Contributor, PFSL01

Cheng works across art, self-organising communities and local ecologies. Since 2006 she has been researching and hosting workshops around everyday resourcefulness – creative making by non-specialists across the Asia-Pacific and Europe. Recently she has been attending to interspecies kinship in her local surroundings, unveiling micro-cosmos and intricate stories by simple means.

Contributor, PFSL01

Jorrit is an independent researcher and policy advisor at Bureau Buitendienst. He works towards liveable, inclusive and sustainable cities by changing people's perception of their living environment and their relation to it. As an economic geographer, he is interested in how economic processes shape our physical and social environments. In his work, he focuses on alternative methods of citizen consultation, the just representation of residents and SMEs in local policy and tactical interventions to experiment with urban development.

Contributor, PFSL 01

Ben-Dror is a multidisciplinary artist, inventor and designer interested in waste, somatics and multispecies entanglements. He recently turned a toy Lamborghini into a tele-presence robot which roamed around the city making friends. Adam studied fine arts at the University of Auckland, design at Victoria University Wellington and robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA.

Contributor, PFSL02

Mickey Oscar Boyd (b. 1990, Alameda, CA, USA) is a sculptor and printmaker, based in Athens, GA, USA, who uses his history of working in the trades and construction as a sculptural language for interpreting the consequences of the developmental model of the built environment in the United States. He earned his MFA in Studio Art at the University of Georgia, Lamar Dodd School of Art in 2023 and holds a BFA in Sculpture and Printmaking from Metropolitan State University of Denver. He is currently a faculty member at the Lamar Dodd School of Art.

Contributor, PFSL01

“My daily life in Rotterdam is an important fuel for my work in which I connect with people I encounter in my direct surroundings. I’m interested in various social phenomena within the urban landscape, which I approach from a personal point of view and the view of the people I collaborate with. The focus in my work is to have a fearless open minded, critical but positive view on the world around me. To look at what connects us as human beings. Because we still have so much to learn from each other.

As a photographic artist I’m investigating the concept of neighborhood and community. I use photography in an intuitive way and as a direct tool to make contact with my surroundings, the people and objects that I encounter on a daily basis. My series of images I use in (audiovisual) installations and publications. More recently I have also experimented with making films.”

Contributor, PFSL02

Torsten Bruch (b. 1973) is a visual and acting artist born in Hannover, Germany. Since 2003 he is based in Hamburg.

The starting point of Bruch is the search for the other within the self by different strategies of role play. Meeting the self by acting out different roles and adding them together to one video is a central motive in his multi-tired, transmedial art work that uses installations, sculptures, films, body art and performance. His works have been on display in Germany as well as France, Finland, USA, Japan, South Korea, Netherlands and China.

Contributor, PFSL02

My base and fascinations lie at the foot of the mound and the countryside around Ezinge, a small village with centuries-old history in the north of the Netherlands where I grew up. Central to the work is the search for a connection between man and local nature. References to philosophy, science and mythology run like a common thread through this search and the works. Film, theater, installations, ecological landscape works find each other in overarching projects. The basis of a project is often long-term preliminary research in which field work, literature, making books, giving lectures and public activities are recurring forms. Collaborations with other artists/parties and public participation are for me a means to build the relational connection between man and nature. Together we search from macro to micro for an intersubjective experience in which reciprocal relationships with the natural environment are central. I am currently working on the Grassland project. One hectare of meadow in one of the oldest cultural landscapes in Europe (Reitdiep valley). We are working to increase biodiversity on this former pasture land.

Contributor, PFSL02

Marin Carr-Quimet (they/he/she) works and lives between Asheville, NC and Chapel Hill, NC. They work in sculpture, ceramic, installation, and social practice. They cofounded an artist-run space in Chapel Hill, NC, and like to focus on collective and collaborative work. Their work is heavily based in material and the built environment. Marin received their BFA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2024.

