In loss, there is transformation.  Despite the thought that endings entail an absolute departure from “potentiality”, it is in endings, in losses, that we find some of the most obscured parts of ourselves. Death, an ever lingering loss, brings us to important divinations around what it was to be our tender selves. What we find in tenderness absent, are transformational sites in need of necromancy. And when conjuring may not be potent enough to harness certain chances at transformation, the dream of resurrection emerges to reanimate flesh in a bid to restart narratives.  These narratives and knowledge are what bring us to spaces between the known and unknowns of history. 

Bethany Smith is an entrepreneur who champions public education through a fellowship with Education Voters of Pennsylvania. She helped author the critically acclaimed book Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unraveling of America's Suburbs, which shares pieces of her life.


Bio photo credit: E.A. Smith of CREW Production

Benjamin Herold explores America's beautiful and busted public schools. His award-winning reporting has appeared in Education Week, PBS NewsHour, NPR, Huffington Post, WHYY, The Hechinger Report, and the Public School Notebook. Herold has a master's degree in urban education from Temple University in Philadelphia, where he lives with his family.
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Bio photo credit: Naomieh Jovin

Director: Mateo Herrera. Producer: Jorge Núñez

This ethnographic film follows a group of inmates that take over Ecuador's oldest maximum-security penitentiary, a late 19th-century panopticon in Quito. This is a story of prison revolt against corruption and institutional abuses experienced by people living behind bars.

Through El Comité, viewers are offered a window into the long-term history of Ecuador's current prison crisis. This film serves as an ethnographic critique of the state's role in exacerbating cycles of violence, pushes against policies favoring militarization and criminalization, and offers an insider view to inmates’ daily life and organizing struggles.

Poet, musician, educator, and curator Yolanda Wisher is author of Monk Eats an Afro. Wisher performs a blend of poetry and song with her band Yolanda Wisher & The Afroeaters and produced their debut album Doublehanded Suite, released in 2022. Her writing has been featured in numerous literary journals as well as The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, CBC Radio, the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day series, and the Poetry Foundation's Audio Poem of the Day series. Wisher has been commissioned to create new works of poetry by ICA Philadelphia, Fabric Workshop and Museum, HealthSpark Foundation, The Public Interest Law Center, Philadelphia Peace Plaza Committee, Delaware River Waterfront Corporation, and Philadelphia Jazz Project, among others. Wisher has been a poet in residence at Hedgebrook and Aspen Words, and she has taught poetry at K-12 schools, community organizations, prisons, social service agencies, and colleges and universities. A Pew and Cave Canem Fellow, Wisher received the Leeway Foundation's Transformation Award in 2019 for her commitment to art for social change and was named a Philadelphia Cultural Treasures Artist Fellow in 2022. She works as a Senior Curator at Monument Lab.

Brooke O’Harra (she/her) is a director, artist and performer. She co-founded The Theater of a Two-headed Calf. O’Harra developed and directed all 14 of Two-headed Calf’s productions including the OBIE Award winning Drum of the Waves of Horikawa (2007 HERE), Trifles (Ontological Hysteric Incubator 2010), and the opera project You, My Mother (2012 La Mama ETC, 2013, River to River Festival).
O’Harra conceived, directed, scripted, and performed in the Dyke Division’s live serial Room for Cream (Four seasons - 28 episodes) at La Mama, ETC 2008-10 and at the New Museum 2017. Brooke and the Dyke Division were also featured in The New Museum’s 40th Anniversary Show “Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon.”
For several years she has been creating and performing a nine-part directing/performance project, I am Bleeding All Over the Place: Studies in directing or nine encounters between me and you. Brooke is also the co-creator of a collaborative performance with artist Sharon Hayes called Time Passes. Time Passes is an 8-hour performance that uses the book-on-tape recording of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse as its spine.
Brooke is the Co-director of the Performance Intensive http://www.performanceintensive.org.

Ross Gay is interested in joy.

Ross Gay wants to understand joy.
Ross Gay is curious about joy.
Ross Gay studies joy.
Something like that.
~
Ross Gay is the author of four books of poetry: Against Which; Bringing the Shovel Down; Be Holding, winner of the PEN American Literary Jean Stein Award; and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. In addition to his poetry, Ross has released three collections of essays--The Book of Delights was released in 2019 and was a New York Times bestseller; Inciting Joy was released in 2022, and his newest collection, The Book of (More) Delights was released in September of 2023.

David A. Gaines is a writer, filmmaker and actor born and based in Philadelphia. His work examines Blackness, masculinity, Christianity and mental health through an intersectional lens. Dave is an award-winning, nationally touring poetry performer, a fellow of The Watering Hole and BlackStar Filmmaker Lab, and a Poet Laureate of Pennsylvania’s Montgomery County; and his work has been featured in the National Black Arts Festival, Button Poetry, Write About Now, VICE Media, among many others. When not writing, performing, or orchestrating films, you can find Dave teaching poetry to Philly youth, playing narrative-centric video games or spending quality time with nature.

