Lecture Hall, MassArt Design Media Center

2:00 - 4:00pm

Introductory remarks from Dr. Marika Preziuso

Counterpoint #1: Creativity, Empathy and Social Justice

4:00 - 4:20pm

Coffee break

4:20 - 6:20pm

Counterpoint #2: Women, Representation and Cultural Markets

6:20 - 7:00pm

Roundtable and Closing Remarks

Arnheim Gallery

7:15 - 8:30pm

Reception & Student Exhibition

Maria Popova

Maria Popova is a writer and critic who has written for Wired UK, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab. She is a MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow. Maria is the founder of Brain Pickings, a one of a kind curatorial experiment of literary and artistic wisdom that she started in 2006, and that is, in her words, “an inventory of the meaningful life.”

Gunta Kaza

Gunta Kaza is Professor and Chair of the Graphic Design Department at the MassArt, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses. Gunta received her M.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design, and is currently writing her doctoral dissertation on depression, passivity, and transference at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis. She is particularly interested in the intersection between art/design and psychoanalysis. She is principal designer/owner of Kaza Design. Current projects include "Mute, Muse, Mutiny," a self-authored project based upon the tea towel as a living metaphor.

X Wang

A second Year MFA Candidate in Photography at MassArt, X Wang wears lots of wool, whittles spoons, enjoys crosswords, stares at the sea a lot, and thinks about the conditions of ideology that surround race, gender, power dynamics, and Neoliberalism. X also takes pictures for school sometimes.

Dr. Rachel L. Mordecai

Dr. Rachel L. Mordecai received her Master’s degree from the University of the West Indies, Kingston, Jamaica, and her doctorate from the University of Minnesota; she is an Associate Professor in the English Department of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her primary areas of teaching and research interest are Caribbean and multicultural American literature. Beyond these, her current research interests include African Diasporic popular culture, and the Caribbean presence in US popular culture. She is the author of Citizenship under Pressure: The 1970s in Jamaican Literature and Culture (UWI Press, 2014), which investigates the role of expressive culture in negotiating and memorializing the politically tumultuous and culturally vibrant 1970s in Jamaica.

Dr. Sharon Heijin Lee

Dr. Sharon Heijin Lee is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, whose research agenda explores the imperial routes that culture and media travel. In addition to her book manuscript, The Geopolitics of Beauty, which maps the discursive formation of plastic surgery in South Korea, Asia, and Asian America, Lee is co-editing two anthologies: From Bollywood to Hallyuwood: Mapping the Affect of Power and Pleasure Across Pop Empires, forthcoming in 2016 from University of Hawaii Press, and Fashion and Beauty in the Time of Asia.

Anne Sisto

Anne Sisto is a dynamic media artist, art director and feminist. She spent the last decade working in the advertising industry on clients including Four Seasons, Best Western, Emirates Airline and Saint Lucia. While receiving her Masters at MassArt's Dynamic Media Institute she took a critical look at the effect that the male dominated media industries have on the portrayal of the female experience in American pop culture. Her work as an artist highlights the media’s limited perspective on women and its use as a subconscious reference point for the formation of female identity. She is a third year graduate student in the Dynamic Media Institute (DMI) at MassArt.