Colloquium Bios

Anonda Bell is an Australian born, USA based, artist, writer and curator. She is currently the Director and Chief Curator of the Paul Robeson Galleries, at Rutgers University – Newark. She completed her formal education in Australia – a Bachelor of Arts (Psychology & English) at the University of Melbourne, A Bachelor of Fine Arts at RMIT University, a Post Graduate Diploma at The University of Melbourne and a Masters of Fine Arts at Monash University. She has worked in the museum industry in Australia and the United States, and specializes in working with contemporary artists.

As an artist, she has been the recipient of the New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship and a Jerome Foundation Travel Grant. She is currently a resident artist at Guttenberg Arts, New Jersey. As a curator, she was awarded an Australia Council Grant to undertake a placement at the International Program at MoMA.

Tricia Laughlin Bloom, PhD, is Curator of American Art at The Newark Museum of Art. During her tenure at NMOA Bloom has initiated exhibitions, publications, and acquisitions that foster global perspectives and expand the way the Museum defines American art. Current and recent projects include Carlos Villa: Worlds in Collision, organized by the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco and the San Francisco Art Institute (opening February 10, 2022); Saya Woolfalk: Field Notes from the Empathic Universe (opening October 21, 2021); and Wendy Red Star: A Scratch on the Earth (2019). While at NMOA Bloom has curated the ongoing reinterpretation of the Museum’s American galleries including Native Artists of North America, Seeing America: 20th & 21st Century, and currently, a thematic reinstallation of the historical American galleries titled Seeing Slavery. Bloom came to NMOA in 2015 from the Brooklyn Museum, where she organized numerous large scale exhibitions including Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks (2015) and Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture (2011).

Alexandra Chang is Associate Professor of Practice with the Art History program at the Department of Arts, Culture and Media and Interim Associate Director of the Clement A. Price Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience and Associate Director of the American Studies Program at Rutgers University-Newark. She also organizes the EcoArt Salon at Paul Robeson Galleries at RU-N and the Decolonizing Curatorial and Museum Studies and Public Humanities Project. She directs the Global Asia/Pacific Art Exchange (GAX) and Virtual Asian American Art Museum with A/P/A Institute at NYU and is Co-Founding Editor with Alice Ming Wai Jim of Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas (ADVA) (Brill, Leiden). She is Co-Founder of the College Art Association’s affiliated society the Diasporic Asian Art Network (DAAN). Recent exhibitions she has curated include CYJO/Mixed (2019, co-curator with artist, NYU Kimmel Windows); Ming Fay: Beyond Nature (2019 Sapar Contemporary); Zarina: Dark Roads (2017-18, co-curator with artist, A/P/A Institute, NYU), (ex)CHANGE: History Place Presence (2018, Asian Arts Initiative); Circles and Circuits: Chinese Caribbean Art (2017-2018, co-curator, Getty PST II: LA/LA, Chinese American Museum and California African American Museum.) She is the author of Envisioning Diaspora: Asian American Visual Arts Collectives (Timezone 8, 2018) and editor of Circles and Circuits: Chinese Caribbean Art (Duke UP, 2018).

Kate Doyle is an Assistant Professor of Music in the Department of Arts, Culture & Media at Rutgers University-Newark. Kate’s writing and engaged scholarship explores the performance and ideas of music in conceptual and experimental art practices — particularly through cybernetic frameworks, which offer models for thinking about observer and listener relationships to systems of culture and environment. In pedagogy and practice, Kate seeks to reject the dissection of knowledge into disciplinary territories in favor of movement among diverse ideas, topics, and methodologies. Beyond and in connection with her writing work, she experiments with new modes of scholarly dissemination at the intersection of performance and creative archiving. She works actively within the American Society for Cybernetics and has been an invited speaker or collaborator at The Library of Congress, Chelsea College of The University of the Arts London, the Dia Art Foundation, and the Festival of Original Theater.

Sandrine Colard is Assistant Professor of Art History at Rutgers University-Newark (USA) and an independent curator, based in New York City and Brussels. Holding a Ph.D. from Columbia University (2016), Colard is a historian of modern and contemporary African arts and photography and she has lectured internationally (MoMA, Concordia University, EHESS, Wiels, Bozar, European Parliament) and is the author of multiple publications. Her most recent exhibitions include Multiple Transmissions: Art in the Afropolitan Age (Wiels, Brussels, 2019) ; The Way She Looks : A History of Female Gazes in African Portraiture. Photographs from The Walther Collection (Ryerson Image Center, Toronto, 2019) ; Congoville(Middelheim Museum, Antwerp, 2020). Colard was the curator of the 6th Lubumbashi Biennale, Future Genealogies: Tales from the Equatorial Line (Lubumbashi, DRC, 2019). Her research has been supported by numerous fellowships (quai Branly Museum, Ford Foundation, among others) She is a 2021-2022 Getty/ACLS fellow for her book project about the history of photography in the colonial Congo.

