—Feral Contributors

ANIMAL PATTERNING PROJECT

Debra Swack is a digital artist who creates transformative participatory experiences about the most critical issues of our time. Her writings have been published by MIT and she is mentioned in Art and Innovation at Xerox Parc (MIT, 1999). She received two Fulbright and four co-production grants from Banff Centre and Tel Aviv University that helped her complete many ambitious projects including Little Wars; the Carousel Project (Beecher Center for Arts and Tech, 2003) and Birdsongs: The Language Gene (Princeton University, 2008). While a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome 2014, she presented Cloud Mapping Project for MIT (2017) at the Pera Museum. In 2015 Animal Patterning Project was commissioned by the West Harlem Art Fund and Pratt Institute and adapted for dance (Art Daily). 95 Chimes was adapted for 16 channel sound installation at the Staller Center in 2016. The Monument Project was a recipient of 2018 Artist Engagement grant from the NYC Dept of Cultural Affairs, and a 2020 recipient of an Andrew Mellon Foundation grant. Her work is a catalyst for change, innovation, collaboration in helping to solve world problems. Bloom explores genetics and bio-acoustic communication to aid preservation and world hunger; The Emotions after Charles Darwin (MIT, 2013) addresses CRISPR and the universality of emotions on a biological level regardless of race, age, gender; Cloud Mapping addresses climate change, surveillance, machine learning and creativity; and Animal Patterning addresses genetics, environmental displacement through urbanization, our co-existence in urban spaces, and the rise of infectious diseases such as COVID.

Manhattan, NY
http://debraswack.com

AOUDAD

Ammotragus lervia

Soussi Houssine, PhD. Associate Professor of language and communication at University of Ibn Zohr, Morocco.

Dr Soussi obtained a Master’s Degree in media studies from Qadi Ayyad University of Marrakech (Morocco) and a Ph.D. in applied linguistics from Moulay Ismail University of Meknes (Morocco). His research interests are focused on intercultural learning in online environments, as well as in the sociolinguistics situation of Morocco and more specifically the study of the Amazigh language and culture. Dr. Soussi is also interested in media-art and the intersection of art, science and technology. Accordingly, he is the moderator and correspondent of YASMIN: a network of artists, scientists, engineers, theoreticians and institutions promoting communication and collaboration in art, science and technology around the Mediterranean Rim (a project initiated by Leonardo/Olats in collaboration with the Rockefeller Foundation and the “Digiarts” program of the UNESCO).

Morocco

ARMY ANT

Swarm Raid

Anna Lindemann (co-director, composer, performer) calls herself an Evo Devo artist. Her work as a storyteller, animator, composer, and performer explores the emerging field of evolutionary developmental biology (Evo Devo). Her Evo Devo Art, including the art science performances The Colony and Theory of Flight and her animated shorts Beetle Bluffs and Ant Sisters, has been featured internationally at theaters, planetariums, galleries, concert halls, biology conferences, film festivals, digital art conferences, and natural history museums. Anna received an MFA in Integrated Electronic Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a BS in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology from Yale. She is an assistant professor in the Digital Media & Design department at the University of Connecticut where she has pioneered courses integrating art and science.

USA
www.annalindemann.com

Aquatic Larvae

Christy Rupp is an American eco-artist and citizen scientist. Having grown up in the Rust Belt of upstate NY during the 60’s, she witnessed first hand the hazards of industrial waste and efforts to conceal the underlying causes of pollution. She moved to NYC in the late 70’s as it faced bankruptcy and offered fertile ground for a generation of artists lucky enough to participate in the petri dish of history, culture and nature that was late capitalist downtown.  Originating from an interest in urban ecology and the waste stream, Rupp’s work taps into universal themes of climate change and justice. Her work has focused on environmental hazards like fracking waste, oil extraction and water quality. Her career survey publication, Noisy Autumn, is launching on November 16, 2021; a tribute to Rachael Carson’s Silent Spring at 60 years.

