Friday, November 6th 2026

Schedule

8am – Optional Breakfast | Location: Commons Dining Hall

9am – Welcome and Introduction | Location: Chase Hall Lounge

9:45-10:15am Coffee & Pastry Break

10:15am-12:45pm Morning Sessions | Location: IMStudio, Coram Library

• 10:15-11:15am Multichannel Audio Workshop, led by Sepehr Pirasteh & John Fireman
• 11:30am-12:30pm Projection Mapping Workshop, led by Charles Coes

1pm-2:15pm Lunch Break | Location: Commons Dining Hall

2:30-4:45pm Afternoon Sessions | | Location: Chase Hall Lounge

• 2:30pm Panel: Exhibiting Media Art, with Erin H.Nolan, Carrie Cushman, Iris Williamson, Bethany Engstrom, Ross Wightman
• 3:45pm Movement Workshop, led by Patricia Brace | Location TBD
• 4:45pm Closing Remarks

5-6pm Closing Reception | Location: Chase Hall

Presenter & Organizer Information (more TBA soon)

Patricia Brace

Patricia Brace’s practice is located in rural Maine. Overall her work is concerned with the body as it relates to place and care, examining how we cohabitate with nature during a rapidly unfolding climate situation. Brace has attended residencies including The Arctic Circle (2025 and returning in 2027), The Studios at MASS MoCA, the Alumni Residency at Maine College of Art & Design, and the Vermont Studio Center. She has exhibited nationally at venues such as PS122 Gallery (New York, NY), Gary Snyder Project Space (New York, NY), SOHO 20 (New York, NY), Ortega y Gasset Projects (Brooklyn, NY), Smack Mellon (Brooklyn, NY), and Trestle Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), as well as regionally at 82 Parris (Portland, ME), the Center for Maine Contemporary Art (Rockland, ME), and the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art & Design (Portland, ME). Brace’s awards include the Kindling Fund Grant, Hildreth Professional Development Grants from MECA&D, and the Women Invigorating the Curriculum and Cultivating Diversity Committee Grant at the University of Maine, Augusta. She is co-founder of the Performance Art Initiative, Sine Gallery, and GROUNDWORK retreat, and her work is held in the permanent collections of the Portland Museum of Art and Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital in New York City. Brace formerly taught at Maine College of Art & Design as a Visiting Assistant Professor in Painting, Sculpture, Foundation, and MFA in Studio Art and is currently enrolled in the PhD program at the University of Maine, focusing on the intersection of climate science and interdisciplinary art.

https://www.patriciabrace.com

Carrie Cushman

Carrie Cushman is director of the Bates College Museum of Art in Lewiston, Maine. She holds a PhD in art history from Columbia University with a specialization in the histories of photography and Japanese art. She has authored numerous books, including Human Marks: Tattooing in Contemporary Art (2026), Komatsu Hiroko: Creative Destruction (2022), and Going Viral: Photography, Performance, and the Everyday (2020). Along with Kelly McCormick, she is the co-creator of the open source website, Behind the Camera: Gender, Power, and Politics in the History of Japanese Photography.

Lola Buczkowski

Lola Buczkowski (she/they) is a dance-artist interested in experimental approaches to performance. Duration, states of becoming, intersubjectivity, relationality, and the intersection of process and performance are areas of inquiry that drive her work. Lola’s practice is rooted in rigorous play, an interrogation of hierarchical frameworks, and a belief in dance’s capacity to engender collective and individual transformation. Through deepening lines of attention, desire, sensation, and relationship, Lola responds to the internal and the external, the human and the more-than-human, the studio, the everyday, and the natural world. A student of diverse movement practices—including Horton, ballet, post-modern and release techniques, contact improvisation, and somatics—Lola’s embodied history is shaped by a collage of intertextual influences. Through her continued movement research, Lola hopes to hone athleticism, release, subtlety, and idiosyncrasy. Before attending the University of Iowa, Lola majored in Dance and French at Bates College, where they were the first student to complete an Honors Thesis in Dance. Her favorite color is orange.

