Art Science Connect brings artists and scientists together at The Graduate Center, CUNY for thoughtful collaborations and innovative programs. We aim to engage participants in meaningful public conversation, spur cross-disciplinary research and teaching, and encourage students and researchers to investigate the ways in which art and science speak to and inform each other.
The Art Science Connect Working Group is an interdisciplinary group of CUNY scholars and scientists dedicated to sustaining an environment for reciprocal learning between the arts and sciences. The working group functions as a hub for joint research between CUNY campuses and departments in developing research, pedagogical projects, and public programs.
Helen Koh
Helen Koh is Director of Art Science Connect. She has produced cultural programs at the Asia Society, organized sponsored research studios at RISD, and taught courses on East Asian culture and history at Columbia University. Her current research is on Nam June Paik and the beginnings of video art. She received her doctorate from the University of Chicago.
Jennie Youssef
Jennie Youssef is the Coordinator for Art Science Connect. As a doctoral candidate in Theatre and Performance at the CUNY Graduate Center, she researches foodways in traditional plays and other types of performance. She is currently dissertating on how food is used to ethnicize, racialize, and represent cultural difference on early modern stages in European societies.
Chloë Bass
Chloë Bass is an Assistant Professor of Studio Art at Queens College, CUNY. An artist with an interdisciplinary practice including elements of performance, installation, media, she is also the co-editor of Art As Social Action, the co-director of Social Practice Queens, and the author of several monographs and chapbooks.
Joshua Brumberg
Josh Brumberg is Interim President of the Graduate Center. His research is characterized by the integration of anatomical and physiological techniques to further our understanding of the individual building blocks of cortical microcircuit.
Johanna Devaney
Johanna Devaney is Assistant Professor of Sonic Arts at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. Her research seeks to understand how humans engage with music, primarily through performance, with a particular focus on the singing voice, and how computers can be used to model and augment our understanding of this engagement. Her work draws on the disciplines of music, psychology, and computer science.
Jennifer Drake
Jennifer Drake is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center. She examines the emotion regulation benefits of engaging in drawing for children and adults as well as the cognitive and perceptual processes underlying graphic representation skills in autistic, non-autistic, and gifted children.
Peter Eckersall
Peter Eckersall is Professor of Theatre and Performance at The Graduate Center. He specializes in contemporary performance practices with particular interests in Japanese performance and on dramaturgy. His work shows how new media performance provokes shifts in sensory experience that are embodied and produce neurological responses.
Shana Elbaum-Garfinkle
Shana Elbaum-Garfinkle is Assistant Professor of Biochemistry and the Structural Biology Initiative at the Advanced Science Research Center of The Graduate Center. She leverages diverse expertise in single-molecule fluorescence, soft matter material science and C. elegans genetics to resolve new roles for protein liquid phase separation in the origins of neurodegenerative disease.
Douglas Geers
Douglas Geers is a composer and media artist. His work includes algorithmic music composition and creation of custom software and hardware electronic music instruments. He is Professor of Music at The Graduate Center and Brooklyn College, where he is Director of the Center for Computer Music and the MFA program in Sonic Arts.
Tobias Fandel
Tobias Fandel is a composer with a creative interest centered on aesthetic implications of digital culture. He teaches Music at Baruch College and is currently pursuing a PhD at the Graduate Center. He received his Doctor of Music from The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Itzá García
Itzá García is a composer with a creative practice that focuses on the entangled relationship between time and togetherness in musical settings that involve interactions with technology. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. degree in composition at The Graduate Center, with the support of the Fulbright García-Robles Grant.
Jonathan Gilmore
Jonathan Gilmore is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center and Baruch College. His work in the philosophy of art draws on both empirical research in cognitive science and historical and critical scholarship in the humanities. He is also a widely published art critic. His 2020 book, Apt Imaginings, addresses how our engagements with imagined states of affairs compare to our encounters with the everyday world.
David Grubbs
David Grubbs is Professor of Music at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. At Brooklyn College he also teaches in the MFA programs in Performance and Interactive Media Arts (PIMA) and Creative Writing. He is the author of The Voice in the Headphones, Now that the audience is assembled, and Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording (Duke University Press) and, with Anthony McCall, Simultaneous Soloists.
Alexandra Juhasz
Alexandra Juhasz is Distinguished Professor of Film at Brooklyn College, CUNY. She makes and studies committed media practices that contribute to political change and individual and community growth. Dr. Juhasz makes activist videotapes, produces feature fakes, and studies fake news as radical digital media literacy. Her latest book is AIDS and the Distribution of Crises.
Tommy Martinez
Tommy Martinez is a musician, programmer, and organizer. He has lectured on computer music and media art at UC Berkeley and Stanford University and is a professor at School of Visual Arts. Tommy is the co-editor of Software for Artists Book: Untethering the Web (Pioneer Works Press, 2022), and currently a Brooklyn College Sonic Arts MFA candidate.
Hadley Newton
Hadley Newton’s research at the Graduate Center’s Art History program is concerned with the impact of concepts and methodologies of gestalt psychology on artistic discourses and practices in the 1950s and 1960s across Europe and the Americas. By examining artists’ engagement with these theories of perception, her work seeks to reveal a crucial impetus behind an “environmental” turn in aesthetics of the period, which increasingly emphasized the production of immersive experiences.
Jesse Prinz
Jesse Prinz is a Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Committee for Interdisciplinary Science Studies at The Graduate Center. He is a notable expert in philosophy of psychology who combines both philosophical and experimental methods to address questions about the nature of the mind.
Tony Ro
Tony Ro is a Presidential Professor of Psychology and Biology and the Director of the Master’s of Science Program in Cognitive Neuroscience at The Graduate Center. His research examines how the human brain processes sensory information for conscious perception.
Andrew Reinmann
Andrew Reinmann is a forest and urban ecologist researching tree growth and forest carbon sequestration in changing environments. He also studies how trees and forests can be used to enhance urban sustainability and address environmental justice issues.
Gregory Sholette
Gregory Sholette is Professor at Queens College, CUNY, where he co-directs the Social Practice Queens art and social justice initiative. He is co-founder of several artists’ collectives, the curator of Imaginary Archive, and the author of Dark Matter (Pluto, 2010), Delirium and Resistance: Activist Art and the Crisis of Capitalism (Pluto, 2017), and Art As Social Action (with Chloë Bass, SPQ, 2018).
Monica Varsanyi
Monica Varsanyi is Interim Associate Provost for Academic Affairs and Dean for the Humanities and Social Sciences at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is also on the Geography doctoral faculty and master’s faculty of International Migration Studies MA, both at the Graduate Center. She is a scholar of migration, membership, and the state, with a specific focus on unauthorized immigration and immigration federalism in the United States.