Contributor, PFSL01

Cheyenne Concepcion is a Filipino-American artist and designer whose work explores the politics of place across a wide range of media including installation, social practice, textile, design and public art. Materially experimental but conceptual at its core, Concepcion’s practice engages ideas of cultural memory, place-based activism, migration and often incorporates a public component. Recently, her objects, textile work and spatial interventions have focused on reclaiming and reinterpreting traditional craft and building practices from her homelands: the Philippines and North America.

Contributor, PFSL01

Chang’s works have won first prize of the Kaohsiung Awards (2019), were selected in Taoyuan International Art Award (2021), Taipei Art Awards (2020) and nominated for Taishin Arts Award (2019, 2020), have been presented in the National Art Exhibition (2017), and are part of the collection in the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, and Art Bank Taiwan. He has been granted by various domestic and overseas foundations and institutes, commissioned by art and history museums, and his works have been exhibited and screened in museums, galleries, biennials and festivals across Taiwan and international art scenes.

The artist has participated in artist residency programs in Taiwan, Korea, Nepal, Norway, Finland and Denmark, and took part in the post-earthquake reconstruction and art program Solastalgia (NP, 2017), and The Arctic Circle (NO, 2017). He participated in Mediations Biennale (PL, 2018), as independent scholar in ICHSEA (KR, 2019), in PORT JOURNEYS annual meeting (TW, 2019), in collateral exhibition of Taiwan Biennial (TW, 2020), as visiting artist to Rinehart School of Sculpture, MICA (US, 2021), in Pan-Austro-Nesian Art Festival (TW, 2021), Biennale Jogja (ID, 2021) and SMIFest (ES, 2021).

Chang regards the ocean as a worldview diverse from the current terrestrial civilization of Anthropocene, and interprets various issues and phenomena in the contemporary context as a complex, macro-system and in forms of interconnected waters, currents and tides. Besides, he regards water as the medium penetrating everything from the inner to the outer worlds, to embody the unstable state of transition, flow and anti-subjectivity corresponding to his homeland Taiwan under subtropical monsoon climate.

His art practices deal with those rapid-changing environments like ship, island, water as well as port, and through textural and spatial processes of investigation, collection, interweave and reconstruction, in which he tries to unveil the universal experiences, tension and grey area between human, civilization and nature constantly shaping each other. His works are usually realized based on a core narrative text or by means of storytelling, and integrate with keen craftsmanship multiple forms and media. He was the co-founder of alternative art space Waley Art located in western Taipei.

Co-director; Contributor, PFSL01 + PFSL02

Diekema is an interdisciplinary artist that works in the field of art-based research, media-art and writing. He has a focus on social systems, behavior and urbanism. Since 2007 he has been involved in organizing creative communities in the field of temporary urban developments.

Co-director; Contributor, PFSL01 + PFSL02

James Enos is an artist and educator who produces post-narrative works that account for fragmented urban processes and imaginaries. He uses sculpture, drawings, and situational practice as a way to gauge how public culture responds to change. His work often addresses questions of time and culpability through the mark as a record (and, what may consequently radiate from it).

Contributor, PFSL02 (Athens, GA, USA)

Samuel Horgan (b. Pittsburgh Pennsylvania 1998) is a writer and interdisciplinary artist from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and an MFA candidate at the University of Georgia (MFA '26). He has been employed as a night-shift janitor, a construction worker, an apprentice private-investigator, a transient, and a dropout novice in the priesthood. A childhood accident has left him blind in one eye. The major methodology of his work has involved collating different, often disparate, discourses into multimedia apparatus which aim to articulate theory, conjecture, and speculative fiction by plastic means. His research interests include scale models, puppetry, theology, and the libidinal economy of technology. His current project involves synthesizing the alchemical piety of the 17th century religious hermit Johannes Kelpius, the erotics of Charles Brockden Brown's early American novel Wieland, and a defunct train-layout-tourist-trap on the Pennsylvania interstate called “Roadside America”.