Charles Coes

Charles Coes is a Designer and engineer working primarily in the theater and installations  focused on Sound and Media design.  His major interest is on the humanzation of the necessary use of technology in live performance.  Credits include The Motion, Age of Innocence and Death on the Nile (Arena Stage)  Pride and Prejudice and Christmas Carol (St. Louis Rep), Golden Shield (MTC), Letters of Suresh (2ST), As You Like It The Tempest, Cymbeline Much Ado About Nothing (HVSF), Sing Street (NYTW); Jitney (Mark Taper Forum, Music Hall of Detroit, Arena Stage); Miss You Like Hell, Fun Home, Soul, The Christians, Les Liaisons Dangereuses (Baltimore Center Stage); The Good Book (Berkeley Rep); The Belle of Amherst, Third, (Two River Theater); Natural Shocks (WP Theater); The Way the Mountain Moved, Sense and Sensibility (OSF) Little Black Shadows, The Tempest (South Coast Rep); Animal Farm (Milwaukee Rep); Robber Bridegroom (Roundabout); Sense and Sensibility (Dallas Theater Center, The Guthrie); tokyo fish story (The Old Globe).  He has been the associate on more than 25 Broadway shows including Giant, Call Me Izzy, Almost Famous, To Kill a Mockingbird, Peter and the Starcatcher, and Junk. He has toured the world with the Homer’s Coat production of An Iliad. He works for figure53, who make QLab.

Bethany Engstrom 

Bethany Engstrom is an artist, curator, and educator living and working in Belfast, Maine. She received a BA in Art History 2002, her MFA in Intermedia in 2011 and Interdisciplinary PhD in Intermedial Collaborative Practices in 2014, each from the University of Maine. 

Engstrom’s recent work utilizes objects, installation, audio, and video, focusing on how these materials can express ideas of time, care, environment, labor/work, and motherhood. She has participated in residencies at A-Z West, Swan’s Island, the Volland Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Hewnoaks Artist Colony, Ellis-Beauregard Foundation and Mildred’s Lane. She recently had a solo exhibition at the University of Maine Farmington Art Gallery and her work has been included in group exhibitions at the Farnsworth Art Museum, Newport Art Museum, Newport, Rhode Island; Gallery 263, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Collar Works in Troy, New York; Parsonage Gallery, Searsport, Maine; Speedwell Contemporary and Cove Street Arts in Portland, Maine; Asymmetrick Arts and the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockland, Maine; Waterfall Arts in Belfast, Maine and the University of Maine. Engstrom is the recipient of the Kindling Fund, part of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts’ Regional Regranting Program. 

Engstrom is a part-time Assistant Professor of Art in the Intermedia MFA program at UMaine and an adjunct Lecturer of Visual Arts at the University of Maine Augusta and has taught at Bowdoin College and Unity College. Formerly Associate Curator at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockland, Maine, and recently the Managing Director of SPEEDWELL Contemporary in Portland, Maine, she is co-founder and director of the Performance Art Initiative in Maine. She is currently the 2026 Maine Art Commission Fellow in Media Arts.

 https://www.bethanyengstrom.com

John Fireman

John Fireman is a multimedia artist, improviser, and Visiting Professor of Visual Arts at Bowdoin College. His work spans audiovisual installation and live electroacoustic performance, with a recent focus on machine learning as both subject and material, deliberately misusing its tools to force “Guided Hallucination.” His work has been presented at venues including the Mozarteum University in Salzburg, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, Ars Electronica Forum Wallis in Switzerland, ArteScienza in Italy, and Mixtur Festival in Spain. A solo exhibition at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art opens in 2027. In 2025 he co-founded Open Systems, an artist-run performance space, gallery, and sound studio in Portland, Maine, built around a permanent multichannel sound system specifically for emerging artists; there he curates and performs. He holds degrees from Yale University and the Maine College of Art and Design.

https://www.john-fireman.com

Erin H. Nolan 

Erin Hyde Nolan is a photo historian who engages lens-based media throughout the Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Bates College where her classes center around questions of vision and technology: who is seeing and who is being seen? Working across diverse lens-based media in the modern period, her teaching emphasizes the cultural contingency of visual representation, and mutable meaning of material objects within changing political contexts.  Hyde Nolan’s courses examine the transnational circulation of image technologies in order to decenter dominant narratives and artistic origin stories from Europe and the United States, constellating image histories that are international, inclusive, and collaborative.

