Laboratory for Other Worlds: Designs for Living Beyond Damage (Symposium)

Cassie Aimetti (she/her) is a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Connecticut, where she earned her B.A. in Earth Science and Anthropology with a minor in Studio Art in 2025. Her geoarchaeological research focuses on Holocene landscape transformation, relative sea-level rise, and human–environment interaction in the northeastern United States. Her ongoing project reevaluates the timing of early Indigenous maize horticulture in New England through micro botanical phytolith research. Additionally, she is investigating the application of stable isotope methods to archaeological shell middens as a proxy of paleoenvironmental reconstruction over the past several millennia. As both an artist and archaeologist, she is committed to the translation of scientific research into advocational outreach through creative media such as museum work and exhibitions in the future.

aru apaza works across sound and sculptural painting, rooted in an Aymara worldview that embraces cyclical compulsion and rejects notions of purity.

Collaborating with materials found in both city and rural environments, they explore mutation, multi-temporality, and radical kinship. Grounded in the material and sensory conditions of public transitory landscapes, such as market places and protests, they seek to unsettle recognition and insist on the radical potential of misalignment. 

Rather than presenting a romanticized pastoral indigeneity, aru engages one that complicates and manifests in unpredictable ways, navigating the tensions between refuge and refusal.  

Their work is for their lineage – past and future. 

aru has exhibited across Abya Yala (the americas), prioritizing community spaces alongside commercial galleries. Spaces such as The Luminary, Abrons Art Center, The Gochman Family Collection, Hair & Nails Gallery, Yale Center for British Art, The American Indian Community House and along the local River.

recently aru was named a CCAM Fellow at Yale University & selected for the F.I.R.E (Forum for Indigenous Research and Exchange) cohort 2026.

They are currently in Quinnipiac territory, so-called New Haven, pursuing an MFA in Painting/Printmaking at the Yale School of Art, class of 2026.

Tanya Crane is a multi-disciplinary artist working mainly within the context of jewelry and sculpture for the body. She is an Assistant Professor in 3D Foundations + Jewelry + Sculpture at Long Beach City College. Craft has become a bridge between her artistic practice and her dedication to serving communities through education and active involvement.

Crane was the 2024 winner of a United States Artist Fellowship and has a solo exhibition on view at Racine Art Museum focusing on exploring the legacy of African jewelry. She was a 2023 Artist in Residence at Hewnoaks in Lovell, Maine, and a 2022 Artist in Residence at Indigo Arts Alliance in Portland, Maine. In 2018, Crane exhibited her work in a solo exhibition at the National Ornamental Metal Museum in Memphis, Tennessee.

Her work is part of many prestigious collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Racine Arts Museum, Stewart Program for Modern Design in Montreal, Canada, Yale University Art Gallery, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Crocker Museum, and the National Ornamental Metal Museum in Memphis, Tennessee.

Erin Genia (she/her), an enrolled member of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate, is a multidisciplinary artist, educator and community organizer specializing in Native American and Indigenous arts and culture. Genia’s work in these areas is focused on amplifying the powerful presence of Indigenous peoples in the arts, sciences and public realm to invoke an evolution of thought and practice that is aligned with the cycles of the natural world and the potential of humanity. Genia’s artistic practice merges Dakota cultural imperatives, pure expression, and exploration of materiality with the conceptual. Erin is fluent in multiple modes of expression: sculpture, fibers, sound, performance, digital media, writing, painting, printmaking, jewelry and ceramics. Her work has received attention from diverse audiences, and has been exhibited nationally and internationally, at the Urbano Project in Boston, the Venice Biennale, Ars Electronica and the International Space Station. Erin has an M.S. in Art, Culture and Technology from MIT, an M.P.A. in Tribal Governance from the Evergreen State College and studied at Institute of American Indian Arts. She was awarded the 2021 Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Grant from Mass Cultural Council, the 2019 MIT Solve Indigenous Communities Fellowship and the AAF Seebacher Prize for Fine Arts in 2018. Erin was recognized as one of the “ARTery 25 — Artists Of Color Transforming The Cultural Landscape” by WBUR in 2021. Erin’s public arts commissions include the Rose Kennedy Greenway, Boston University, the Minnesota Historical Society, the City of Saint Paul, and the City of Seattle. Genia lives and works in the greater Boston region, was a 2020 artist-in-residence for the City of Boston, and is a lecturer in the sculpture and performance department at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University.