Contributor, PFSL01

Brian House is an artist who investigates the rhythms of human and nonhuman systems. His practice incorporates sound, custom technology, and multidisciplinary research, and he has worked with such varied subjects as geolocation surveillance and the communication strategies of urban rats. House has exhibited at MoMA, Los Angeles MOCA, Ars Electronica, ZKM, and Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, among others, and The New York Times Magazine, WIRED, The Guardian, and TIME’s annual “Best Inventions” issue have featured his work. He holds a PhD in Computer Music from Brown University and is Assistant Professor of Art at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon.

Contributor, PFSL02

Matt Kaelin is an artist working in photography and video, based in Providence, Rhode Island. His work explores themes of isolation, intimacy, and belonging through long-form projects rooted in place. Conceptually, he is interested in the tension between observing and experiencing—using the camera to interrogate what can, and cannot, be conveyed through photographic representation. He holds an MFA from Hunter College and a BA in Psychology from Swarthmore College. His most recent project, Inventory of the Impermanent, reflects on seven years he spent living year-round on Fishers Island, New York—a quiet, windswept slip of land at the mouth of Long Island Sound—and considers how photographs shape memory, loss, and the passage of time.

Contributor, PFSL01 + PFSL02

Forest Kelley is an Assistant Professor at the School of Art and Visual Studies at the University of Kentucky in Lexington (USA). His work reflects on introspective histories and systems/contexts that perpetuate social isolation. He has shown internationally at galleries including 1708 Gallery (Richmond, VA), Clamp Art (NYC), Filter Space (Chicago), Photo Is:Rael (Tel-Aviv), Rotterdam Photo (Rotterdam), and SF Camerawork (San Francisco). He was recognized with the 2020 Imagemaker Award by the Society for Photographic Education. In 2018, he contributed music to the Academy Award-nominated and Criterion Collection-selected documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening for which he received the award Best Music Score from the International Documentary Association.

Contributor, PFSL02

Joseph Kennedy is an interdisciplinary designer and creative technologist who works across multiple scales in both natural and built environments. He is currently a Doctor of Design candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Contributor, PFSL02

Sophia Leitenmayer (she/they) (*1996, Freiburg, GER) works at the intersection of sound, performance, objects, and video. Their working method is fluid, ephemeral, and process-oriented. This is accompanied by fields of research: archives, remembrance practices, rest and desire. Currently, Leitenmayer works on prostheses, non-functioning bodies, and the repair of different live forms and explores graveyard orbit. Previous works focused on the water systems of cities, which the artist is listening to and resonating with by using hydrophone and saxophone. Collective and interdisciplinary approaches are an integral part of their practice. In 2019 they founded the space orbit.altona, Hamburg, and in 2020 they joined the team of Hyper Cultural Passengers, Hamburg as part of the international artist network Portjourneys. Leitenmayer holds a Master of Fine Arts from Hamburg University of Fine Arts (DE). Their works have been exhibited at Neuer Kunstverein Wien, Kunstverein Springhornhof, HYCP Hamburg, Studio Peragine, Delphi Space, and ((NYT)) Art Space Berlin. Solo exhibitions include ‘Three River Pieces’ at Ono Point Space Yokohama, ‘Kinderbrille’ at Galerie für Gegenwartskunst EWERK Freiburg, and ‘Papierfischchen’ at Galerie Genscher Hamburg. sophialeitenmayer.de

Farzin Lotfi-Jam is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at Cornell University, where he directs the Realtime Urbanism Lab. The lab focuses on the use of spatial media and technologies in urban research, particularly the impact of digitalization and realtime data on urban environments. He also leads Farzin Farzin, a design studio operating at the intersection of architecture, computation, and media. His work is held in the collections of the Centre Pompidou and the Sharjah Art Foundation. He received the 2022 Architecture League of New York Prize and has recently been supported by the Alexander S. Onassis Foundation and the Graham Foundation. His publications include the co-authored book Modern Management Methods: Architecture, Historical Value, and the Electromagnetic Image (Columbia University Press). His current book project, Realtime: Computing North American and Southwest Asian Urbanism, 1858–Now, traces how realtime technologies—from colonial telegraphs to digital twins—have operated as tools of imperial control shaping urban life.

