Attention Span | Biographies
Stuart Brown is founder of the National Institute for Play. Trained in general and internal medicine, psychiatry and clinical research, and an inveterate player himself, he had his first professional glimpses of the magic and mystery of play while a medical student as its unexpected presence heralded the return to health in very sick children. But a fuller sense of its centrality to human well being came later as a Professor, as he recognized the importance of play by discovering its stark absence in the life story of murderers and felony drunken drivers. Dr. Brown’s 25 years of research, academic and clinical practice affirmed the profound narrowing of life in the play deprived, and demonstrated the need for, and the positive by products of healthy play for all. His later evaluation of highly creative individuals revealed the centrality of playfulness to their success, resilience and enduring exuberance. As he left clinical medicine and its essential primary focus on pathologies of play dysfunction, he chose to broadly explore and document play as a phenomenon of nature. Working with PBS and the BBC, and through his research and collaborations, he documents the evolution and neurobiology of human and animal play to increase understanding of the patterns and transformative power of play. The Institute of Play promotes an awareness of play to improve health and well being; foster better learning and education; sustain personal relationships and community; improve institutional leadership and innovation. The Institute brings together evidence-and sciencebased information about play to demonstrate that “Play + Science = Transformation”.
Dorothy Dunn is Director of Visitor Experience and Fellowships at the Philip Johnson Glass House. She is responsible for all site interpretation and designs programs and strategic partnerships, including “Conversations,” to position the site as a catalyst for promoting innovation and change. Dunn was the recipient of the inaugural Smithsonian Education Achievement Award in 2004 in recognition of her leadership as Education Director for Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. While at the Smithsonian, from 1989 through 2004, she launched and directed the signature programs A City of Neighborhoods: Bridging School and Community, Summer Design Institute, and Design Directions and planned numerous international conferences including Design on the Ecological Frontier (1994), Designing for the Senses (2002) as well as invitational study tours Icons of Modernism: LA and Palm Springs (1999), The Architecture of Landscape and Light (2003), Salone Internazionale del Mobile, Milan (2004 and 2005) and the invitational retreat, Craft and Design: Hand, Mind and the Creative Process (2004). Dunn worked with AIGA, the professional association for design, to reposition the International Design Conference at Aspen, the Aspen Design Summit, the world’s oldest forum for business and design leaders. As program director for AIGA, Dunn produced the program content for the international conferences Gain: AIGA Design and Business Conference (2006) & Design Conference (2005).
Since 2001 Ze Frank has created online and offline environments in which participants can gather, create, and play. His site, zefrank.com includes a wide range of projects that have focused on collaboratively written and illustrated poetry, algorithm-assisted citizen artwork, photo contests, digital toys, and a year-long week-daily videoblog titled The Show. The format of The Show was derived through an ongoing conversation with its viewers and resulted in a month long game of Wiki-facilitated chess, the creation of an Earth Sandwich, Fabuloso Friday - an episode written entirely by the audience, as well as thousands of audience-created pictures, songs and video clips. Currently, Ze is organizing an internet-wide game called Colorwars 2008. Ze has held adjunct positions at NYU/ITP, Parsons and SUNY Purchase and frequently performs as an Information Age consultant, storyteller and humorist.
