2018 Speaker Biographies: Architecture

JoAnn Conrad is a professor of Anthropology and Folklore at CSU East Bay. Her research focuses on narrative theory, gender, embodied knowledge, and the relationship between affect and the senses. Currently she is working on the role of illustration/illustrators in advertising and in popular culture (most specifically children's picture books and animated film), and on the historical (and uncredited) role of women in promoting this visual sphere in everyday life.

Talinn Grigor (Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2005) is a Professor of Art History in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of California, Davis. Her research concentrates on the cross-pollination of art and (post)colonial politics, focused on Iran and Parsi India. Her first book, Building Iran: Modernism, Architecture, and National Heritage under the Pahlavi Monarchs (Prestel, 2009) examines the link between official architecture and heritage discourses in 20th-century Iran. Contemporary Iranian Visual Culture and Arts: Street, Studio, and Exile (Reaktion, 2014) explores Iranian visual culture through the premise of the art historical debate of populist versus avant-garde art that extends into the identity politics of the exile. A co-edited book with Sussan Babaie, entitled Persian Kingship and Architecture: Strategies of Power in Iran from the Achaemenids to the Pahlavis (I.B. Tauris, 2015), investigates the architectural legitimization of royal power through Iran’s long history. Her articles have appeared in the Art Bulletin, Getty Research Journal, Third Text, Journal of Iranian Studies, Thresholds, and DOCOMOMO among others. Past grants and fellowships include the Getty Research Institute, Cornell University, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Soudavar Memorial Foundation, the Soros Foundation, the Roshan Cultural Heritage Institute and the Aga Khan at MIT. Her present project deals with the turn-of-the-century European art-historiography and its links to eclectic-revivalistic architecture in Qajar Iran and the British Raj.

Rosemary Joyce is a Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley who conducted field archaeology in Honduras for over 30 years until a coup in 2009 made the region unsafe. Since then, she has returned to her roots as a museum researcher, studying unpublished collections from Honduras in North America and Europe to aid in interpretation of her original field data. The author or co-author of nine books and numerous journal articles and book chapters, she has special interests in technology, especially clay working, gender relations, and everyday life. At Berkeley she teaches courses in museum anthropology, cultural heritage policy, and the study of materials.

Annie Malcolm is a Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, researching art villages in Shenzhen, China with a focus on Wutong Shan. Her interests lie in sociocultural anthropology, Chinese contemporary art, urban change, aesthetics, anthropology of place, conceptions of work, art practice and ethnographic experimentation, translation and writing.  Malcolm has been learning Chinese and traveling to China for 15 years and recently completed dissertation fieldwork supported by a Fulbright-Hays fellowship.

Anna Novakov is a writer and cultural critic whose most recent book, Imagined Utopias in the Built Environment: From London’s Vauxhall Garden to the Black Rock Desert was published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing in 2017. The daughter of noted environmental physicist Tihomir Novakov, she was immersed in the Ecotopian dreams of air pollution control from an early age. She was raised in both the Socialist Utopia of post-war Yugoslavia and the free speech, counterculture movement of Berkeley, California. Both radical movements had profound influences on women’s rights, new technology and the built environment – areas of study that would form the basis of Novakov’s creative practice. In 1992, after completing her doctorate at New York University, she came to prominence in Manhattan as one of the first art critics to write about the interrelationship between art, technology and Utopian spaces. The author of dozens of books, exhibition catalogues, magazine and newspaper articles, Novakov lives on a ranch in Northern New Mexico and is Executive Director of Freehold Taos, co-Founder of Provisional Art Spaces and Adjunct Professor at University of New Mexico, Taos. Novakov is an art and technology correspondent for Art Press (Paris), critical reviewer for The Magazine (Santa Fe) and a member of Independent Curators International. Novakov is currently serving a three-year term as Vice President of the AICA (International Association of Art Critics). 

Tanu Sankalia is Associate Professor in the Department of Art + Architecture, and Program Director of Urban Studies at the University of San Francisco where he teaches courses in architectural design, architectural history, and urban planning and design. He was trained as an architect and urban designer at the School of Architecture, Ahmedabad, India, and at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests cover a wide range of topics related to architecture and urbanism in the San Francisco Bay Area, India, and Latin America. His articles and essays have appeared in the Journal of Urban Design, Journal of Urban History, and Journal of Planning History, among others.  Most recently he co-edited a collected volume of essays, Urban Reinventions: San Francisco’s Treasure Island, published by the University of Hawaii Press, 2017.

Margaret R. Tarampi, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at University of Hartford. Her research investigates the cognitive mechanisms that underlie spatial perception and cognition in select populations including visually impaired individuals and spatial experts such as dancers and architects. Other research interests include spatial thinking, perception and action, perspective taking, crowd dynamics, joint action, and kinesthetic imagery. She received her Bachelor of Architecture from Carnegie Mellon University and her Ph.D. in Cognition and Neural Science from University of Utah. Following her graduate training, she was a Junior Research Fellow in the SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind at University of California Santa Barbara and a Research Associate in the Center for Spatial Studies at UCSB. Her interests in the effect of architecture on quality of life brought her to the American Institute of Architects in Washington DC and then to the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla CA. She is also an accomplished visual artist whose work has been displayed in exhibitions nationally and internationally. SCAPE Lab website: https://sites.google.com/view/scapelaboratory/

Matt Wade is a PhD Candidate in the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a scholar of urban planning and critical development studies in Southeast Asia. He completed his dissertation fieldwork in Jakarta on politics of global real estate development, infrastructure planning for climate change, and middle-class experiences of modernity. He received a B.A. (2003) at Indiana University, and a M.A. in International Affairs (2010) at the New School in New York City.

Katherine Zubovich is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Ryerson University in Toronto. She teaches classes in urban, European, and Soviet history and is currently working on a book project about Stalinist skyscrapers. Dr. Zubovich received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2016.