Zeina Barakeh’s work examines how people and spaces become polarized during binary divisions. Through animation, digital media, and archival installations, she interrogates constructions of identity, history, memory, and territory. Barakeh was born in Beirut and moved to the United States in 2006.

Influenced by psychoanalytic, aesthetic and mathematical theory, Cameron focuses his studies on the speculative pursuit of universals. He earned his PhD in English from Temple University in 2010 and is currently working with issues of identity and territorialization in the fiction of Edward P. Jones.

My teaching/research interest is in comparative philosophy: the aesthetic issues of architecture, drama, poetry and ritual in connection with Taoism (Lao-tzu & Chuang-tzu), Zen Buddhism (Dogen & Zeami) and modern German philosophy (Nietzsche, Heidegger & Gadamer). A book project, tentatively entitled Luminous Ruins: Architecture and Zen Philosophy, is in progress.

Jennifer Rissler is the Acting Vice President and Dean of Academic Affairs at SFAI, and teaches Interdisciplinary Studies.  Her research on fine art curricular histories includes “Shared Legacies: Black Mountain College and its Influence on Post-Studio Art Education” presented at Re-Viewing Black Mountain College: an International Conference at the University of North Carolina, Asheville (October, 2009).  Her photographic work “Self-Served” was published in Aroused: a Collection of Erotic Writing, edited by Karen Finley (2001).

Meg Shiffler is the Director and Chief Curator of the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery. In her curatorial practice she works with both Bay Area and international artists, and is currently organizing a traveling survey of works by Brooklyn-based photographer Teru Kuwyama. She is also a columnist for SFMOMA’s Open Space blog. Meg moved to San Francisco in 2005 from New York where she was a freelance researcher and consultant for the New Museum, Andrea Rosen Gallery and the Ursula Meyer Art Conservancy project.