia in 2006, having previously taught at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, where she was Director of the Institute for Studies in American Music [now the H. Wiley Hitchcock Institute for Studies in American Music]. She has also taught at Harvard University, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Connecticut College, Ohio State University, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Queens College/CUNY, and the University of Virginia. At Columbia, she has served as Vice Chair of the Department of Music and Area Chair for Music Theory. She is a member of the Theory and Historical Musicology areas.
Marilyn Ivy is a professor in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. She is the author of numerous articles and essays concerning modernity, mass mediation, aesthetics, and politics in contemporary Japan; her book Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan (University of Chicago Press, 1995) won the 1996 Hiromi Arisawa Memorial Award for Japanese Studies. Professor Ivy is on the editorial board of the journal positions: east asia cultures critique and was a long-time member of the editorial group for the journal Public Culture. She was a visiting professor at the University of Tokyo in 2012, conducting research on art, affect, and politics after the triple disaster of 3.11; her essay “The End of the Line: Tōhoku in the Photographic Imagination” was included in the catalogue for the Boston Museum of Fine Art’s exhibition In the Wake: Japanese Photographers Respond to 3/11. Her most recent published essay is “The InterCommunication Project: Theorizing Media in Japan’s Lost Decades,” in Media Theory in Japan (Duke University Press, 2017).
William D. Johnston is Professor of History at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. He has written two books, The Modern Epidemic: A History of Tuberculosis in Japan and Geisha, Harlot, Strangler, Star: A Woman, Sex, and Morality in Modern Japan, as well as numerous articles and book chapters mostly on the history of medicine, disease, and epidemics in Japan. He also has been an active photographer since 1992, and had several solo exhibitions before beginning to work with Eiko Otake (of Eiko and Koma) first in Fukushima and subsequently in numerous places where they have collaborated in creating photographs that, rather than being images of a performance are themselves the performance. The project, “A Body in Places,” is ongoing, and they are in the process of planning a photo book based on it. Their collaborative work has been exhibited in numerous galleries and museums in North and South America.
Thomas Looser (PhD in Anthropology, U. of Chicago) is Associate Professor of East Asian Studies at NYU. His areas of research, and topics of publication, include cultural anthropology and Japanese studies; art, architecture and urban form; new media studies and animation; and critical theory. He has published articles in a variety of venues including Boundary 2, Japan Forum, Mechademia, Shingenjitsu, Journal of Pacific Asia, and Cultural Anthropology.
Miya Masaoka works at the intersections of sound, composition, improvisation, spatialized perception and social interaction. Her work encompasses instrument building, creating computing wear-ables. She has a body of work mapping and sonifying the data behavior of plants, brain activity and insect movement for almost twenty years. Her work has exhibited internationally including the Venice Biennale, Park Avenue Armory, Merkin Hall, ICA, PA, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and many others. She was a Fulbirght fellow to Japan in 2016, and has been awarded the Doris Duke Award, the Alpert Award, Gerbode, the MAP Fund, Montalvo Residency and The Centre for Contemporary Art at Ujazdowski Castle. She has taught composition at NYU and in the Sound program at Bard MFA since 2002, and is currently the director for the MFA Sound Art program at Columbia University. Her installation “Vaginated Ears” travels to Bonn, Germany to the KunzMuzeum in 2017. She will premiere a piece for the Glasgow Orchestra in 2018. The Wire publication calls her work, “virtuosic, magnificient…essential.”
Brooke O’Harra is co-founder (with composer Brendan Connelly) of The Theater of a Two-headed Calf which was initiated in 2000. O’Harra has developed and directed all 14 of Two-headed Calf’s productions including the OBIE Award winning Drum of the Waves of Horikawa (2007 HERE Arts Center), It Cannot Be Called Our Mother but Our Graves a.k.a Macbeth (Soho Rep Lab 2008/9), Trifles (Ontological Hysteric Incubator 2010), and the opera project You, My Mother (2012 at La Mama ETC, 2013 in the River to River Festival). Brooke conceived, directed, wrote for, and performed in the Dyke Division of Two-headed Calf’s live lesbian soap opera Room For Cream which ran for three full seasons (25 episodes) at La Mama, ETC in NYC between 2008-10. Brooke’s work has been supported by numerous awards, grants and residencies including several NYSCA grants, a Franklin Furnace performing artists award, an Arts Matters grant, the NEA/TCG Directors program, an OBIE award grant, a residency at The Performing Garage, and an LMCC space grant.
Born and raised in Japan, Eiko Otake is a New York-based movement artist, performer, and choreographer who for more than 40 years worked as Eiko & Koma. Since 2014, she has directed and performed a solo project, A Body in Places, in which she collaborates with photographer and historian William Johnston to create and present a series of exhibitions showing her dancing in irradiated Fukushima and elsewhere. She teaches an interdisciplinary course about the Atomic Bombings and Nuclear disasters at Wesleyan University and Colorado College.
Karen Shimakawa is the Chair and Associate Professor of Performance Studies in the NYU Tisch School of the Arts. She is the author of National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage (2003) and co-editor of Orientations: Mapping Studies in the Asian Diaspora (2001) with Kandice Chuh. Her research and teaching focus on critical race theory, law and performance, and Asian American performance. She is currently researching a project on the political and ethical performativity of discomfort.