New York
Christyrupp.com

BADGER

Crossed Paths – Badger

Miranda Whall is an artist, director of Creative Arts and full – time lecturer at Aberystwyth University. Her practice interests include other species, places, living landscapes and ecologies, exploring the relationship between human and non-human through interdisciplinary practices such as performance, film, gentle activism and installation. Whall studied her undergraduate in fine art at UWIC, Cardiff and the Emily Carr School, Vancouver, Canada, her postgraduate in sculpture at The Royal Academy Schools, London, and was an associate student at Goldsmiths College, University of London. She was recipient of an Arts Council Wales Major Creative Wales Award in 2012 and an Arts Council Wales Large Production Grant in 2017/18. Whall had a solo show Crossed Paths – Sheep in Oriel Davies Newtown, Wales in 2018, a solo show Passage in Institute of Contemporary Interdisciplinary Art, Bath in 2015, a solo show Is It OK IF in the Gallery One, Arts Centre Aberystwyth 2010 as well as numerous international group exhibitions.

West Wales, UK
www.mirandawhall.space

BARNACLE

Is it alive? Cirripedia: The Upside- Down Creature Who Revolutionized Our Creaturely Kinships

Barbara Krystal is a marine biologist, author, swimmer and tap dancer. She celebrates the sea as a place for science and humanities to meet.

Seattle, Washington, USA
https://www.theartofwater.global

BARRED OWL

Enatic

Ashley Czajkowski is an image-based artist and educator working in numerous interdisciplinary methods. Driven by curiosity and personal experience, her research explores social constructions related to femininity, nature, mortality, and the psychological manifestation of the human-animal. Though situated in photography, Czajkowski’s practice pushes the expected boundaries of the medium to incorporate performance, video, installation, and alternative print processes. Czajkowski earned her MFA in photography in 2015 from Arizona State University and currently resides in Mesa, Arizona. She is the sound technician and story editor for the Creative Push Project and is a Lecturer for the online Digital Photography program at Arizona State University.

Mesa, Arizona, USA
www.ashleyczajkowski.com

BED BUG

Cimex lectularius

Lindsay Garcia is Assistant Dean of the College for Junior/Senior Studies and Recovery/Substance-Free Student Initiatives at Brown University. She is also an artist and scholar of environmental humanities. Her artwork and research defamiliarizes the politics of representation from a queer, interspecies, anti-racist lens. She earned her PhD in American Studies at the College of William & Mary and her MFA from State University from New York-Purchase College. 

Providence, RI
www.lindsaygarcia.com
www.brown.edu/go/donovan

BLACKBIRD

Turdus merula merula

Robert Ellis Walton is Resident Artist in the School of Computing and Information Systems at The University of Melbourne where he leads the creation of performance artworks that explore the expressive potential of emerging technologies including, artificial intelligence, machine vision, virtual holograms, swarm robotics, engineered bacterial bioluminescence, MR/XR, building information model data, and ambient computing. He is also a Senior Lecturer in Theatre at the Victorian College of the Arts.

Naarm/Melbourne, Australia
www.robertwalton.net

BLUE TIT

Nest/Jumper Series

Eileen Hutton is a visual artist whose practice aims to generate reciprocal relationships with the more than human world and in the process create replicable models for informed ecological actions. In 2012, Hutton developed the Art and Ecology MFA at Burren College of Art and National University of Ireland, Galway. She was the Researcher/ Evaluator for An Urgent Enquiry(2017- 2020) a series of think tank sessions and residencies that address the intersection between art, biodiversity and climate change. A member of the Ecoart Network, Hutton is a contributing author to the group’s collectively produced book Ecoart in Action,a collection of essays and provocations on pedagogy and ecoarts practice. She exhibited a series of purpose built habitats and collaboratively produced sculptures as part of Home: Being and Belonging in Contemporary Irelandat The Glucksman Museum (IE) and was the A.I.R. for the Soil Project Residency with the Butler Gallery (IE) for 2021.

