Past Event: Biophilia: In Excelsis Closing Webinar

M. Annenberg is a conceptual artist and independent curator. Her paintings, sculptures, installations and videos focus on under-reported stories in American media, concentrating on scientific studies and global warming. Annenberg’s recent artwork deconstructs the reporting of five major climate studies –The Emissions Gap Report, The National Climate Assessment, the Paris Climate Treaty, the UN’s 5th IPCC Report and the Hindu Kush Himalaya Assessment.

Her paintings are in the permanent collections of museums in Lithuania, Israel, England and the USA. She has organized six environmental exhibits including Petroleum Paradox, Earth SOS, cocurated with Eleanor Flomenhaft of Flomenhaft Gallery, Endangered Earth, Earth on the Edge, and Mayday! EAARTH, pop-ups at Ceres Gallery, NYC and now, Biophilia: In Excelsis.

Richard Festinger has garnered international recognition for his extensive catalogue of compositions. The Tanglewood Festival describes his music as “notable for its combination of propulsive energy with an impeccable sense of poise and balance,” and WQXR Radio in New York dubbed him “an American master.” Educated at the University of California, Berkeley, he is professor emeritus of San Francisco State University, and in 1985 co-founded the San Francisco based Earplay ensemble for contemporary music. Published by C.F. Peters and Wildcat Canyon Press, his recorded works are available on the Naxos, Bridge, CRI, Centaur, Infrasonic and CRS labels. He has been the recipient of numerous major awards and commissions, and his work has twice been honored by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky, is currently Artist in Residence at Yale University Center for Collaborative Arts and Media (2023-2024, extended). He is a composer, multimedia artist, and writer whose work engages audiences in a blend of genres, global culture, and environmental and social issues. Miller has collaborated with an array of recording artists, including Ryuichi Sakamoto, Metallica, Chuck D from Public Enemy, Steve Reich, and Yoko Ono amongst many others. His 2018 album, DJ Spooky Presents: Phantom Dancehall, debuted at #3 on Billboard Reggae.

His large-scale, multimedia performance pieces include “Rebirth of a Nation,” Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica, commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and Seoul Counterpoint, written during his 2014 residency at Seoul Institute of the Arts. His multimedia project Sonic Web premiered at San Francisco’s Internet Archive in 2019. He was the inaugural artist-inresidency at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s The Met Reframed, 2012-2013.

His books include the award-winning Rhythm Science, published by MIT Press in 2004; Sound Unbound, an anthology about digital music and media; The Book of Ice, a visual and acoustic portrait of the Antarctic, and; The Imaginary App, on how apps changed the world. His writing has been published by The Village Voice, The Source, and Artforum, and he was the first founding Executive Editor of Origin Magazine.

Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University and Director of the Cool America Foundation. Morton is the author of 25 books, translated 46 times into 19 languages; and the author of the libretto for the opera Time Time Time by Jennifer Walshe. Morton cowrote and appears in Living in the Future’s Past, a 2018 film about global warming with Jeff Bridges. Morton has collaborated with Laurie Anderson, Björk, Jennifer Walshe, Susan Kucera, Hrafnhildur Arnadottir, Sabrina Scott, Adam McKay, Jeff Bridges, Olafur Eliasson, Pharrell Williams and Justin Guariglia. In 2014 Morton gave the Wellek Lectures in Theory at UC Irvine. Morton has published Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology (Columbia, 2024), The Stuff of Life (Bloomsbury, 2023), All Art Is Ecological (Penguin, 2021), Spacecraft (Bloomsbury, 2021), Hyposubjects: On Becoming Human (Open Humanities, 2021), Being Ecological (Penguin, 2018), Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (Verso, 2017), Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (Columbia, 2016), Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (Chicago, 2015), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minnesota, 2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Open Humanities, 2013), The Ecological Thought (Harvard, 2010), Ecology without Nature (Harvard, 2007), 8 other books and 280 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, architecture, design and food.