Her monograph-in-progress, Portrait Atlas: The Migration of Photographs Across the Ottoman-Atlantic, maps the ways in which images from the modern Middle East intersect with trans-Atlantic geographies. She is the co-author, with Sophie Junge, of Survey Practices and Landscape Photography Across the Globe (Routledge, 2022), and with Aimée Bessire, of Outside the Frame: Todd Webb in Africa (Thames & Hudson 2021) and has published widely in peer-reviewed journals.

She is currently a fellow with the Khamseen’s Getty project “The Futures of Islamic Art History: Remapping the Field.” Her research has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard University, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Terra Foundation for American Art, Getty Research Institute, and Max-Planck-Institut, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz.

Tristan Koepke

Tristan Koepke (he/him) is a dancer, choreographer, and educator based in Portland, ME. His creative works, collected as Big Boy Dance, have been presented at SPACE Gallery, CANDYBOX Dance Festival, Patrick’s Cabaret, Bryant Lake Bowl, Bates College, Bates Dance Festival, The Wooden Floor, Point Dance Ensemble, Inverse Performance Festival, and The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center. He has performed in contemporary and experimental dance works by Chris Schlichting, Vanessa Anspaugh, luciana achugar, Cally Spooner, Doug Varone, Mathew Janczewski, Kendra Portier, Heidi Henderson, Matthew Cumbie, Annie Kloppenberg, and was a member of Zenon Dance Company from 2011-2015 and 2017-2019. He holds an MFA in Dance from the University of Maryland, College Park, and is currently Assistant Professor at Bates College, where he was also the Associate Director of the Young Dancers Intensive at the Bates Dance Festival from 2016-2025. He now serves on the Bates Dance Festival Advisory Board, is a New England representative on the American College Dance Association’s (ACDA) Board of Directors, and is the Dance Area Co-Chair for the Popular Culture Association. His recent publications can be found in Choreographic Practices, Popular Culture Studies Journal, and Dance Research Journal. He was a 2025-2026 Faculty Research Fellow at Jacob’s Pillow, and is a 2026 Dance Research Fellow at the New York Public Library Dance Division.

https://www.tristankoepke.com

Sepehr Pirasteh

Sepehr Pirasteh is a composer and interdisciplinary artist born and raised in Shiraz, Iran. His compositions draw on Persian classical and folk traditions, as well as contemporary classical music vocabularies, to express his concerns about the political and social realities of the world. Through his art, he reflects on his personal journey as an immigrant and his commitment to activism. He has been commissioned and performed by ensembles, including the American Composers Orchestra, Illinois Philharmonic Orchestra, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, SPLICE Ensemble, Argus Quartet, and PRISM Quartet. Sepehr has received fellowships from Harvard University’s Fromm Foundation and the Presser Foundation. His works have been featured at the Beth Morrison Project, the American Composers’ Forum, and Philadelphia Fringe Festival. Sepehr is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Bates College. He is also the co-founder and artistic director of Shiraz Ensemble, an Iranian contemporary music ensemble based in Philadelphia that blends contemporary classical and experimental music with Iranian traditional music.

www.sepehrpirasteh.com

Andy Ricci 

Andy Elliot Ricci (they/them) is an Assistant Professor of Digital and Computational Studies. They are a Computer Scientist with expertise in human-robot interaction (HRI) working at the intersection of technology, identity, and embodiment. They earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science at Cornell University with a concentration in Artificial Intelligence and a minor in Information Science. They have a B.S. degree in Mathematics and Computer Science from Union College. Andy is the director of Bits & Bots & Bolts at Bates: an Interaction Design Lab. Their research explores how people interact with and through technology, focusing on identity and the body.

Dale Rothenberg

(coming soon)

Asha Tamirisa

Asha Tamirisa is an interdisciplinary media artist. Working across performance, installation, film/video and sound, she combines analog and digital audiovisual processes with handcrafted media techniques. Her work has been presented at venues and festivals including Harvard University’s Shelemay Sound Lab, ICA Boston, Flux Festival Montréal, La Sala Rossa, Waterworks Festival of Experimental Music, Indexical, the Museum of Science Boston, MIT, and bitforms gallery, and exhibited at the Portland Museum of Art, UnionDocs, Punto y Raya, Woman Made Gallery, the Toledo Museum of Art, and the New Zealand International Film Festival. Her work is held in the collections of the Portland Museum of Art and Rhizome’s ArtBase. Tamirisa has received support from the LEF Foundation Moving Image Fund, Maine Arts Commission, Ellis-Beauregard Foundation, and SPACE Gallery, and has participated in residencies at The Kitchen, Indigo Arts Alliance, Perte de Signal, Hewnoaks Artist Colony, the Media Archaeology Lab, and I-Park Foundation. Her scholarship has appeared in Feminist Review, Journal of Popular Music Studies, and Modular Synthesis: Patching People and Machines (Routledge). She holds a Ph.D. in Computer Music and Multimedia and an M.A. in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University. She is an associate professor at Bates College and lives in Portland, Maine.

https://ashatamirisa.net

Jamie Watkins

Jamie Watkins (he/him) is an artist and media educator. He works at Bates College, where he serves as a Senior Academic Technology Consultant – Digital & Immersive Media Technologies, providing training and support for students, faculty, and staff working on multimedia projects and assignments. Jamie holds a BA from Vassar College, as well as certificates from the London Academy of Dramatic Art and Maine Media Workshops + College.

At Bates, Jamie provides in-class workshops, offers one-on-one student mentorship, and maintains a large library of production resources and tutorials. He manages the Digital Media Studios (bates.edu/digital-media), a cross-curricular facility equipped with professional-grade Editing Suites, a Photo/Video Production Studio, an Animation Studio, an iMac Teaching Lab, and a Loaner Pool of multimedia production equipment. He also co-manages the Immersive Media Studio (bates.edu/impact21st), a flexible, immersive media gallery and performance space that hosts classes, workshops, and visiting artists focused on multi-channel and interdisciplinary media arts and performance.

Whether it’s working with a first-year seminar as they record and edit a podcast for a community-engaged final project; working closely with Faculty member on devising a new multi-channel exhibition inspired by on their NSF research; or supporting an Arts and Visual Culture thesis student as they put the final touches on their narrative short film – Jamie’s goal as an educator and artist is to help members of the Bates community discover, refine, and deepen their storytelling abilities through media production and creative technologies.

Ross Wightman

Ross Wightman is a sound and media artist from New Jersey. Currently, he serves as a Technical Manager at the Yale Center for Collaborative Arts and Media (CCAM) and Curator of the CCAM Sound Art Series. At Yale and the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music, he teaches a variety of media studies, computer music and composition courses, and leads electroacoustic improvisation ensembles.

As a sound artist and composer, his work incorporates microtonality, electro-acoustic multimedia composition and instrument building. In his electroacoustic instruments building practice, Ross repurposes and deconstructs found instruments, combining 3D printing, robotics, and machine learning to investigate themes related to performance practice, virtuosity, timbre and resonance. He is a 2025 Artist In Residence at the Watermill Center.

As a visual artist, Ross’ work spans video, 3D modeling, mixed reality, graphic design and other media. Drawing often on a deep love of film, his video art practice subverts the intended functionality of consumer electronics to concoct amalgamations of glitched and distorted vintage media via digital sampling and circuit bending analog A/V equipment.

As a soloist, Ross has premiered works for the double bass by Raven Chacon, Alvin Lucier and Anthony Coleman and has performed with contemporary music ensembles such as The Ever-Present Orchestra, Ghost Ensemble, Ensemble Mise-en, Callithumpian Consort and at international festivals including the Darmstadt Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik, The Lucerne Festival, Ambient Festival Köln, The New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, the Bang on a Can Summer Festival, CURRENTS New Media Festival and LONG PLAY Festival. 

Clash Magazine has cited his work as among the “best of the American experimental underground.”

https://www.rosswightman.net

Iris Williamson

(coming soon)