Contributor, PFSL01

Michael Kress is a conceptual artist living in Hamburg/Germany. The focus of his work is semiotics and language as a formative moment in the construction of a media identity.

His examinations use different media, like video, drawing, writing, sound, and photography. For several years, Kress has been engaging in cultural politics. He had been chairman of FRISE/Hamburg and board member of the Deutscher Künstlerbund (German Association of Artists). In 2015, he initiated Hyper Cultural Passenger, global cooperation of artists and philosophers based on the river island of Hamburg Veddel. Kress designs connectivities with art as a collaborative aesthetic expreinvće. He aims at art to understand the global culture more as a source rather than a concept of identities for understanding the other as an author.

Contributor, PFSL01

Michael McFalls is a practicing artist, professor of art, and director of the visionary art environment, Pasaquan. McFalls received a BFA in Studio Art from the Columbus College of Art and Design (Ohio), and an MFA from the University of California, Davis. Before joining Columbus State University, he served as the Art Program Coordinator and Assistant Professor of Art at The University of Maine at Farmington. McFalls is a former Fulbright Scholar at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and has received numerous scholarships, grants, and awards for his artistic research, including the Pritzker Foundation Endowed Fellowship, the CSU Teaching Award, the College of the Arts Faculty Research Award, and the CCAD Distinguished Alumni Award. McFalls has participated in artist residencies at Sculpture Space, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and the Australia National University. He has also been a visiting artist at Dartmouth College and Furman University. McFalls has had numerous solo exhibitions in national and international galleries and museums, and his artworks are held in many private and public collections.

Contributor, PFSL02

Charles G. Miller is an artist and arts administrator based in San Diego, California. He holds an MFA from the University of California, San Diego, and currently serves as the Senior Public Art Program Manager for the City of San Diego.

Contributor, PFSL02

Michael Mullin is a filmmaker and multimedia artist whose work explores the intersections of water, ecology, and public space. Through video, music, and documentary forms, his practice examines the ways humans shape — and are shaped by — the natural world. Grounded in themes of preservation and education, his projects often invite viewers to consider their own relationship to shared environments and experience a deep engagement with place, community, and the living systems that sustain us.

Contributor, PFSL02

Andrea Ngan is a designer and multimedia artist whose work engages how communities and systems embody change, interdependence, and repair from generational harm. She currently serves as the Director of Community Co-Design at the City of Philadelphia’s PHL Service Design Studio. She formerly co-stewarded Creative Resilience Collective, Creative Resilient Youth, and the Design Justice Network’s Philadelphia Node.

Contributor, PFSL01

Nick Norwood’s poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Southwest Review, Western Humanities Review, Shenandoah, Poetry Daily, The Oxford American, the PBS NewsHour site Art Beat, U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser’s syndicated column American Life in Poetry, on NPR’s Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor, and elsewhere. He has published four full volumes—Eagle & Phenix (2019), Gravel and Hawk (2012, winner of the Hollis Summers Prize), A Palace for the Heart (2004), and The Soft Blare (2003)—and two limited edition books—Text (2016) and Wrestle (2007)—in collaboration with the artist and master printer Erika Adams. He has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, an International Merit Award in Poetry from Atlanta Review, a residency at the Jentel Foundation in Wyoming, and both a Tennessee Williams Scholarship and a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. His poem “powerhouse” was permanently installed in twelve-inch Corten steel on the Columbus RiverWalk as a public art piece by sculptor Mike McFalls in 2016. Nick is a professor of creative writing at Columbus State University and directs the Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians in Columbus, Georgia, and Nyack, New York. He lives in a converted 19th-century cotton mill on the Chattahoochee River near the Port of Columbus.

Contributor, PFSL01 + PFSL02

Vijay Rajkumar is an artist and designer based in Brooklyn, NY whose work bridges architecture, film, and music. He sculpts space and time as media to navigate memory, dreams, and felt experience.