Léuli Eshrāghi, PhD is a Sāmoan/Persian/Cantonese interdisciplinary artist, writer, curator and researcher working between Australia and Canada. They intervene in display territories to centre global Indigenous and Asian diasporic visuality, sensual and spoken languages, and ceremonial-political practices. Eshrāghi is Curator of the 9th TarraWarra Biennial of Australian Art (2023), and Curatorial Researcher in Residence at the University of Queensland Art Museum.

Recent curatorial projects include Pasapkedjinawong: La rivière qui passe entre les rochers–The river that passes through the rocks with John G Hampton for MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina (2021), two iterations of Sāmoan Hxstories, Screens and Intimacies for imagineNATIVE and A Space Gallery, Toronto (2020, 2021), Écrans autochtones: temporalité et mouvement with Mylène Guay also forimagineNATIVE (2020),ʻO le ūa na fua mai Manuʻa at UNSW Galleries, Sydney (2020).

Eshrāghi has published essays, poetry and reviews in Momus, Versopolis Review, Cigale Journal, cmagazine, Canadian Art, L’Internationale Online, 4A Papers, Artlink, Art Monthly Australasia, Memo Review, and Peril Magazine, and contributed chapters to Becoming Our Future: Global Indigenous Curatorial Practice, ARP Books (2020), and Sovereign Words: Indigenous Art, Curation and Criticism, OCA/Valiz (2018). Eshrāghi was co-editor with Camille Larivée ofD’horizons et d’estuaires: entre mémoires et créations autochtones, Somme toute/ICCA (2020).

Liisa-Rávná Finbog, PhD is a Sámi archaeologist and museologist from Oslo/Vaapste/Skánit on the Norwegian side of the border.

She is recently moved to Tampere on the Finnish side of the border where she is currently doing her post-doc at Tampere University on Indigenous methodologies and aesthetic practices.

She is also one of three curators for the Nordic Pavilion that during the 59th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia in 2022 will be transformed into the Sámi Pavilion.

Finbog is also a practitioner of duodji [duojár), which is a Sámi creative practice of aesthetics and storytelling [muitalusat] and gives both courses and workshops in customary techniques and practices of duodji.

Chantal Fischzang is a designer and educator based in NY/NJ. Her research and practice serve a range of multidisciplinary projects focused on design for social impact and her capabilities range from brand identity, print, publication, exhibition to interactive design. Along with her role as Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at Rutgers University-Newark, Chantal is a founding member of IntraCollaborative, a team of designers and educators sharing a deep-seated interest in design and its relevance to the social sector. Chantal integrates publicly engaged practice

Andil Gosine is Professor of Environmental Arts and Justice at York University, Toronto, and author of Nature’s Wild: Love, Sex and Law in the Caribbean (Duke University Press, 2021). Trinidad-born, Gosine’s artistic, curatorial and scholarly practices explore imbrications of migration, desire and power. He is curator of Wendy Nanan, the solo retrospective show of the Caribbean artist, now on view at the Art Museum of the Americas in DC, and the forthcoming everything slackens in a wreck, which will open at the Ford Foundation Gallery in New York next Spring. A touring companion show also titled Nature’s Wild will open at Medulla Art Gallery in Port of Spain in January, and features Gosine’s collaborations with artists from across the Americas.

Donna Gustafson, is the Interim Director, Curator of American Art and the Mellon Director for Academic Programs at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, and a member of the graduate faculty in Art History. She has a PhD in Art History with a focus on American art. Her research interests include photography and social protest, art of the twentieth century, particularly American art of the 1960s and 1970s, and global contemporary art. Her recent publications and exhibition projects include Angela Davis: Seize the Time (currently on view at the Zimmerli Art Museum; Stitching Time: The Social Justice Quilt Project (with Maureen Kelleher); Subjective Objective: A Century of Social Photography; Polymorphic Sculpture: Leo Amino; Guerrilla (and other) Girls: Art/Activism/Attitude; Jessie Krimes: Apokaluptein: 16389067; at/around/beyond: Fluxus at Rutgers.  Her exhibitions and research have been funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Andy Warhol Foundation, Luce Foundation, and the  National Endowment for the Arts. She has published reviews and articles, presented papers, and organized symposia on a variety of American and contemporary art topics.