Ernesto Pujol is a multi-disciplinary queer maker who conceptualizes & curates group performances as social choreography; designs native edible horticultural spaces of historical memory for collective healing; and generates creative critical writing and transformative field education workshops. Pujol's complex projects result from trust-based ethical collaborations with gatekeepers & stakeholders in communities across the globe. Pujol believes the creative tools of ecologically and socially-engaged cultural producers are more relevant than ever within increasingly diverse impoverished societies seeking sustainability in the Post-Democratic Age of Extinction. Through grounded psychic acuity, Ernesto portrays the human condition's ongoing desire for transcendence in the face of human rights violations & climate crisis. Ernesto counteracts the cult of speed and the culture of spectacle by revisiting emblematic architecture and mythical landscapes through contemplative presence. These public interventions have consisted in full-immersion environments and repetitive cartographic walks with menus of minimal gestures, from slowness to stillness, all shrouded in silence for deep listening to encourage the awakening of consciousness. Ernesto Pujol is the author of Sited Body, Public Visions (2012) and Walking Art Practice (2018). Artist interviews & essays are found in publications such as The Brooklyn Rail (Vulnerability as Critical Self-Knowledge, 2013), Fernweh: A Travelling Curators’ Project (An Atlas of Small Places, 2015), and Awake: Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art (2004). 

Ra'anan Alexandrowicz is an Israeli filmmaker and screenwriter currently living in Philadelphia . Some of his achievments include  the Grand Jury Award at Sundance and a Peabody award for his experimental documentaries that deal with the violence, ethical suspensions, and military, legal, and visual frameworks underlying the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank (and the treatment of Palestinians in Israel). Films include The Inner Tour, The Law in These Parts and The Viewing Booth.

 While a fellow at CEE and in light of the devastating events in Palestine / Israel, Ra'anan's seminar will pivot to focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through cinematic reflection. The course, featuring film screenings of Israeli and Palestinian works, will delve into key historical periods in the conflict to foster a more nuanced understanding of the present. It will use cinema as a lens to study the century-long war and critically assess the role of audio-visual media in historical narratives. The main goals are to provide students with nuanced knowledge about the history of the conflict and create an inclusive space that allows an open and honest dialog about facts and events -  as well as an inquiry into the very language we use to speak of them. Using the history of both Israeli and Palestinian cinemas as a vehicle to study history of the  conflict itself provides an engaging way to look into the two peoples and the century long war between them, but also an opportunity to critically look at the positive and negative roles of the audio-visual medium in the context of historical narratives and events. 

Sosena Solomon is an award winning social documentary film and multimedia visual artist from Ethiopia. Intuitively selecting subjects and stories, she is particularly interested in spaces of transition and change, acting as a cultural preservationist. Her work, whether presented as a film or an immersive 3-dimensional experience, explores cross sections of various subcultures and communities in flux, carefully teasing out cultural nuances and capturing personal narratives via arresting visual storytelling and cinéma vérité stylings. Sosena has worked for many years in the commercial and nonprofit sectors and has worked as a Director and Cinematographer on many short film projects including “Sole”, a documentary on sneaker culture that premiered on PBS affiliate MINDTV, and “MERKATO”, filmed on location in one of Africa’s largest open-air markets and exhibited internationally as an audio, visual, and sensory installation.

Jennifer Harge is an interdisciplinary choreographer, performance artist, and educator based in Detroit, MI. She approaches creative practice as a space to design and execute strategies to thrive in Blackqueer flesh. She privileges her interiority and subjectivity as form to move from/move with/reroute/reimagine/reinvent the stories sitting in her blood memories. 

She most recently served as the Alma Hawkins Visiting Chair in Dance at UCLA where she taught studio courses on Black Feminist spatialities and Black compositional thought (word to Torkwase Dyson). She is currently developing  FLY | DROWN, a multi-form fable series centering Black sovereignty. While in residence at the Center for Experimental Ethnography, Harge will teach a graduate seminar on Black Feminist Thought and Performance Composition.  Informed by theories of time, space, presence, and the body, the course will work from movement-based investigations prompted by a range of Black feminist texts and performances to position performance composition as a site of research, intervention, ritual, and protest.

Jasmine Elizabeth Johnson is an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies. Her work explores the politics of black movement including dance, diasporic travel, and gentrification. Johnson's interdisciplinary research and teaching are situated at the intersection of diaspora theory, dance and performance studies, ethnography, and black feminisms.
Her first book project, Rhythm Nation: West African Dance and the Politics of Diaspora, is a transnational ethnography on the industry of West African dance. Johnson has received a number of fellowships and grants including those from the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Her work has been published by The Drama Review, ASAP Journal, Dance Research Journal, Africa and Black Diaspora: An International Journal, Theater Survey, the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism, Aster(ix) and elsewhere. She serves as a Board Director for the Collegium for African Diaspora Dance and for the Dance Studies Association.