Julie Gemuend
Julie Gemuend is a Canadian artist. She received her MFA from Ryerson University. Her practice is aligned with a number of intersecting movements that emerged in the 1960s, including performance-based video, body art, and land art. In her work, Julie aims to explore our profound connection with the natural world by probing the edges of identity and environment, interiority and exteriority, the tamed and the wild, and the places where the two merge. She employs her body to speculate on theories concerning the self, space, and materiality within the context of the human body and its relationship to the physical world. She has participated in various artist residency programs in North America and abroad and exhibits her work internationally. She is currently completing a research-creation-based Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Humanities at Brock University.
Melanie King
Melanie King is an artist and curator with a specific focus on astronomy. Her studio is based in Ramsgate, Kent. She is co-Director of super/collider, Lumen Studios and founder of the London Alternative Photography Collective. Melanie is currently Artist In Residence at the School of Metallurgy and Materials at The University of Birmingham, from 2021 to 2022. Melanie is a PhD Candidate at the Royal College of Art (2015-2022). She is a graduate of the MA in Art and Science at Central Saint Martins (2013), and the BA Fine Art at Leeds Art University (2011). She is a lecturer on the MA programme at the Royal College of Art, and on the BA Photography course at University of West London. She is represented by the Land Art Agency and has prints available for purchase via Argentea Gallery, Birmingham. Melanie’s solo exhibitions include Photofusion, London (2022), Photo Co Op Folkestone (2021), Big Day Film Collective USA (2021), Leeds Art University (2017, 2020), Bloomsbury Festival (2019), the Blyth Gallery, Imperial College London (2018). Melanie has exhibited in a wide range of international galleries, such as the Hasselblad Foundation, Sweden, BOZAR Brussels, Unseen Amsterdam, the Williamson Gallery in Los Angeles and CAS Gallery in Japan.
Deepta Sateesh and Laura Denning
Deepta is a design researcher, educator, architect and planner, working in landscapes in conflict. Her environmental practice is focused on creating new pathways in design, education and policy. Her doctoral research in the Western Ghats of India gathers situated practices, movement, and the politics of the colonial eye, and draws from design, environmental humanities and philosophy. She is also a dancer, wanderer and photographer.
She is Director and Founder of Odde Research Center, and Dean of Research and Collaborations, at the Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Manipal Academy of Higher Education. The research and projects of Odde Research Center are concerned with the environment and its inhabitants, oriented towards revealing and generating new possibilities and frameworks for nature-culture synchronicities. The Center’s work is framed by wet ontologies, and is focused on: design of environmental policies that are inclusive, emergence of participative eco-pedagogies, and framing of responsive adaptive everyday practices. Research and practices at the Center are collaborative, gathering communities, NGOs, researchers and young learners, and government organizations.
She is Senior Advisor at the Forum for Law, Environment, Development and Governance; member of IUCN Commission on Education and Communication; and co-editor of the book Product-Service-System Design for Sustainability, a collaboration of the EU-Asialink program Learning Network on Sustainability (LeNS).
Laura Denning is a transdisciplinary artist working across film, sound, social participation and installation. She has received commissions, as well as a number of awards from Arts Council England. Most of her work aims to reveal novel insights that can contest familiar ways of thinking about people, place and sensation.
She undertook her first funded film Manual for Nomads as writer, director and producer (working with actors, crew and post-production for the first time) in 2020. This resulted in a commission for the Arts Institute Plymouth The Underside of Time (2020), and a commission for Beastly Landscapes We are all Beasts 5 minute Artists Moving Image piece for Newcastle University’s Centre for Research Excellence in Landscape (Sept 2021).
Recipient of the inaugural scholarship in Environmental Humanities at Bath Spa University, Denning has recently successfully defended her PhD thesis. This practice-led research positioned art practice within experimental geography in order to open up the registers within which art might operate, and to foreground the environmental and ecological focus of her art practice.