Robert McRuer

Robert McRuer is Professor of English at The George Washington University in Washington, DC, where he focuses on queer theory, disability studies and American cultural studies.  He is the author of Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (NYU Press, 2006) and The Queer Renaissance: Contemporary American Literature and the Reinvention of Lesbian and Gay Identities (NYU, 1997).  With Abby L. Wilkerson, he co-edited Desiring Disability: Queer Theory Meets Disability Studies, a special issue of the journal GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.  He is completing a book on disability and film and co-editing, with Anna Mollow,  an anthology called Sex and Disability.


Elisabeth Lebovici

Elisabeth Lebovici completed a PhD in Aesthetics in 1983, after having studied art history and philosophy at the University of Paris X- Nanterre. In 1979-1980, she was a fellow of the Whitney Museum Independant Study Program, in New York.
She has been writing art criticism since 1985, became an editor in chief of Beaux-Arts Magazine, then editor at large of A.Les aventures de l’art, before being hired by the french national daily newspaper Libération, as an arts and culture editor, from  1991 to 2006.  She is currently a freelance writer, has opened a blog: http://le-beau-vice.blogspot.com, contributes to the site: www.poptronics.fr and works for the french radio, France-Culture. She has been a member of the international art critics association, AICA, since 1987.
EL has published numerous essays, i.e. on Claude Cahun, Annette Messager, Louise Bourgeois, Roni Horn, Zoe Leonard, Alice Anderson, Philippe Thomas, George Tony Stoll, Nancy Spero, Dana Wyse, Valerie Mréjen, Nathalie Talec, Agnes Thurnauer, Bertrand Lamarche, Omer Fast, Société Réaliste.. and curator Suzanne Pagé, and in the context of group shows such as Global Feminisms, Gender Battle, Listen Darling The World Is Yours, or elles@centrepompidou… to name a few recent publications. She has been involved since the 1990’s into writing on feminism, aids activism, queer politics and contemporary arts.
In 1998, she edited a book on « L’Intime » (« the Intimate »), after a series of seminars at the Ecole nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris. Then, she started working on a book, co-written with Catherine Gonnard, about the history of women artists in France between 1880 and 2005. This book of 480 pages, entitled « Femmes/artistes, Artistes/femmes, Paris de 1880 à nos jours », was published in 2007 by Hazan, Paris. 
Founding President of the Paris international festival of gay and lesbian cinema (1994-1996), EL co-curated Beau comme un Camion at the European Lesbian and Gay Pride, in Paris, in 1997 and the shows „Xn 99“ et „Xn00“ at the Espace des Arts in Châlon sur Saône (France). With Caroline Bourgois, she co-curated the exhibition „L’Argent“ at the Plateau/FRAC Ile de France, Paris, in 2008. She also curated „Readymades narratives“  for the Montehermoso Cultural Center in Vitoria-Gasteiz (Spain), in 2008.
 She is one of the organizers (with Patricia Falguières, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Natasa Petresin) of a weekly seminar at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris entitled: « Something You Should Know ».
(So far, numerous artists and producers of the contemporary arts have participated, such as : Yona Friedman, femmeuses, IRWIN, Tania Bruguera, Jimmie Durham, Cerith Wyn Evans, Deimantas Narkevicius, Corine Diserens, AA Bronson, Jennifer Allora and Caldzadilla, Ursula Biemann, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Akram Zaatari,  Yael Bartana, Catherine David, Claire Fontaine, Société Réaliste, A Constructed World, Johan Grimonprez, Heimo Zobernig, Catherine Lord, Louise Gray, Maja Bajevic, Marjetica Potrc, Moyra Davey, Jason Simon, Manuel Borja-Villel,  Martin Beck,  Helen Molesworth, Hito Steyerl, The Otolith Group, Falke Pisano, Julie Ault… to name a few.  Something You Should Know also organized day-long seminars with Edouard Glissant, Giorgio Agamben, „expolitiques“ with Molly Nesbit „Inside the White Cube“ with Brian O‘ Doherty, or "HF/RG" with Harun Farocki and Rodney Graham). 
EL has conducted workshops in artschools in France and has been on a number of panels in universities, schools and museums or art foundations (Berkeley, Paris, Nantes, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Cerisy-La-Salle, Antibes, Tate Britain, Hayward, MACBA Barcelona …)


Catherine Lord

Catherine Lord, Professor of Studio Art and affiliated faculty, Department of Women’s Studies and Department of Art History at the University of California, Irvine, is a writer, artist, and curator whose work addresses issues of feminism, cultural politics, and colonialism.  She is the author of the text/image experimental narrative,  The Summer of Her Baldness:  A Cancer Improvisation (University of Texas Press), recently translated into French as L’Ete de Sa Calvitie.  Her critical essays and her fiction have been published in Afterimage, Art & Text, Artcoast, New Art Examiner, Whitewalls, Framework, Documents, Art Journal, GLQ, X-tra and Art Paper, and October, as well as the collections The Contest of Meaning,  Illuminations:  Women Writing on Photography from the 1850s to the Present, Reframings:  New American Feminisms in Photography , The Passionate Camera , Hers 3 ,Space, Site and Intervention:  Issues in Installation and Site-Specific Art, and Decomposing.  Her curated exhibitions include "Pervert," "Trash,"  “Gender, fucked,” and "Memories of Overdevelopment:  Philippine Diaspora in Contemporary Visual Art."  Her work as a visual artist was included in the 1995 inaugural biennial of Site Santa Fe, and has been shown at the New York Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Post Gallery (Los Angeles), La Mama (NYC), and DNJ (Los Angeles)  the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center, among other venues.   She is currently collaborating with Richard Meyer on a book titled Art and Queer Culture, 1885-2005 (Phaidon Press, forthcoming 2010) and a text/image project titled, The Effect of Tropical Light on White Men. 
She has worked as associate editor of Afterimage and Dean of the School of Art at the California Institute of the Arts.  She served as chair of the Department of Studio Art, UC Irvine from 1990-1995 and as Director of the UCI Gallery from 1991-1996.  She was the Shirley Carter Burden Visiting Professor of Photography at Harvard University in 2008.  She has received fellowships from the New York State Council on the Arts, the Humanities Research Institute of the University of California, the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, the Norton Family Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation, the Creative Capital Foundation, the Durfee Foundation, the Rockefeller Center for Arts and Humanities and Anonymous Was a Woman., She received her A.B. from Harvard University in 1971, and her M.F.A. from the State University of New York at Buffalo (Visual Studies Workshop) in 1983.


Kobena Mercer

Kobena Mercer writes and teaches on the visual arts of the black diaspora. He is an inaugural recipient of the 2006 Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing and was Reader in Art History and Diaspora Studies at Middlesex University, London, and Visiting Professor at the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University in Spring 2009. In addition to Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (1994), he is the author of monographs on James VanDer Zee, Isaac Julien, Adrian Piper and Rotimi Fani-Kayode. He is series editor of Annotating Art’s Histories, whose titles include Cosmopolitan Modernisms (2005), Discrepant Abstraction (2006), Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures (2007) and Exiles, Diasporas & Strangers (2008).