Karen Holmberg is an archaeologist who specializes in volcanic contexts to examine the long-term experiences humans have had with environments that change unpredictably. She is interested in how the past can aid understanding of the environmental challenges and crises of the 21st century, particularly in the Global South.

Holmberg received her PhD from Columbia University after which she taught at Brown and Stanford Universities. Her doctoral work was funded by Fulbright, Mellon, and Wenner-Gren awards. She is the recipient of awards including a Creating Earth Futures award from the Geohumanities Centre of Royal Holloway University and the Leverhulme Trust, Make Our Planet Great Again award to collaborate with the Laboratoire de Géographie Physique at the Panthéon-Sorbonne in Paris, and the This is Not a Drill award through the NYU-Tisch Future Imagination Fund that utilizes public pedagogy to address the intractable social problems of the climate emergency through technology, the arts, and critical thinking.

Andrew Kemp (he/him) Dr. Kemp’s research aims to produce detailed reconstructions of sea level over the last 2000 years and in particular to determine the response of local, regional and global sea level to known climate deviations such as the Medieval Climate Anomaly, Little Ice Age, and 20th century warming. Dr. Kemp takes an interdisciplinary approach to this work using coastal stratigraphy, biological, and geochemical proxies, varied dating methods and quantitative paleoenvironmental techniques to reconstruct sea level. These records provide a constraint for future projections of sea-level rise. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (AR5) is consulting these reconstructions to place current and projected sea-level changes in an appropriate geological context. It is hoped these new geological data will aid coastal management under scenarios of future sea-level change.

Eugenia Kisin is a visual anthropologist who specializes in the anthropology of art and material culture. Her research focuses on contemporary art and environmental justice movements, analyzing the ways that art is understood as a political force and how it comes to matter in social worlds through practices of display. Her understanding of these questions and their stakes has been shaped by long-term collaborative research with First Nations artists and activists in British Columbia, Canada, and draws on Indigenous understandings of art as relational belongings, foregrounding cultural transmission and intergenerational practices of care. Her book, Aesthetics of Repair: Indigenous Art and the Form of Reconciliation, takes up these questions in relation to Northwest Coast aesthetics and politics. She is Artistic Director of the Gallatin WetLab, an art-science exhibition and laboratory space on Governors Island, where Laboratory for Other Worlds will open later this year. 

Patte Loper (she/her) Loper’s work is informed by scientific research, folklore, and imaginative worldbuilding practices. She creates paintings and multimedia installations that reconfigure art histories to visualize entanglements between ecosystems and humans. As a lapsed Catholic and feminist utopian, her interest is in image construction that reads as religious and mythological, but that thematically explores frontiers of science and philosophy to contend with the intelligence of plants and microbes, the agency of matter, and how to live in a time of rapidly unfolding change. She currently lives and works in New York City and Boston, MA where she is on the faculty of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. She has shown her work in numerous solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally, including the Drawing Center (New York, NY), the Mattress Factory (Pittsburgh, PA), the Bronx Museum (Bronx, NY), the Tacoma Art Museum (Tacoma, WA) the Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts (Amman, Jordan), the Institute for Contemporary Art at the Maine College of Art and Design (Portland, ME). She has participated in residency fellowships at Yaddo, MacDowell and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s, and was a participant in the Drawing Center’s Open Sessions Program 2014-2016. She was a member artist of the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Studio Program from 2014-2019.

