Conversations From The Center

A project of the Center for Arts, Design, and Social Research, this monthly series invites listeners to join a global conversation about the arts, transdisciplinary research, and social justice activism. Conversations from the Center features the voices of an international community of artists, writers, scientists, technologists, activists, and other innovators whose work crosses conventional categories of understanding to address the urgent issues of our times. Produced and co-hosted by Sylvain Souklaye, Dalida María Benfield and Christopher Bratton.

Sylvain Souklaye

Sylvain Souklaye is a live performer, sound and video artist interested in sampling intimacies about people who don't belong to a determinate identity, gender, class, colour or nationality. His performances are a collage of individual memories which are re-enacted for and via the audience. His methods characteristically involve intense physical acts as well as the use of unsettling intimacy. https://www.sylvainsouklaye.com/

Dalida María Benfield

Dalida María Benfield, Ph.D. (Panamá/U.S.A.) is an artist, theorist, curator and educator who researches and activates feminist and post/decolonial thought, pedagogy, and creative action in the interstices of global information ebbs and flows. She is passionate about the transformative potential of aesthetic dimensions and is the cofounder and Director of Research and Programs of the Center for Arts, Design and Social Research (CAD+SR). Her writing and digital art works have been published and exhibited internationally.

Christopher Bratton

Christopher Alan Bratton is an artist, former President of the San Francisco Art Institute, and co-founder and Executive Director of the Center for Arts, Design and Social Research. With an extensive background in socially engaged cultural work and media, Bratton has spoken widely on issues of art, media, and technology education and access. Bratton is currently a Professor and Director of the Foundation and General Studies Program in the School of Arts, Design, and Architecture at Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland.