Hot Spots

Karin Bergdolt, Munich
Program / Artist
Karin Bergdolt finished her studies with a master diploma at the Academy of Arts in Munich in the class of Nikolaus Gerhart. Since presenting her three-week performance and installation, "I CHOOSE THE PLACE OF WORK MYSELF" at the former frontier building Germany-Austria 1998, her work has addressed the use and organization of (public) space. In 2002, she established the initiative P.L.A.N. – a concept that is intended to work for the intellectual and sensorial reorganization of places and space, and which functions in an interdisciplinary and participatory way. Karin resided in Pittsburgh with her family for six months supported by an artists' grant through the Barvarian government. Prior to her visit and while she was in Pittsburgh, she formulated the HOT SPOTS PROJECT and began working with Ann Rosenthal and Elizabeth Monoian. She recently received a one-year-stipend for the promotion of equal opportunity of women's rights in university and career.

Elizabeth Monoian, Dubai
Program / Artist
Elizabeth Monoian is an interdisciplinary artist and designer who uses the Internet, found objects and spaces, electronic noise, video, and performance to tease apart and question cultural relationships to time, history, and memory. Her work has screened and exhibited internationally in venues including: the XXIII Moscow International Film Festival, Moscow, Russia; Anthology Film Archives, NYC; Open Screen Belgrade, Belgrade, Serbia; Festival of Actual Kino, Novosibirsk, Russia; The Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland; and the International Media Art Festival at the Armenian Center of Contemporary Experimental Art, Yerevan, Armenia.

She is the principal artist for the Land Art Generator Initiative (LAGI). The goal of LAGI is to design and construct a series of land art installations across the United Arab Emirates that uniquely combine aesthetic intrigue with clean energy generation.

She is the founder and director of Society for Cultural Exchange, a non-profit organization that, through interdisciplinary processes, is dedicated to the perpetuation of free-thought—a thinking for the self while considering the facts of the world as experienced by us each as individuals and shared by us all as a collective society. Society for Cultural Exchange has designed public new media projects, hosted artist residents, provided various workshops, curated art exhibitions, and has planted an urban orchard.
www.landartgenerator.org
www.societyforculturalexchange.org

Ann Rosenthal, Pittsburgh
Program / Artist
Ann Rosenthal brings to communities 30 years experience as an artist, educator, and writer. Her art installations address the local manifestation of global concerns, including climate change, food safety, and nuclear waste. Over the last few years, her work has been shown at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Exit Art and the Hudson River Museum in New York, several northeast universities, and in Japan. In 2006, she initiated the Community Trail Art Initiative, partnering with trail organizations and post-industrial communities to reconnect citizens, educational institutions, and youth to their forgotten waterways as sites of common experience, history and possibility. Under her direction, the Initiative has received generous funding from The Grable Foundation, The Pittsburgh Foundation, and the National Park Service, among others.

Her essays on eco/community art and interdisciplinary pedagogy have been published in several journals and anthologies, most recently in Blaze: Discourse on Art, Women and Feminism, edited by Karen Frostig and Kathy A. Halamka (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle, UK, 2007). She has taught eco/community art and design over the last decade at Carnegie Mellon University, University of Maryland, Mount Holyoke College, and currently at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh.

She received her MFA from Carnegie Mellon University in 1999.
www.studiotara.net

Linn Quante
Munich, Germany
Arts Management and Cultural Work
Project Assistant

Dr. Serafine Lindemann
Cooperation with www.artcircolo.de
Munich, Germany

Prof. Florian Matzner
Academy of Fine Arts
Munich, Germany
Student Project / Program
website
website

Amara Geffen, Professor of Art
Director, Center for Economic & Environmental Development
Allegheny College
Meadville, PA USA
Student Project / Program
website

Society for Cultural Exchange
Pittsburgh, PA USA
website

Marlene Rigler
Platform3
Munich, Germany
website

Dina Faour, Assistant Professor
American University in Dubai
Dubai, UAE
Student Project / Program

Yunsun Chung-Sin, Assistant Professor
Tina Sleiman, Assistant Professor
Zayed University
Dubai, UAE
Student Project / Program

Wolfgang Gebhard
University of Applied Sciences
Munich, Germany
Student Project / Program

hofHaus
Satellite
website
website

The Art Institute of Pittsburgh
Shawn O'Mara, Instructor
Andres Tapia-Urzua, Department Chair, Digital Filmmaking & Video Production/Visual Effects & Motion Graphics
Pittsburgh, PA
website

DUOC Institute in Santiago (Chile)
David Perera
Santiago, Chile
website

University of New Mexico
Interdisciplinary Film and Digital Media (IFDM) and ARTS Lab
Andrea Polli, Director of IFDM and Mesa Del Sol Chair of Digital Media
Albuquerque, NM
website