Co. Kildare Ireland
www.eileenhutton.com

BOVINE

Between Bos and Bubalus: Bovine politics and multispecies solidarity in India

Clara Miller received her B.S. in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from The Pennsylvania State University. She is currently working as a Direct Care Worker for individuals with disabilities and plans to pursue a graduate program in Disability Studies.

State College, Pennsylvania

A. Parikh is an Assistant Teaching Professor at the Pennsylvania State University. She looks critically and creatively at gender and development, urban environments, and nationalism. She dreams of an academia that displays an ethics of care not only in scholarship, but also in how they are in the world.

State College, Pennsylvania

BUNNY

Oryctolagus cuniculus [feralis]

bug carlson (they/them) is a white trans non-binary interdisciplinary research artist working in the mushy territories of ecology, grief, umwelt, entanglement,and play. They work across drawing, performance, and writing to render relationships between humans and the more-than-human world through mythopoeic narratives that weave intimacy, cosmology, and biology together. They are most interested in the squishy, slimy, and benthic beings of the cosmos.

Most recently, carlson was a fellow at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts and Kathmandu International Artists in Residency. They have attended residences including Vermont Studio Center, Wassaic Project, Montello Foundation, Kimmel Harding Nelson, and BigCI. carlson has exhibited, performed, and lectured across the U.S. and internationally and they are a contributing author in the 2021 Lexington Press edited volume Intimate Relations: Communication (in)the Anthropocene. carlson has received multiple awards including a Puffin Foundation Environmental Grant and the Penn Praxis Social Impact Award.

Tiwa Territory
www.bugcarlson.com

CALIFORNIA GRIZZLY

Ursus arctos californicus  

Daniel Lanza Rivers is Assistant Professor of American Studies & Literature at San José State University, where they also serve as Director of the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies. Daniel teaches courses in U.S. literature, cultural studies, animal studies, and the environmental humanities. And their research explores the ways that settlers’ ideas about California’s “natural” state have shaped the region’s environments, communities, and literary cultures since colonization. Daniel’s writing has appeared in the Journal of Transnational American Studies, Apogee, Joyland, American Quarterly, and Women’s Studies, where they edited the special issue “Futures of Feminist Science Studies.”

San Jose, CA
https://sjsu.academia.edu/DanielLanzaRivers

CAT

Cats and the Stag-Hunt Game

Amalia Călinescu – I am a tenured high school English teacher and holistic researcher, with a PhD in Philology and two Master’s degrees, in Literary Translation and Behavioural Economics, from the University of Bucharest, Romania. I am also a law graduate, legal translator, psychologist, sports nutritionist, and an internationally certified master sports trainer (Yoga, Pilates, Fitness, Tae Bo, Step Aerobics). I do everything in my power to live my life holistically and translate my relation with the Universe into beneficial energy and inspired action. I am the author of several articles and books, which can be found through my website, in international journals, on Amazon, or in bookstores worldwide. I am deeply interested in the therapeutic role of literature with regard to human interconnection and the decision-making process. In the near future, I also intend to occupy a teaching position at the University of Bucharest and publish many other books and interdisciplinary articles.

Romania
www.holistic-english.com

CAT

Staying Autistic, Staying Feral

Amy Gaeta (she/hers or they/them) is not utopian; she is a student of understanding how we survive a world that is killing us on a dying planet, a feminist disability activist and scholar, poet, punk, and PhD candidate in the English Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her academic work specializes in the psychological aspects of human-technology relations under the surveillance state. In poetry, she explores mental illness, desire, and the impossibility of being human.

United States

CHIMERA

Ursulansis amabilis

Daniel Robles Lizano is a visual artist from Mexico City (1994) He graduated with a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His works are mostly sculptural along with performative objects and video, where he uses various materials such as ceramics, silicon, metal, wood, among others to explore speculative universes and possible future bodies.

He works as a freelance practical effects artist for theatre and film which has helped him incorporate various techniques in his own work.