Founding Co-director, Curator, PFSL01

Stephen Ramos is an urbanist. He is a professor in the College of Environment + Design at the University of Georgia. He is a founding editor of New Geographies (GSD/Harvard University Press) and an associate editor for Planning Perspectives. Books include Dubai Amplified: The Engineering of a Port Geography (Ashgate, 2010; Routledge, 2016) and Infrastructure Sustainability and Design (Routledge, 2012).

Contributor, PFSL01 + PFSL02

Miku Sato works in Japan and the Netherlands. She completed her Master of Film and New Media Studies from Tokyo University of the Arts in 2019.

Her practice is based on her fieldwork of specific places, where she starts up a project delegating her intention to the local people she selects.

Through video, installation and participatory action, she develops a new way of composing storytelling, taking a different approach from journalism, shining a different light on the past and present, and retelling the stories of the world.

Co-director; Contributor, PFSL01 + PFSL02

Annie Simpson is an experimental geographer working via site-/sight-based investigation to make photographs, videos, essays, and interventions. She holds a Doctor of Design from Harvard University, Graduate School of Design, where she was a Fellow with the Harvard-Mellon Urban Initiative. She was recently nominated for the 2026 Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Awards.

Contributor, PFSL01

Hồng-An Trương is an artist who uses photography, video, and sound to explore immigrant, refugee, and decolonial narratives and subjectivities. She was a Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Art in 2019-2020 and the Capp St. Artist in Residence at the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art in 2020. She is a MacDowell Residency Fellow for 2022. Hồng- n lives in Durham, North Carolina where she is an activist and a teacher. She is Professor of Art at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Contributor, PFSL01

Lien Truong’s practice blends painting techniques, materials and philosophies, and military, textile and art histories; creating hybrid forms interrogating the relationship between aesthetics and doctrine. Her work has shown in exhibitions at the National Portrait Gallery; North Carolina Museum of Art; Station Museum of Contemporary Art; Weatherspoon Art Museum; Oakland Museum of California; and Art Hong Kong and Sea Focus, Singapore with Galerie Quynh. She is a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant.

Contributor, PFSL02

Tom Schram lives in Asheville, North Carolina, and works as an Assistant Professor of Sculpture at Western Carolina University. Schram’s studio work involves a conversational relationship between viewer, place and material. He works in a variety of methods including object making, interactive installation, video, and sound and is intrigued by the continually progressive use of technology in daily life as it intersects, and at times conflicts with, one’s ability to experience and observe actual physical and social landscapes. His exhibitions include Lyndon House (Athens, GA), Bascom Center for the Visual Arts (Highlands, NC), Echo Contemporary (Atlanta, GA), Del Mar College (Corpus Christi, TX), and Eastern Mennonite University (Harrisburg, PA). He has also worked as a professional fabricator on projects such as the High Line in New York City and the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.

Contributor, PFSL02

Nao Uda (b. 1983, Yokohama, Japan) is a visual artist who works in several mediums such as painting, photography, ceramics and creative writing. Her work is about how immigrant families pass on and understand untold family stories through their family photo albums. She was born in Japan as a granddaughter of a Japanese Canadian grandfather who moved to Japan in 1941. After she received BFA in Photography at the School of Visual Arts in New York City in 2007, she internationally presented her artwork in solo shows and participated in artist-in-residence programs in many places including Japan, USA, Canada and Taiwan. She completed her MFA at the National Tainan University of the Arts in 2019 and is currently based in Taiwan and Japan as a professional artist and a PhD candidate.

Contributor, PFSL02

I follow an unwinding path of healing and incarnation. When attitudes become form, art is getting fluid and vibrant. My attitude is to work with social circumstances as material for my artistic ideas. I cannot see “disability“ and “barriers“ just as a metaphor. Overcoming barriers still and forever will be my motor and motivation in a practical sense – even if I see, how “usefullness“ is a limitator for the freedom of my artistic ideas. Dealing with “disabilities“ is part of my healing incarnation.