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Free online lectures: Explore a world of ideas

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  • N. Frank Daniels, while technically a resident of Nashville, has spent months traveling the US, crashing on couches, and trying to find himself through the ever-shifting life of the bedouin. He was born in Philadelphia, raised in Atlanta, and educated in Kentucky. He recently co-edited the anthology *Santi: Lives of Modern Saints*. He recently completed his second novel, *Sanctuary*.
  • Susan Rebecca White was born and raised in Atlanta, graduated from Brown University, and holds a master of fine arts in creative writing from Hollins University, where she was awarded a teaching fellowship and the James Purdy Prize for outstanding fiction. She currently lives in Atlanta.
  • Douglas R. Egerton is professor of history at LeMoyne College. He was born in Arizona and received his PhD from Georgetown University.
  • Carrie Lambert-Beatty is an art historian at Harvard University whose research focuses on art since 1960. She received her PhD from Stanford in 2002. Her book *Being Watched: Yvonne Rainer and the 1960s* was published by MIT Press in 2008 and was the winner of the de la Torre Bueno book prize for advancing the field of dance history scholarship. Two recent articles on socially-engaged contemporary art, in the journals *Signs* (Winter 2008) and October (Summer 2009), are part of the book Lambert-Beatty is currently writing called *Just Art: Imagining Art's Efficacy*.
  • Ann Hamilton is a visual artist internationally recognized for the sensory surrounds of her large-scale multi-media installations. Noted for a dense accumulation of materials, her liminal environments create immersive experiences that poetically respond to the architectural presence and social history of their sites. Born in Lima, Ohio in 1956, Hamilton received a BFA in textile design from the University of Kansas in 1979 and an MFA in Sculpture from the Yale University School of Art in 1985. Among her many honors, she has been a recipient of the Heinz Award, MacArthur Fellowship, Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, NEA Visual Arts Fellowship and United States Artists Fellowship and was chosen to represent the United States at the 48th Venice Biennale. Most recently, she has participated in The Third Mind exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York with human carriage, a site-specific commission installed along the spiral ramp of the museum. Presently, she is working on several public art projects and is preparing for a 2010 project installation at the Pulitzer Foundation in St. Louis.
  • Jeremy Liu is an artist, urban planner, and community development professional. Most recently he served as the Executive Director of the Asian Community Development Corporation (ACDC) -- a community-based, not-for-profit developer of affordable housing that works to build vibrant, healthy and just neighborhoods for all. ACDC serves as a bridge to and for the Asian/Asian American community of Greater Boston. By addressing housing, economic, and leadership development needs, ACDC improves the quality of life for all communities where Asians and Asian Americans live and work. For over 15 years he has worked for and with communities of color, seniors, and youth to creatively confront issues of social and environmental equity, affordable housing, and community empowerment. He has written and lectured in the US and abroad about participatory planning, technology, and the community development role for arts and culture; he has created arts-based community development projects in the US and Asia. He has received an Artadia Artist Prize, a Visible Republic Artist Grant, and several LEF Foundation Contemporary Work Fund grants. His work has been recognized by the MacArthur Foundation/HASTAC, the Ford Foundation/ESC, Neighborworks America, the Boston Foundation, and others. He is currently a Barr Fellow.
  • Barbara currently co-directs Animating Democracy, a program of Americans for the Arts, Institute for Community Development and the Arts, funded by the Ford Foundation. Launched in fall 1999, Animating Democracy's purpose is to foster artistic activity that encourages civic dialogue on important contemporary issues. Barbara has worked as a consultant since 1990, and prior to that she served as executive director of the Arts Extension Service at the University of Massachusetts where she was on staff for 13 years. Her work with partner Pam Korza includes program design and evaluation for state and local arts agencies and private foundations nationally. Projects include strategic plans for the Heinz Endowment's Arts and Culture programs and the New York State Council on the Arts, a 20-year review of the North Carolina Arts Council's Grassroots Arts Program, and cultural plans for Northampton, MA, and Rapid City, SD. Barbara has written, edited, and contributed to several publications, including the revised edition of *Fundamentals of Local Arts Management* and *The Cultural Planning Work Kit*, published by the Arts Extension Service. She is an arts management educator, serving as a primary instructor for the "Fundamentals and Advanced Management" seminars, guest lecturer for the New York University Graduate Program in Arts Management, and a senior faculty member for the Empire State Partnerships' Summer Institute in arts education. A graduate of the University of Massachusetts, Barbara has served as a panelist and adviser for many state and national arts agencies. She is president of the Arts Extension Institute, Inc., a board member of the Fund for Women Artists, and chair of her local school committee.
  • Mel Chin is known for the broad range of approaches in his art, including works that require multi-disciplinary, collaborative teamwork and works that conjoin cross-cultural aesthetics with complex ideas. He developed Revival Field (1989-ongoing), a project that has been a pioneer in the field of "green remediation," the use of plants to remove toxic, heavy metals from the soil. From 1995-1998 Mel formed the collective GALA Committee that produced In the Name of the Place, a conceptual public art project conducted on American prime-time television. Chin is one of 16 artists included in the PBS Series Art of the 21st Century aired in the Fall of 2001. His proposal for a New World Trade Center was part of the American representation at the 2002 Venice Biennale of Architecture. These projects and others are consistent with a conceptual philosophy which emphasizes the practice of art to include sculpting and bridging the natural and social ecology.
  • Christos Papadimitriou is C. Lester Hogan professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. He was won numerous international awards for his pioneering work in computational complexity and algorithmic game theory. He has written the novel *Turing: A Novel about Computation*.
  • Harriet Reisen is a former fellow in screenwriting at the American Film Institute, Reisen has written dramatic and historical documentary scripts for PBS and HBO, and radio commentary for *Morning Edition* and *Marketplace*. She has been interested in Louisa May Alcott since her childhood marathon reading of Alcott's eight young adult novels. She has written a documentary of the life of Louisa May Alcott to be aired on PBS, for which *Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women* is a companion biography.
  • Stephen Dubner is an award-winning writer and journalist whose work has appeared in numerous major publications over the years, including *The New York Times*, *The New Yorker*, and *The Washington Post*. His has written several previous books, including *Choosing My Religion: A Memoir of a Family Beyond Belief* (originally published as *Turbulent Souls*), *Confessions of a Hero-Worshiper* and the international bestseller *Freakonomics*, which he co-wrote with Steven Levitt. His awards include the inaugural Quill Award for best business book, a Visionary Award from the National Council on Economic Education, a BookSense Book of the Year Award , all for *Freakonomics*. He also had both *Turbulent Souls* and *Freakonomics* chosen as Notable Books of the Year by *The New York Times*, in 1998 and 2005 respectively.
  • Lisa Rosner is professor of history at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. She is the author of *The Most Beautiful Man in Existence: The Scandalous Life of Alexander Lesassier*.