Contributors

Marin Abell BIO
Marin Abell’s creative practice is fueled by a desire to entangle with his environment in both symbolic and ironic ways. He often utilizes non-western tactics such as that of the shape-shifting trickster who walks the boundary between the imaginary and the real, erasing the distinction along the way, in order to dispel the illusion of separateness. Abell earned his M.F.A. from Ohio University’s Sculpture & Expanded Practice Dept., and teaches Sculpture at the University of Alabama Huntsville. He was born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and grew up in southeastern Virginia. www.marinabell.org

Elizabeth Corr BIO

Elizabeth Corr is the Manager of Art Partnerships at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). She strives to bolster the organization¹s litigation, science and advocacy work with a variety of interdisciplinary arts partnerships and collaborations. She works with artists, architects and designers whose commitment to the environment dovetails with NRDC¹s ongoing programmatic efforts, in order to heighten public awareness of, and interest in, environmental problems facing our communities. Recently, she launched the first ever Artist in Residency initiative at NRDC to support Chicago-based artist Jenny Kendler. Elizabeth received a master¹s degree in African Studies and a bachelor¹s degree in Psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. www.nrdc.org

Micol Hebron BIO
Micol Hebron is an interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles and is an Assistant Professor in the Art Department at Chapman University in Orange, CA. She is also an independent curator, writer, and community organizer. Hebron has been engaged in individual and collaborative projects in Los Angeles since 1992. She is the founder of the LA Art Girls; the co-founder of the Fontbron Academy; and former co-founder of the artist collective The Elizabeths. Her work frequently explores the artist’s relationship to art-making, art history, modernism and feminism. Currently she is collaborating with 350 artists from around the world on the “Gallery Tally Poster Project” to create graphical visualizations of data regarding gender inequity in the art world. In 2012, Hebron was awarded a mid-career California Community Fellowship. She is represented by Jancar Gallery in Los Angeles. www.micolhebron.com www.jancargallery.com

Niku Kashef BIO
Niku Kashef is an artist and educator living and working in Los Angeles. She works with various media exploring ideas of home, place and biography through the lens of where the real meets the uncanny. Her process stems from collection and collaboration, dealing with subjects including collective memory, dislocation, identity, urban environment and motherhood. Niku has exhibited and taught nationally and internationally, most recently at the London College of Communications in the UK and the Shandong Normal University in China. She is active on local and national committees for the arts including with the College Art Association’s Services for Artists Committee, the Julius Schulman Institute and as a Director for the National Women's Caucus for Art and Director and past-President of the Southern California Women’s Caucus for Art. With her MFA in Visual Communication she is a Lecturer of Art at California State University, Northridge and a Participating Adjunct at Woodbury University. She is currently working on studies and installations surrounding the LA freeway system and a series of photographic narratives in her new role as parent. www.nikukashef.com

Jenny Kendler BIO
Jenny Kendler is a multimedia artist, naturalist, wild forager & social entrepreneur who currently lives in Chicago and Los Angeles. Her practice seeks to complicate the space between Nature and Culture, in order to re-enchant human beings' relationship with the natural world. Through her intimate and visceral sculptures and drawings, she asks us to reexamine the idea of 'nature' as something outside ourselves, making space to welcome the radical, transformative otherness of our bio-diverse Earth. Kendler holds a BFA from The Maryland Institute College of Art (2002, summa cum laude) and a MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2006). She is co-founder of the artist website service OtherPeoplesPixels and co-founder of The Endangered Species Print Project, which has raised over $11,000 for conservation. She sits on the Executive Boards of arts organizations threewalls and ACRE, where she serves as Vice President. Upcoming projects include an exhibition at the Peggy Notebeart Nature Museum and a year-long, grant-supported residency with NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council). www.jennykendler.com

Linda Weintraub BIO
Linda Weintraub is a curator, educator, artist, and author of several popular books about contemporary art. She has earned her reputation by making the outposts of vanguard art accessible to broad audiences.  The current vanguard, she believes, is propelled by environmental consciousness that is not only the defining characteristic of contemporary manufacturing, architecture, science, ethics, politics, and philosophy, it is delineating contemporary art.  Her book, TO LIFE! Eco Art in Pursuit of a Sustainable Plane” (University of California Press, 2012) was preceded by the series, Avant-Guardians: Textlets in Art and Ecology (2007). It includes EcoCentric Topics: Pioneering Themes for Eco-Art; Cycle-Logical Art: Recycling Matters for Eco-Art;EnvironMentalities: Twenty-two Approaches to Eco-Art.Weintraub established Artnow Publications in order to apply environmental responsibility to the books’ material production. Lindaapplies these environmental concerns to her personal life by managing a sustainable homestead where she practices permaculture.Weintraub is also the author of In the Making: Creative Options for Contemporary Artists and Art on the Edge and Over: Searching for Art’s Meaning in Contemporary Society. She edited ANIMAL. ANIMA. ANIMUS with Marketta Sepalla; served as the director of the Edith C. Blum Art Institute located on the Bard College campus where she originated fifty exhibitions and published over twenty catalogues; and held the position of Henry Luce Professor of Emerging Arts at Oberlin College. She is currently a lecturer at The New School.