Biung Ismahasan, PhD is a curator, artist and researcher from the Bunun, Atayal and Kanakanavu Nations, three of Taiwan’s sixteen Indigenous Nations. He received a PhD in Curating from the Centre for Curatorial Studies at the University of Essex, UK, in January 2021, with a thesis on ‘Indigenous Relational Space and Performance: Curating Together towards Sovereignty in Taiwan and Beyond.’ His research involves issues of Indigenous curatorial practice and decolonial aesthetics, focusing on the curation of Taiwanese Indigenous contemporary art, building on the themes of the articulation of ‘performative Indigeneity’, Indigenous creative sovereignty, ethics and epistemologies of artistic collaboration and strategies, as well as the historiography of Indigenous curation and exhibition design. He is an alumnus of the MA in Cultural Policy, Relations & Diplomacy from the Institute for Creative and Cultural Entrepreneurship at Goldsmiths, University of London (2014).

His most notable curatorial projects include: Dispossessions: An Indigenous Performative Encounter 2014–2019 (an international performance art exchange of Indigenous artists from Taiwan), Ngahi’ Routes: When Depth Become Experiment (Taoyuan City Indigenous Cultural Centre, 2019); the Rukai Nation installation artist Eleng Luluan’s Between Dreams at Àbadakone | Continuous Fire | Feu continuel (National Gallery of Canada, 2019-2020); Resurgence and Solidarity: Indigenous Taiwanese Women’s Art (Taiwan Indigenous Peoples Cultural Park, 2021 collaborated with British Council and Border Crossings’ ORIGINS Festival of First Nations in London). He was a curatorial assistant of Let the River Flow: The Sovereign Will and the Making of a New Worldliness (Office for Contemporary Art Norway in Oslo, 2018). biungismahasan.weebly.com

Alice Ming Wai Jim is Professor and Concordia University Research Chair in Ethnocultural Art Histories in Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal, Canada. She is founding co-editor-in-chief with Alexandra Chang of the journal Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas (ADVA), published by Brill (Leiden, NL). An art historian and curator, her research on diasporic art in Canada and contemporary Asian art has generated new dialogues within and between ethnocultural and global art histories, critical race theory, media arts, and curatorial studies. A core scholar of the NYU Global Asia/Pacific Art Exchange (GAX) since 2014, Jim co-convened GAX 2019 Tiohtiá:ke (Montreal):Asian Indigenous Relations in Contemporary Art, which brought together Asian diasporic and Indigenous researchers, artists, and students to consider the theme of “curating hospitality” in relation to care discourses in contemporary art. Jim is a SSHRC co-investigator and FQRSC  principal investigator for the Trans-Atlantic Platform project, Worlding Public Cultures (2020–2023), and a collaborator (Critical Race Museology) on the SSHRC Partnership Grant project, Thinking Through the Museum: A Partnership Approach to Curating Difficult Knowledge in Public (2021–2028). Her current SSHRC-funded oral histories research project, Afrofuturism and Black Lives Matter in the Canadian art scene, is part of a larger examination of the convergence of Indigenous and Afro-Asian futurism in contemporary art. Jim is a member of the College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists of the Royal Society of Canada.

Mark Krasovic is associate professor of history and American Studies at Rutgers University-Newark, where he is the lead PI on the Mellon-funded Just Futures project on racial reparations. He works with partners on and off campus – including Gallery Aferro, the Ironbound Community Corporation, and Aljira, a Center for Contemporary Art – to organize exhibits and archives. He is the author of The Newark Frontier: Community Action in the Great Society (2016).

Annie Jael Kwan is an independent curator and researcher whose exhibition-making, programming, publication and teaching practice is located at the intersection of contemporary art, art history and cultural activism, with interest in archives, histories, feminist, queer and alternative knowledges, collective practices, and solidarity. She is director of Something Human, a curatorial initiative that launched the pioneering Southeast Asia Performance Collection that represent 50 artists from the region at the Live Art Development Agency during the 2017 M.A.P. (Movement x Archive x Performance) project. SAPC was then presented at the 2019 Archive-in-Residence “Southeast Asia Performance Collection” exhibition, along with the Pathways of Performativity in Contemporary Southeast Asian Art symposium at the Haus der Kunst in Munich, Germany. She is a lead Associate at Asia-Art-Activism (AAA), an interdisciplinary, intergenerational network based in London and working transnationally. She was the co-editor of Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia’s guest issue: Archives, a recipient of a Diverse Actions Leadership Award 2019, and currently teaches at Central St Martins, University of the Arts, London, KASK, School of Art, in Gent, Belgium, and the Royal College of Art. She is currently Curator-in-Residence at FACT Liverpool where she curated Futures Ages Will Wonder, and Digital Researcher-in Residence at the Barbican for Noguchi: Resonances. anniejaelkwan.com/