Mexico City
www.daniel-robles.com 
Instagram:@robleslizano

COAL-MINE CANARY

Syrinx Spring

Jennifer Scappettone works at the confluence of the literary, scholarly, visual, and performing arts. Her poetry has engaged translators of various kinds (verbal, filmic, musical, choreographic) around the world—books include From Dame Quickly, The Republic of Exit 43: Outtakes & Scores from an Archaeology & Pop-Up Opera of the Corporate Dump, Belladonna Elders Series #5: Poetry, Landscape, Apocalypse, and SMOKEPENNY LYRICHORD HEAVENBRED: 2 Acts, a libretto for “mixed-reality” performance with code artists Judd Morrissey and Abraham Avnisan. Her translations of the poet-refugee Amelia Rosselli were gathered in the award-winning collection Locomotrix. Her critical study Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice investigated the undeath of lifeways deemed past and was a finalist for the Modernist Studies Association book prize. She has performed solo and collaboratively on works crafted for sites ranging from the Chicago Architecture Biennial to the American Academy in Rome. She is Associate Professor at the University of Chicago and Visiting Professor at the Université Gustave Eiffel.

Chicago and Los Angeles
https://oikost.com

COCKROACH

Turn Over Cockroaches

Geetanjali Sachdev is an art and design pedagogue. She has been involved in developing pedagogical frameworks for the past twenty-five years at the Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology in Bangalore, India. Her research and practice within higher education are in the areas of art and design assessment, pedagogies for plant study, patterns and paper. She leads Pedagogy with the Botanical, an initiative involving teaching and learning with plants. She is completing her PhD in Art & Design from Manipal University, India, through which she is framing pedagogical approaches for botanical art and design practice in India.

Bangalore, India
http://srishtimanipalinstitute.in/people/geetanjali-sachdev

COW

Kreuzritter des Fortschritts

Silke Mathe is a German-Norwegian artist. She lives and works in Oslo Norway, has a master’s degree in painting from the Akademie der bildenden Künste Nürnberg/ Germany, where she studied under prof. Johannes Grützke. (1995-2001) She paints in oil on canvas and parkett and looks for the truth. She is intrigued by people and animals and by what lies behind their facade, the “hidden truth.”

“Mathe is a figurative painter who is concerned with what is hidden in what seems to be normal and scenes from everyday life. But what is the truth of the moment? What secrets does beauty hold? And is it really so beautiful? Can we really trust what we see?” (Ine Harrang, art critic)

Norway
www.instagram.com/silkemathe

COW

Out walking the cow (2017) – The last rumination 

Steinar Laumann is an artist, carpenter and mountain guide based in Southern Norway. He graduated from Oslo Academy of the Arts in 2015, and has since worked as an artist and guide. In 2021 he also published a book and started an indie publishing house called Favn Forlag where he plans to focus on the small and non-mainstream writers of Norway. Laumann is often making art pieces that is non-sites, meaning they are spread over a vast area, and last for a long period of time.

Norway 
www.steinarlaumann.com

COW, KU, KO

Kulning

Cait Vitale-Sullivan was steeped in the high desert wilderness of Idaho as a child. She is intrigued by the human connection to nature and music, and when not playing outside, could be found playing fiddle or singing in the forest. In 2013, she moved to Norway, where she was introduced to Scandinavian traditional music and majestic fjords. After returning to Idaho to finish a degree in Ecology and Conservation Biology, she returned to Sweden to complete a Fulbright grant studying the connection between Kulning (Swedish cow calling music) and landscape. There, she attended Malungs Folkhögskola to study Swedish folk music. She is currently completing a master’s degree in Agroecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a focus on the connection between music and agricultural landscapes, exploring the human, more-than-human relationships built through sound.

Madison, WI
https://vitalesulliv.myportfolio.com/

COYOTE

Canis Latrans: Persistence through its image

Dawnja Burris was born in Colorado and raised in West Texas/Southern New Mexico. She is a media studies scholar and practicing conceptual photographer. Her academic degrees are in the disciplines of communication and media studies, media philosophy and photography. She is currently an Emeritus Professor with the School of Media Studies, The New School, NYC.

