People

Shannon Jackson

Co-PI

Shannon Jackson is the Cyrus and Michelle Hadidi Professor of Rhetoric and of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies and is a Faculty Affiliate in History of Art, Art Practice, and Berkeley Center for New Media. In addition to this project, she currently co-leads two major research projects at UC Berkeley 1) as Faculty Director of the Environmental Arts & Humanities Initiative(opens in a new tab) and 2) as co-PI of the Cities of Awe Lab(opens in a new tab), with Dacher Keltner.

Jackson’s research focuses on two overlapping domains: 1) collaborations across visual, performing, and media art forms and 2) the role of the arts in social institutions and in social change. Her most recent books are Back Stages: Essays Across Art, Performance, and the Social (Northwestern University Press, 2022), and The Human Condition: Media Art from the Kramlich Collection (Thames & Hudson, 2022). Her previous books include The Builders Association: Performance and Media in Contemporary Theater (M.I.T. Press, 2015), Public Servants: Art and the Crisis of the Common Good, co-edited with Johanna Burton and Dominic Willsdon (M.I.T. Press, 2016), Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (Routledge, 2011), Lines of Activity: Performance, Historiography, and Hull-House Domesticity (2000) and Professing Performance: Theatre in the Academy from Philology to Performativity (2004). Other collaborative projects include the guest-edited Valuing Labor in the Arts with Art Practical; a special issue of Representations on time-based art (with Julia Bryan-Wilson); In Terms of Performance(opens in a new tab), an online platform of keywords in experimental art and performance created with the Pew Center for Art & Heritage; and Media Art 21(opens in a new tab), an online database and exhibition platform, co-edited with Zhang Ga and Rudolf Frieling. Recently, she hosted Relevance of Place(opens in a new tab), a series of online, site-specific dialogues about art, ethics, and landscape at Tippet Rise Art Center. Jackson’s writing has appeared in dozens of museum catalogues, journals, blogs, and edited collections. 

Debarati Sanyal

Co-PI

Debarati Sanyal is Professor of French and Director of Berkeley’s Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry(opens in a new tab). She is affiliated with Critical Theory, the Center for Race and Gender, the Institute of European Studies and the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative. Her research and teaching interests include critical refugee studies; race and postcolonial studies; aesthetics and biopolitics; postwar French and Francophone culture; transcultural memory studies. She is a recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award, UC Berkeley’s highest recognition for teaching. Her first book, The Violence of Modernity: Baudelaire, Irony and the Politics of Form (Johns Hopkins, 2006), reclaims Baudelaire’s aesthetic legacy for ethical inquiry and historical critique; her second book, Memory and Complicity: Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance (Fordham, 2015), addresses the transnational deployment of complicity in the aftermath of the Shoah. Her most recent book, Arts of the Border: Fugitive Bodies at the Edges of Europe (Fordham, 2025) addresses migrant resistance, biopolitics and aesthetics in Europe’s current refugee “crisis,” and was supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship (2021–2022). 

Dylan Tingley

Project Manager

Dylan Tingley brings a decade of experience managing research programs and interdisciplinary initiatives in higher education, including roles at New York University, the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and the London School of Economics. His work is informed by a background in critical geography and political economy. Dylan holds an MSc in Human Geography and Urban Studies from the London School of Economics and a BA in Political Economy from Tulane University.

Marlena Gittleman

Postdoctoral Fellow

Marlena Gittleman (she/they) completed a PhD in Comparative Literature with a Designated Emphasis in Gender, Women, and Sexuality at the University of California, Berkeley. Her current book project focuses on gestures in US and Latin American queer and feminist literature and performance art. Marlena’s writing has been published in Feminist Studies, In Dance, and in the edited volume Teaching Gradually. Their translations from Spanish, Catalan, and Portuguese have been published in Critical Times, The Common, and Asymptote. Marlena also supports research, narrative communications, and programming across the Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry (CICI).