Adriel Luis is a community organizer, artist, writer, and curator who believes that collective liberation can happen in poetic ways. His life’s work is focused on the mutual thriving of artistic integrity and social vigilance. He is a part of the iLL-Literacy arts collective, which creates music and media to strengthen Black and Asian coalitions, and is creative director of Bombshelltoe, a collaborative of artists and leaders from frontline communities responding to nuclear histories. Adriel is the Curator of Digital and Emerging Practice at the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, where he advocates for equitable practices in museums and institutions. His ancestors are rooted in Toisan, China, and migrated through Hong Kong, Mexico, and the United States. Adriel was born on Ohlone land.

Adriel has curated projects in a range of venues including several museums across the Smithsonian in Washington D.C.; MoMA and Pearl River Mart in New York City; Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane, Australia; Silo Park in Auckland, Aotearoa; Atom Bar in Buenos Aires, Argentina; and an abandoned Foodland in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi. His writing has appeared in Poetry Magazine, the Asian American Literary Review, and Smithsonian Magazine. He has spoken at the Tate Modern, Yale University, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the China Academy of Fine Arts. His performance venues include the Brooklyn Academy of Music, SXSW, the John F. Kennedy Center, and the American University of Paris. He has a degree in human ecologies from UC Davis in Community and Regional Development and a minor in Asian American Studies.

Michelle Yun Mapplethorpe is vice president for global artistic programs at Asia Society and director of Asia Society Museum, appointed in October 2020. In this role, she is responsible for overseeing the Museum’s exhibitions program and permanent collections. Since joining Asia Society in 2012 as curator of modern and contemporary art, Yun Mapplethorpe has served as curator or cocurator for over twenty-five exhibitions for the Museum. Prior to her appointment to Asia Society, Yun Mapplethorpe was the curator of the Hunter College Art Galleries. She has served as the project director of Cai Guo-Qiang’s studio and as a curatorial assistant in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in addition to organizing numerous independently curated exhibitions. Yun Mapplethorpe is a frequent lecturer on modern and contemporary Asian art. Her writings have been included in many publications, among them After Darkness: Southeast Asian Art in the Wake of History (Asia Society Museum, 2017); No Limits: Zao Wou-Ki (Asia Society Museum, Colby College Museum of Art, 2016); and Nam June Paik: Becoming Robot (Asia Society Museum, 2014); and the updated edition of Treasures of Asian Art: The Asia Society Museum Collection (Asia Society Museum, 2016); all of which she also co-edited; Kim Tschang Yeul (Actes Sud, 2019); Patti Smith: 9.11 Babelogue (The Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Art Gallery at Hunter College, 2011); Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want To Believe (Guggenheim Museum, 2008); Benezit Dictionary of Asian Artists (Oxford University Press, 2012); and The Grove Dictionary of Art (Oxford University Press, 2009/2020); and Greater New York (P.S. 1 and MoMA, 2005). Yun Mapplethorpe earned her MA in Modern Art and Critical Studies from Columbia University and her BA from Mount Holyoke College. She is a graduate of the Getty Leadership Institute’s Executive Education Program for Museum Leaders and sits on the advisory board of the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum.

Chief Vincent Mann is the Turtle Clan Chief of the Ramapough Lenape Nation, which encompasses Passaic County NJ, Warwick, and surrounding areas in New York. Chief Mann has held the title of Turtle Clan Chief for approximately twelve years. For the past five years, he has worked with the NYU Environmental Studies department. In that time, he participated in the construction and implementation of a community health survey focused on identifying and addressing health concerns within his community. To honor Chief Mann’s efforts to shed light on his community’s efforts to fight back after the Ford toxic dumping, he was awarded the Russ Berry Foundations highest award of Unsung Hero.