Anesu Nyamupingidza is a Zimbabwean research based visual artist whose works explore the interconnection between natural environments and oneself. Her research examines connection through a sense of security, focusing on edible botany within a given environment. She explores these connections through active observation within the space and contemplates the role one must play to be in relation with the environment. She received a BA in Visual Studies from Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture. She is currently a Postgraduate Associate in Exhibitions at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music.

Juliana Spahr is a poet and scholar. Her scholarly work focuses on twentieth century and contemporary American literature and its relation to the state and also to social movements. She uses a range of approaches, including data collection, computational and network analysis, archival research, and close reading. Her most recent scholarly book, Du Bois’s Telegram: Literary Resistance and State Containment (Harvard U P, 2019), studies a wide range of institutional forces—such the FBI, the CIA, the State Department, and private philanthropy—that shape U.S. literary production. Her most recent poetry book, That Winter the Wolf Came (Commune Editions, 2015), takes as its concern the global spread of political struggles located at the intersection of ecological and economic catastrophe. It was listed in The New Yorker as one of the best books in 2015. She has received fellowships from the Stanford Humanities Center and the American Council of Learned Societies. She has been rewarded the O. B. Hardison Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library. Previous to these works, she published four full-length collections of poems, two books of prose that might be memoirs, and a book of literary scholarship on U.S. experimentalism.

William Teixeira is a Professor at the Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul (Brazil) and has been a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Harvard University and Visiting Researcher at IRCAM. He holds degrees in Cello Performance from São Paulo State University, a Master degree from the University of Campinas, and a Ph.D. from the University of São Paulo, including research residencies at the Paul Sacher Stiftung and the Akademie der Künste, Berlin; he later undertook postdoctoral research in analytic philosophy of art at the Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul and is currently a Senior Postdoctoral Fellow of Brazil’s National Research Council (CNPq) at the University of Campinas. A specialist in contemporary music, he has premiered dozens of works and appeared as a soloist with major Brazilian orchestras, participated in the Goethe-Institut’s mentorship program with Ensemble Modern, and coordinated funded research projects including Pantanal Sounds, supported by Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center and a CAPES–COFECUB partnership with Université Paris 8. Recent performances include appearances in France, Portugal, and Chile.

Camila Young states: 

“I seek new forms of climate solidarity through my work, ways for us to connect
across cultures and environments. I turn to art as a method of cultural
transmission when words aren’t enough, and I seek to spark the environmental
imagination.  

At Yale University, I am specializing in environmental studies and international
policy, with my research examining the potential for alternative treaty
frameworks grounded in cultural solidarity and artistic collaboration. I approach
art as a diplomatic form: a means of joining into a collective experience where
you can connect beyond words. I’m currently developing an international cultural
coalition for climate, The Green Table Alliance, as we lead up to COP30. As the
head of Yale’s student delegation to the UNFCCC, I’ve been working with my
team to develop U.S. grassroots mobilization for climate.

My work seeks to approach what I call climate-communion: a process of
understanding the environment and each other through kinship and stewardship.
I carry my Caribbean islander roots into my painted pieces, recalling the vibrancy
of my mother’s Puerto Rican traditions in my compositions. Allegorical traditions
inspire my pursuit of the visual metaphor and poetry, and I’m interested in
engaging with the subjectivity of Eastern and Western environmental
philosophies.

Ultimately, I see the life we live as the greatest art, and my work with
communities and creatives seeks to illuminate the raw beauty of interconnection.”

Education: Yale University, New Haven | B.A. Environmental Studies & International Policy, Royal College of Art, London | M.F.A. Candidate

Awards & Honors: Exhibiting Artist at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change COP30 & Head of Yale’s COP30 Delegation, Artist Keynote Speaker for World Food Forum Flagship Event, United Nations Academic Impact Millennium Fellow, American Meteorological Society Minority Scholar, World Wildlife Fund Panda Ambassador, Fall 2024 Cover Artist for Yale Human Rights Journal, ‘Innovator’ at Yale Innovation Summit Virtual Showcase: Proposing the Climate Renaissance, Finalist to Yale’s Creative Entrepreneurship Prize