Her research, teaching and photography has consistently explored cultural practice expressed through media representation, focused upon philosophies and politics of virtual identity construction, the predominance of animals in and as media, and conceptual landscape renderings.  She began exhibiting her photographic work in 2017.

Motivated by the possibility of creating breaks in perception and the presence of hidden realities, her work proposes a rationality beyond the presumed legitimacy of the real. The images in this and most of her series present as fictional in order to be thought about more thoroughly on their own terms.

US Southwest
http://www.dawnjaburris.com

Coyote, Mink

Coyote; A Woman Can Smell Mink Through Six Inches of Lead

Sarah J Stankey recently received an MFA in photography at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She also studied wildlife ecology with the Center for Culture, History and the Environment and earned a certificate from the Nelson Institute. Her studio practice includes photography and research within zoology, limnology and geology. Her interest in the natural sciences and fine arts includes the history of museums, taxidermy and cabinets of curiosity. In addition to her fine art practice, Sarah enjoys working within museums and is currently employed as a photographer and exhibitions preparator at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art.

Madison, Wisconsin, USA
sarahjstankey.com

Decorative Primate

Émili Dufour lives in a small town in Québec, Canada. She holds a Master’s degree in fine arts and a bachelor’s degree in interdisciplinary art from the Université of Quebec to Chicoutimi. His works, through drawing and painting, are composed by multiple-proposition and often ambiguous scenes, a sort of relational analogy between human and nature, inconvenience and beauty. His work is part of private and collective collections and has been presented in individual and group exhibitions in Québec. She did the Résidence croisée Alsace, France/Saguenay-lac-Saint-Jean, Québec.

Québec, Canada
https://emilidufour.com

DISCORDANT MOOSE

Alces alces absonus

Edmund B. Molder (he / him / his) is a geographer, earth scientist, and visual artist interested in the complex and porous boundary between human and other-than-human natures. Drawing from political ecology and other critical geography traditions, he examines the discursive role of digital representations of the environment (e.g satellite images, stream gauge data, photographs) in shaping ideologies about the natural world, and how these ideologies drive environmental governance outcomes in particular places. He holds a B.S. in geology from the University of Oregon and an M.A. in anthropology and geography from Colorado State University. He is currently a PhD student in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Madison, WI
www.nedmolder.com

DOG-HUMAN

Canis-lupus-familiaris–Cynocephali

Darren O’Brien is a UK based multidisciplinary artist currently undertaking an AHRC funded PhD at Nottingham Trent University titled ‘Deep Canine Topography’ which explores Human-Canine collaborative walking practice. O’Brien’s practice utilises Psychogeography and counter-cartographic methods to integrate extended ideas of landscape art practice through photography, moving image, locative media, drawing, sound, and immersive installation. He is specifically interested in exploring how we move through landscape and how we engage with more than human worlds through sensory entanglement.

Leicester UK
www.darrenobrienart.wordpress.com

DOMESTIC CAT

Cats In The Tree of Life

Jill Journeaux is Professor of Fine Art in the Centre for Arts, Memory and Communities, at Coventry University, UK. She is an artist and researcher with particular interests in the representation of physical, emotional and psychological realities through autobiographical narrative. Her key interests are the female body as an experience of inhabitation, the crafts and artifacts of domesticity as content and process for fine art practice, and concepts of the studio house. She realizes her practice through drawing and stitching , examining the space between art and craft, and the relationships between the decorative and the domestic.

Jill Journeaux is Director of Drawing Conversations – an ongoing series of exhibitions, internal symposia and publications, and was lead editor for, and contributor to, Collective and Collaborative Drawing in Contemporary Practice(2017) and Body, Space and Place in Collective and Collaborative Drawing Practice: Drawing Conversations Two(2020). See: drawingconversations.org

United Kingdom
jilljourneaux.co.uk

DRAGON

Multilogues with a Weather-Making Dragon of the North

Anna Vladimirova is a PHD Candidate in Education at the University of Oulu, Finland. Her research interests include body-place relations, the problematics of ethics and care in multispecies encounters, the role of embodied movement in environmental sustenance. Drawing on philosophies of new materialism and posthumanism, she currently explores the implications of children-nature relations for the environmental education. Her work also aims to contribute to rethinking an increasingly anthropocentric notion of forest from an educational perspective.