Chief Mann has been at the forefront of the New Jersey environmental justice movement, where he has worked to protect the water supply of 4 million people and advocated for the community living in close proximity to the Ringwood mines superfund site. He has served on the Legacy Council of the Highlands Coalition and the Ringwood mines superfund site’s Citizen Advisory Group (CAG). His efforts have been documented in the recent publication Our Land, Our Stories: Excavating Subterranean Histories of Ringwood Mines and the Ramapough Lunaape Nation. This collaborative publication was developed through Chief Mann’s partnership with the Rutgers-Newark Price Institute and Anita Bakshi, Professor of the Landscape Architecture Program at Rutgers New Brunswick.

Chief Mann has given multiple Land Acknowledgements throughout New Jersey and New York City and has helped develop multiple restoration projects within the Ramapough community. In particular, Chief Mann helped launch the renovation of a Historic Native American Church within his community, founded by Samuel Defreese, a Ramapough.

Currently, Chief Mann is working on co-creating the United Lunaapeewak. This project is broadly focused on issues of cultural restoration and the construction of a permanent educational center for the greater citizens of New Jersey and Southern New York. He is also working on co-creating an organic farm, known as the Munsee Three Sisters Medicinal Garden. The prayer behind this is to create local jobs and, more importantly, to bring back food sovereignty to his Clan. As an advocate for cultural and environmental issues, he continues to this day to offer up prayers for humanity and for our natural environment.

Lauren C. O’Brien is an educator, curator, and public historian interested in preserving stories that explore the relationship between Black placemaking, public memory, and geographies of displacement. Over the last several years, she has worked as a researcher for institutions like the Jane Addams Hull House Museum, the National Museum of African American History & Culture (NMAAHC), and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Most recently, Lauren served as the primary research consultant for the Tenement Museum’s first permanent exhibition and walking tour documenting the history of African Americans on the Lower East Side. Lauren is currently a PhD Candidate in American Studies at Rutgers University-Newark writing her dissertation on the public memory of slavery and Black placemaking in Newark.

Transnational feminist kate-hers RHEE (이미래/李未來) is an interdisciplinary visual, performance and social practice artist, who works between Germany, South Korea and the United States. Working primarily in performance, installation, and participatory interventions that are often documented and registered in video, photography and drawing, the artist’s transcultural practice has led her to working chiefly in United States, South Korea, and Germany, where learning foreign languages and code switching, continuously informs her work. Her current project, Wunderkammerkŏri, is an interdisciplinary social sculptural installation that interrogates the Western museum’s role as a postcolonial cultural custodian, while reflecting on transnational collection practices and display histories though object making and collecting, while seeking participatory engagement with the public.

She has recently shown work at SOMA Artspace (Berlin), Meinblau Projektraum (Berlin), AHL Foundation (New York), MiA Collective Art, (New York) and the Museum für Asiatische Kunst (Berlin). A new installation, The Postcolonial Afterlives of Han, dealing with death ritual and the afterlife will be featured this November at the Pacific Asia Museum, University of Southern California. She was in residence at Express Newark in 2020 and is currently preparing for a solo exhibition Books and Things: The Studiolo of kate-hers RHEE at the Paul Robeson Galleries at Rutgers University in March 2022. www.estherka.com

Alex Dika Seggerman, Ph.D. is assistant professor of Islamic art history in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media at Rutgers University-Newark. She is author of Modernism on the Nile: Art in Egypt between the Islamic and the Contemporary (UNC Press, 2019) and co-editor of the forthcoming Making Modernity in the Islamic Mediterranean (Indiana University Press, 2022). Before joining Rutgers, she held postdoctoral positions at Smith College, Hampshire College, and Yale University. She specializes on the intersection of Islam and modernism in art history. Her next book project traces the long history of art and American Islam.

Liz Ševčenko is founding director of the Humanities Action Lab, a growing consortium of over 30 universities, led from Rutgers University-Newark, that collaborate with issue organizations and public spaces to develop student- and community-curated public memory projects around contested social issues. HAL’s latest project is Climates of Inequality: Stories of Environmental Justice, a traveling exhibit, web platform, and public actions confronting histories of environmental racism and their legacies for the climate crisis, created by over 500 students and frontline community leaders across the hemisphere  COI was preceded by States of Incarceration:  A National Dialogue of Local Histories, which inspired the Rikers Public Memory Project, a collaboration with Just Leadership USA and Create Forward.  HAL grew out of the Guantánamo Public Memory Project, an international collaboration of universities and organizations Ševčenko launched from Columbia University’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights, to build a global conversation about the past, present, and future of the US naval base at Guantánamo Bay. Ševčenko was founding director of the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, a network of historic sites that foster public dialogue on pressing contemporary issues. Prior to starting the Coalition, Ševčenko served as Vice President for Programs at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, developing exhibits and educational activities that connect the stories of the neighborhood’s immigrants past and present. She writes on intersections of social justice, heritage, and memory.