Paul Holdengräber is the Director of LIVE from the NYPL, the Public Programs series at The New York Public Library. Since his arrival in 2004, he has reinvented the Library’s event series under the new name LIVE from the NYPL. In January 2006 Publishers Weekly characterized LIVE as “The Holdengräber Happening . . . [which] has brought intellectual sparkle to book events at NYPL.” Holdengräber has curated over 150 programs on an array of subjects from the politics of “Who Owns Culture?” to the “Battle over Books” with Google’s library print project to a discussion on “Lust” with Esther Perel and Laura Kipnis. At the Library, he has also interviewed and been in conversation with David Remnick, Jan Morris, Adam Phillips, and Stuart Brown. Nathaniel Kahn introduced the conversation he held at the NYPL with Werner Herzog.” In the fall of 2005, Holdengräber premiered an opera by Maira Kalman and Nico Muhly, based on the illustrated version of the classic grammar book, The Elements of Style presented in the Reading Room. Before coming to the Library, Holdengräber was founder and director of the Institute for Art and Cultures at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Paul Holdengräber, whom the Los Angeles Times describes as a “repository of ideas and passion,” arrived at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1997; a year later, he founded the Institute for Art and Cultures with the idea to challenge the perception that museums are nothing more than mausoleums for Old Masters. Under Holdengräber’s direction, the Institute became an active and lively forum for debate with its ambitious lecture series. Known for encouraging his guest speakers to step outside their areas of specialization and into wider-reaching discussions (“Holdengräber’s got more tricks up his sleeve than Scheherazade,” noted Flaunt magazine in 2001), he lined up Los Angeles painter R.B. Kitaj to speak about Vincent Van Gogh; Jamaica Kincaid to talk about Thomas Jefferson and his slave and friend Jupiter; and actor and filmmaker Tim Robbins to interview Studs Terkel. Other participants have included David Hockney, Susan Sontag, and Vishakha Desai. Pico Iyer was twice invited to LACMA, once to discuss the week he spent living at LAX (The Los Angeles Airport) and once in a conversation with Vishakha Desai. “My Architect,” Nathaniel Kahn’s documentary about his father the architect Louis Kahn, was premiered at the LACMA Institute for Art and Cultures. Holdengräber is a Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities and serves on the board of the Sun Valley Writers Conference. Fluent in four languages, Holdengräber has written essays and articles for journals in France, Germany, Spain, and the United States. In 2003, the French government awarded him the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres.
Andrew Hultkrans is the author of Forever Changes, one of the inaugural six volumes in the 33 1/3 series on celebrated rock albums. From 1998 through 2003, he was Editor-in-Chief of Bookforum magazine, and he remains a frequent contributor to Artforum and Bookforum. Over the years, his journalism and criticism has appeared in Wired, Salon, 21C, Filmmaker, Tin House, Cabinet, and the pioneering cyberculture magazine Mondo 2000, where he was Managing Editor and columnist. For Always There, a monograph on surveillance artist Julia Scher, Hultkrans contributed the essay “Who is at the Controls?” which traced the evolution of technological surveillance from the 1970s to the post-9/11 present. Hultkrans’s first published short story, “Revolution Blues” (in Black Clock #2), was selected for Da Capo Best Music Writing 2005, and his Artforum coverage of Extra Action Marching Band was chosen by guest editor Mary Gaitskill for Da Capo Best Music Writing 2006. A lifelong music aficionado, he is currently the monthly reissues columnist for SPIN magazine. His essay on comic artist and Spider-Man co-creator Steve Ditko appears in Give Our Regards to the Atomsmashers! Writers on Comics (Pantheon, 2004).
Pico Iyer is the author of two novels and seven works of non-fiction, including Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk, The Global Soul and, out this month, The Open Road, describing thirty years of talks and travels with the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. He has also scribbled linernotes for Leonard Cohen albums, written a film-script for Miramax, collaborated on multi-media projects with the Auckland Chamber Orchestra and helped name an international soft drink. Born in Oxford, England, to parents from India, he was partly raised in California, has lived for more than 20 years near Kyoto, Japan and has spent much of his life in North Korea, Ethiopia, Easter Island and places in between.
Nathaniel Kahn is a filmmaker living in Los Angeles and Philadelphia. Kahn’s documentary My Architect, chronicling his five-year odyssey to know his father, architect Louis I. Kahn, was released internationally and was nominated for an Academy Award in 2004. My Architect also received an Independent Spirit Award nomination and Kahn won the 2004 DGA Award, for outstanding direction of a documentary. My Architect was broadcast on HBO and received an Emmy nomination. Kahn’s short film Two Hands, about the legendary pianist Leon Fleisher, was nominated for an Academy Award in 2007 and has played theatrically with other Oscar nominated shorts as well as appearing on HBO. Kahn is currently working on his first feature length fiction film.
Maira Kalman was born in Tel Aviv and loved it there. She moved to NYC at the age four and lived in the Hotel Monterey on Broadway until her family moved to Riverdale in the Bronx. She has most recently illustrated the Strunk and White Elements of Style. Her year long illustrated column for NY Times on line is now a book called, The Principles of Uncertainty. She teaches graduate design at the School of Visual Arts. The most recent class consisted of making pink cakes, attaching them to balloons and flying them around New York City. She has tried to get a job as a maid for the Duchess of Devonshire. So far, no luck.
