People

Co-Directors

• Karen Holmberg

  Karen Holmberg, Ph.D. is an assistant professor of environmental science at Gallatin. She is a volcanologist and archaeologist interested in the creative conveyance of environmental knowledge and narratives of deep time, prehistory, and modern science. She is the Principal Investigator of a transdisciplinary project in Patagonia, working with massive coastline transformations due to glacial retreat, sea-level rise, and volcanic eruptions. She is on the Board of Directors for The Chaiten Site Museum in Chile, which features art-science residencies and displays the long-term human experience of the coastal landscape. Her fieldwork near Naples, Italy, is on physics-based prediction of volcanic unrest and the use of the arts to convey scientific conception of risk. She is co-director of the New York Virtual Volcano Observatory on Governors Island. A strong advocate for the public understanding of science, Holmberg recently contributed to Critical Zones, a book (MIT Press) and exhibition (ZKM) on observing the Earth System and collective strategies for thriving across human-imposed borders. She grew up on a back-to-the-land farm on the Chesapeake Bay with 40-acres of oyster grounds in a rural, water-based community.

• Eugenia Kisin

  Eugenia Kisin, Ph.D. is an associate professor of art and society at Gallatin. Her research and teaching on Indigenous contemporary art foregrounds decolonization and environmental justice in the United States and Canada. Kisin’s forthcoming book, Aesthetics of Repair, considers art’s role in contexts of reparation and transitional justice. A visual anthropologist by training, she is editor of film and exhibition reviews at Visual Anthropology Review, and teaches interdisciplinary “slow looking” methods in art history and cultural anthropology. She is co-director of A Museum for Future Fossils, a transnational field school for curating and education on environmental issues in collaboration with community knowledge holders. Her recent exhibition Overflow (co-curated with Keith Miller and Kirsty Robertson) was a pilot for WetLab’s method of student-led curating, and featured work by Ruth Cuthand, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Mary Mattingly, and other artists who work on water as a connective substance. You can hear more about curating with students on this episode of Criss Cross, the Gallatin podcast.

Research Scientist

• Leonora Zoninsein

  Leonora Zoninsein is a geographer and artist researching the materiality of the senses. She explores colonial extractive and imperial scientific legacies in fragrance and the way these echo through the contemporary global chemical industry. She received a PhD in Human Geography from the University of California, Berkeley, where her doctoral work was funded by Mellon/ACLS, Georges Lurcy,  Evelyn L. Pruitt, and Center for Craft, Creativity and Design grants. Her upcoming book manuscript on chemo-aesthetics focuses on questions of essence, equivalence, and translation, following her dissertation entitled ‘How a Whale Becomes a Molecule: A Geography of Modern Olfaction.’ Leonora has an MSc in Water Science, Policy and Management from the University of Oxford, and her Spring courses focus on emergent ecologies and atmospherics, sensory research methods, and collective creative process. Leonora has exhibited painted works as part of House Show and Pump House exhibitions in San Francisco and Oakland, CA, scent portraits at Herzl Gallery in Tel Aviv, hosted sensory pedagogic gatherings at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and participated in artist residencies at HEIMA in Sydisfjordour, Iceland and at TreeTruck on Lopez Island, Washington. Leonora joins Gallatin as a Research Scientist for the Wetlab, a climate change arts and science public education initiative. Leonora is a perfumer and  makes custom blends and conceptual fragrances through her scent studio, NIGHT AIR.

Curatorial Fellow

• Jasmine Buckley

  Jasmine Buckley is an arts worker and curator. She recently curated and co-curated various exhibitions at NYU’s Gallatin Galleries, including Fluid Matters, Grounded Bodies: Decolonizing Ecological Encounters, which is traveling to Northeasterns’s Gallery 360. Jasmine works at CUE Art Foundation on the production side of exhibitions. In 2022, she graduated from NYU Gallatin with a concentration in Museums and Curatorial Studies.

Artists in Residence

• Yan Shao

  Yan Shao is a terrestrial artist and creative technologist based in New York. She creates new media works explore the uncharted territories of perception, mediating the complex interrelations between humans and the earth. Her artistic language draws inspiration from geopoetics, the transitory essence of nature, and the human responsibility towards ecology, resulting in a unique and evocative narrative. 

  Currently, Yan is an artist fellow at the NYU Gallatin WetLab. She is a receipt of Judson-Morrissey Excellence in New Media Award and the Tisch Initiative of Creative Research Fellowship. In 2023, she completed her MPS from Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at NYU Tisch School of the Arts.

Engineer in Residence

• Marwan Shalaby

  Marwan Shalaby, Ph.D. is a visiting professor in the chemical engineering department at Cooper Union. He received his bachelor’s degree in materials engineering from the German University in Cairo, followed by his master’s degree in metallurgical engineering (with a specialization in corrosion and corrosion prevention) from RWTH Aachen University in Germany. He then went on to the United States to pursue his doctoral degree in chemical engineering from New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering. Marwan’s research merges both highly technical and highly abstract methods to grapple with the climate crisis: from empirical investigations of electro-chemical interfaces in batteries, to philosophical explorations of (and reckoning with) the meaning of modern science, primarily the scientific conception of time, amidst ecological collapse.

Administrator

• Cyd Cipolla

  Cyd Cipolla, Ph.D. is the Associate Director of Science, Technology, Arts and Creativity and Associate Faculty at NYU Gallatin. A scholar of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, with a focus in intersectional feminist theory and queer technoscience, Cyd is particularly interested in teaching at the convergence of science and the humanities, experimental uses of technology in the classroom, and facilitating playful engagements between human and non-human machines.