Oulu, Finland
https://olemus.wordpress.com/

Earthworm

Quake & Underneath Infinity

Alicia Radage is an artist working through performance, video and sound. They have been supported by Arts Council England and the British Council. They are currently exploring the intersection of Neurodiverse experience and Shamanic practice. Alicia has taught at Universities on Fine Art and Theatre courses internationally. They co-organise Assembly with Jasper Llewellyn, a workshop and residency for Action Artists in Provence, France. Alicia graduated from The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in 2011 with a Distinction in Advanced Theatre Practice.

London, UK
www.aliciaradage.com

EASTERN GREY SQUIRREL

Squirrealism

Carollyne Yardley is an interdisciplinary artist researcher who lives and works as an uninvited guest on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded Coast Salish territory of the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations (Ləkwəŋən speaking peoples). Her research-creation practice is informed by a years-long relationship with native and introduced urban animals whose territory includes her home. She has presented her work in venues including Fazakas Gallery (Vancouver), Madrona Gallery (Victoria), and has exhibited across Canada in Montréal (Papier Montréal), Victoria, Vancouver, and Toronto, as well as internationally in Seattle. Her work has been written about by Canadian Art Magazine and Border Crossings and her art research has been published in Ecocene: Cappadocia Journal of Environmental Humanities. Currently, she is completing an MFA degree at Emily Carr University of Arts + Design in Vancouver, BC.

Canada
www.carollyne.com

El Lobo, MEXICAN Gray Wolf

Nina’s Story 

Viola Arduini is an Italian artist and educator currently based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. In her work, she investigates the relationships formed by humans, nature, and technology. Her interdisciplinary work encompasses photography, poetry, installation, and sound, creating connections with biology and mythology.

Arduini received a Bachelor of Arts from NABA New Academy of Fine Arts, Milano, Italy and a Master of Arts in Documentary Photography from University of South Wales, Newport, UK. She has recently received a Master of Fine Arts in Art & Ecology from the University of New Mexico. Her work has been included in solo and group exhibitions in the US and Europe.

Albuquerque, New Mexico
www.violaarduini.com

ELEPHANT HAWK-MOTH

Moth Kota

Hannah Imlach is an artist-researcher who explores ecology and environmental perception through the creation of site- and species-responsive sculpture, film and photography. Her collaborative practice engages diverse communities of environmental knowledge resulting in immersive artworks and participatory events. Her ongoing PhD research, conducted with the University of Edinburgh and with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, focuses on the development of multispecies artworks informed by human-animal encounter and conservation practice at the Loch Lomond nature reserve.

Recent projects include: The Flow Country Sculpture Series,a body of artwork informed by peatland ecology and restoration; The Heavens, a residency in subarctic Finland with the Bioart Society, exploring extremophile life in the atmosphere;  Energy Objects, a solo exhibition at Peacock Visual Arts considering community-initiated renewable energy transition; and From the Dark Ocean Comes Light, a residency, exhibition and education project with researchers from the University of Edinburgh’s Changing Oceans Group.

Glasgow
www.hannahimlach.com

EQUINE, HORSE

The Sassy Equine

Kelsey Dayle John is a member of the Navajo Nation. She studies horse histories, equine facilitated learning, and Native American studies.

Lindsay Stallones Marshall is an assistant professor at the University of Oklahoma. Her work focuses on the intersection of public memory, US West history, and history education, and historical horse-human relationships with an emphasis on interdisciplinary and decolonial methodologies.

Kerri Keller Clement is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Idaho. Her specialities include animal history, environmental and agricultural history, and Indigenous history.

American West