Christy MacLear is the Executive Director of the Philip Johnson Glass House. She was brought to the National Trust for Historic Preservation to develop the strategy, hire all staff and prepare the site and Visitor Center to open to the public this past June 2007. With the goal to “reshape the historic house museum model”, Christy and the staff team of the Glass House have sold out tours through 2008, launched a survey of 90+ modern homes in New Canaan, structured a “center for Modernism” to co-lead the National Trust’s investment in Modernist preservation, managed the NTHP board approval to purchase adjacent properties to preserve the Glass House view in perpetuity, and developed the “conversations” series to continue the legacy of new ideas through diverse leaders on-site. Christy is known for her ability to conceive of and lead large scale projects through opening and on-going operations. She was the Manager of Strategy for the Walt Disney Company’s new town project called Celebration, was the Director of the Museum Campus in Chicago where she represented 3 museum boards through the movement of Lake Shore Drive and the creation of a lakefront park, and was an independent consultant in Strategy & Visitor Experience to such clients as the Field Museum, the Cleveland Clinic and the leaders of the UAE. She has a degree in Urban Design from Stanford University and an MBA from Wharton in Real Estate Finance where she received a Barnes fellowship. She has been a professor in the graduate program of Arts Administration for the School of the Art Institute in Chicago and has served on the boards of Chicago’s Three Arts Club, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and Steppingstones Museum for Children.
Chef Nils Norén is the Vice President of Culinary Arts of The French Culinary Institute (The FCI) and The Italian Culinary Academy (The ICA), at New York City’s International Culinary Center. An embodiment of the new international chef, disciplined in the classic sensibilities and driven by immense creativity, Norrin was appointed in 2006 to lead the schools’ culinary, pastry, bread and Italian programs.For the previous 10 years, he had been at Aquavit, where Marcus Samuelsson appointed Chef Nils to be Executive Chef in 2003. At Aquavit, under Marcus Samuelsson’s exemplary leadership, Chef Nils strove to solidify the restaurant’s place on the culinary map and to show the world what Swedish food and cooking techniques are all about. Prior to joining Aquavit, Chef Nils worked in Stockholm as Executive Chef at Restaurant Riche, which features a fine dining room, tapas bar and bistro; and as Chef de Cuisine at Restaurant KB, one of the country’s classic Swedish restaurants in the center of town. He also coordinated cooking classes for Restaurant Akademin. Chef Nils is a graduate of Culinary School in Gävle, Sweden.
Jorge Otero-Pailos, Ph.D. is the Founder and Editor of Future Anterior, a preeminent scholarly journal of preservation history, theory and criticism. He is Assistant Professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. His forthcoming book, The Search for Experience: Architecture, Postmodernism, and History, examines how ideals of authenticity guided Postmodern architectural theory’s turn toward history. Otero-Pailos is also known for his experimental preservation practice. His preservation installation “The Ethics of Dust” will be exhibited at the 2008 European contemporary art biennial Manifesta 7, in Bolzano, Italy. His research interests include the intellectual history of modern and postmodern architecture and preservation, historiography and aesthetic theory. He lectures internationally and has published widely in journals such as Volume, Architectural Record, Journal of Society of Architectural Historians, Postmodern culture, Journal of Architectural Education, City, BAU, Byggekunst, Il Projetto, Cartas Urbanas, and others. He has received numerous research grants, and held postdoctoral fellowships at the Canadian Center for Architecture and the American-Scandinavian Foundation. He is also a practicing architect and serves as vice president of DoCoMoMo U.S.
Adam Philips is a psychoanalyst currently residing and practicing in London. He has authored 12 books on psychoanalysis and related subjects, including his most recent, Going Sane and Side Effects. Adam has also served as general editor for the New Penguin Freud Translations.
Wolfgang Schivelbusch has distinguished himself as an original historian of culture. An independent scholar who divides his time between Berlin and New York, he has a knack of finding wonderful topics and writing about them with verve and insight. He has published books on the ways railway journeys changed conceptions of time and space; the cultural consequences of artificial light in nineteenth-century Europe; the culture and use of spices, stimulants, and intoxicants; and life and art in Berlin between 1945 and 1948. His latest book, The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery is a history of the culture of defeat in the American south after the Civil War, in France following the 1870-1871 military loss to Germany, and in post-1918 Germany.