Amir Sheikh is a transdisciplinary urban environmental researcher, curator, and collaboration builder. He utilizes the tools of anthropology, geography, environmental science, historical inquiry, and design-based collaborations to examine critical questions about our spatial relationships to landscapes and their deeply intertwined narratives of place.

He currently consults for a variety of cultural landscape and environmental planning projects foregrounding counter-mapping methodologies, and is the spatial research manager for the Public History Project. He is also a Curatorial Associate at the Burke Museum in Seattle, where he co-led the Waterlines Project and co-created a range of materials related to Seattle’s environmental urban histories and decolonial landscapes.  Previously, at the University of Washington, he contributed to projects ranging from community-based hyper-local scales around gentrification to environmental modeling projects addressing water issues in global development contexts, regional historical ecological mapping research in the Salish Sea basin to inform environmental restoration efforts and Tribal co-management of aquatic resources, and the development of place-based curricular transmedia strategies bridging the humanities, social sciences, and the environmental sciences.

He is interested in collaborative co-created community responsive and academic projects that bridge research and the public sphere. Amir holds an M.A. in Environmental Anthropology and a B.S. in Ecology and Conservation biology both from the University of Washington.

John Tain is Head of Research at Asia Art Archive, where he leads a team based in Hong Kong, New Delhi, and Shanghai. Recent projects include the exhibition Crafting Communities (2020), which looks at the confluence of feminism, crafts, and social practice in the biennial series of Womanifesto events organized in Thailand from 1997 to 2008, and MAHASSA (Modern Art Histories in and across Africa, and South and Southeast Asia, 2019-2020), a collaboration with the Dhaka Art Summit and the Institute for Comparative Modernities at Cornell University. He is an editor for the Exhibition Histories series with Afterall and CCS Bard, the latest volume of which is Uncooperative Contemporaries: Art Exhibitions in Shanghai in 2000, and also an advisor for the upcoming Asia Forum.  He was previously a curator for modern and contemporary collections at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles.

Jack (John Kuo Wei) Tchen, historian, curator, dumpster diver, and teacher, is the Inaugural Clement A. Price Professor of Public History and Humanities and Director of the Price Institute at Rutgers – Newark. This fall he organized “Dismantling Eugenics: Legacies, Reckonings, Futures” on the unresolved issues raised by the 1921 Second International Eugenics Congress held at the American Museum of Natural History. His book Yellow Peril! An archive of anti-Asian fear (2016) is a sourcebook on Western xenophobia and violence. He is founding director of the Asian/Pacific /American Studies Program and Institute at New York University. In 1980, he co-founded the Museum of Chinese in America.

Jonas Tinius, PhD is Postdoctoral Researcher and Scientific Coordinator of the ERC project Minor Universality. Narrative World Constructions After Western Universalism and Associate Member of the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. His ethnographic research grapples with the tensions between art, nation, identity, migration, and colonial legacies in Europe, focusing on institutionalised forms of cultural production (theatres, museums, and galleries) and the reflexive agency of artistic and curatorial work. He is editor, with Margareta von Oswald, of the Open-access volume Across Anthropology: Troubling Colonial Legacies, Museums, and the Curatorial (Leuven University Press, 2020).

Fanny Wonu Veys is curator Oceania at the National Museum of World Cultures, the Netherlands. There, Veys has curated the Mana Maori exhibition (2010–2011), Things that Matter (2017-), What a Genderful World (2019-2020; 2021-2022) and A Sea of Islands (2020-2021) and has collaborated on many others. She co-curated a barkcloth exhibition Tapa, Étoffes cosmiques d’Océanie in Cahors (France, 2009) and Migrating Objects: Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice (2020 and 2021).

She has previously worked at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge (UK) (2004–2006, 2008–2009) and has held postdoctoral fellowships at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) (2006–2007) and at the Musée du Quai Branly (Paris) (2007–2008).

Her fieldwork sites are New Zealand (since 2000), Tonga (since 2003) and more recently Arnhem Land, Australia (since 2014).

She is particularly interested in Pacific textiles, and the significance of historical objects in contemporary settings. She has published widely including her most recent single author book Unwrapping Tongan Barkcloth: Encounters, Creativity and Female Agency (Bloomsbury, 2017) and co-edited book Collecting in the South Sea. The Voyage of Bruni d’Entrecasteaux 1791-1794 (Sidestone Press, 2018).