Presenters

ORGANIZERS

	Neil Aitken is the author of two books of poetry, The Lost Country of Sight (Anhinga, 2008), which won the Philip Levine Prize, and Babbage’s Dream (Sundress, 2016), as well as a poetry chapbook, Leviathan (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2015). The founding editor of Boxcar Poetry Review and a Kundiman Poetry Fellow, Aitken is a former computer games programmer whose poems appear in American Poetry Review, diode, Ninth Letter, The Normal School, RHINO, and elsewhere. He recently completed his Ph.D. in Literature & Creative Writing at the University of Southern California where his critical work examined the history of artificial intelligent figures in nineteenth-century literature and popular imagination, specifically addressing the Turk, Frankenstein’s creature, Babbage’s calculating engines, and Sherlock Holmes.
	L. Burns is a faculty member in the Asian American Studies Department at UCLA. Her book, Puro Arte: Filipinos on the Stage of U.S. Empire (NYU 2012) received the Asian American Studies Outstanding Book Award for 2012. She has begun research on robots and theater, and has recently completed an essay on Asian American racialization and robots in American Theater. Burns is also a dramaturg, whose recent collaborations include David Rousseve’s Stardust, and R. Zamora Linmark’s But, Beautiful, and as a humanities consultant for TeAda Productions’ Global Taxi Drivers’ Project. She has participated in several projects focusing on Asian American theater and performance, including reviewing for the The Next Big Bang: National Asian American Theater Festival (2009, 2011).
	Margaret Rhee is a feminist poet, new media artist, and scholar. She is the author of Radio Hearts, Or How Robots Fall Out of Love (Forthcoming, Finishing Line Press, 2015) and Yellow (Tinfish Press, 2011). As a new media artist, she co-lead and co conceptualized From the Center a feminist HIV/AIDS digital storytelling education project implemented in the San Francisco Jail: www.ourstorysf.org. Currently, she is a Visiting Researcher at the Institute of American Cultures, University of California, Los Angeles. She holds a Ph.D. in ethnic studies and new media studies from the University of California, Berkeley.

KEYNOTE SPEAKER

Minsoo Kang is an associate professor of European history at the University of Missouri – St. Louis. He earned his Ph.D. in history at UCLA and is the author of Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination (Harvard University Press, 2011), and co-editor of Visions of the Industrial Age, 1830-1914: Modernity and the Anxiety of Representation in Europe (Ashgate, 2008). He is also a fiction writer who has published a collection of his short stories, Of Tales and Enigmas (Prime, 2007). He has translated works of Korean literature, including the classic novel The Story of Hong Gildong which will be published as a Penguin Classic in 2016. He is currently working on a book on the history of automata from the perspective of gender theory.

FEATURED PERFORMER

micha cárdenas is an artist/theorist who creates and studies trans of color movement in digital media, where movement includes migration, performance and mobility. This fall, cárdenas will be joining the University of Washington | Bothell as Assistant Professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences. micha’s co-authored books The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities and Trans Desire / Affective Cyborgs were published by Atropos Press. Her poetry has appeared in the anthologies Troubling the Line, The &Now Awards 3, Trans Bodies, Trans Selves and the forthcoming Writing the Walls Down.

MODERATORS

	Rachel C. Lee is Professor of English and Gender’s Studies at UCLA, Director of the UCLA Center for the Study of Women, and founder of the Life (Un)Ltd project at the the CSW. She is the author of The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality and Posthuman Ecologies (2014) published in NYU Press’ Sexual Cultures series. Her scholarship draws on critical methods from race/ethnic studies in conjunction with theories of gender and sexuality, to examine the specific interfaces and choreographies of stand-up comedy, dance, new media/digital technology, and literature, most recently as they reflect on the life sciences. She is a founding editor of the peer-reviewed online journal, Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience. Her essays have appeared in C-Theory, TDR: The Drama Review, The Scholar and the Feminist, Cultural Critique, boundary2, GLQ: The Gay and Lesbian Quarterly, and Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism. Author of The Americas of Asian American Literature: Gendered Fictions of Nation and Transnation (1999), editor of the Routledge Companion to Asian American and Pacific Islander Literature and Culture (2014), and co-editor of the volume Asian America.Net: Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Cyberspace (2003).
	Miriam Posner coordinates and teaches in the digital humanities program at the University of California, Los Angeles. She frequently writes and speaks on digital humanities, as well as on the history of technology, particularly the history of medical imaging. Her book, Depth Perception, on twentieth-century medical filmmaking, is under contract with the University of North Carolina Press. Her Ph.D., from Yale University, is in Film Studies and American Studies.
	Jasmine Nadua Trice is an assistant professor of Cinema and Media Studies in the Department of Film, Television and Digital Media at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television. Based on two and a half years of research in Manila, Professor Trice’s current book project is titled City of Screens: National Cinema and Global Culture in Contemporary Manila, Philippines. Contextualized within Manila’s growing independent film scene, it considers how links between cinema and nation are forged through local systems of circulation, examining sites such as the pirated DVD district, art house screening spaces, film festivals, and mall multiplexes. The project was supported through fellowships from the American Association of University Women (2008-2009) and the Asian Cultural Council (2010), as well as a term at the Institute of Philippine Culture at Ateneo de Manila University, where she was a Visiting Research Associate (2010). Professor Trice is also working on a historical project on radio, film, and urban culture in Manila during the American colonial period. This work is based on materials from several Philippine archives, including the University of the Philippines, the American Historical Collection at Ateneo de Manila University, and the Lopez Museum & Library. Prior to her time at UCLA, Professor Trice taught at the National University of Singapore and worked in feminist media development in Manila.

PARTICIPANTS

	Dmitry Berenson is an Assistant Professor in Robotics and Computer Science at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where his research focuses on motion planning, robot manipulation, and human-robot collaboration. Previously, he obtained a PhD in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University and was a post-doc at UC Berkeley. He also writes poetry, with work appearing in The Worcester Review, Poet Lore, MiPOesias, and the anthologies Don’t Blame the Ugly Mug, and Best Indie Lit New England (BILiNE).
	Chiwan Choi is the author of two poetry collections, The Flood (Tía Chucha Press) and Abductions (Writ Large Press). He is also a founding partner of the DTLA based publisher, Writ Large Press. He is currently working on Ghostmaker, a book he is writing and losing in 2015
	Miyoko Conely is a PhD student at UC Berkeley in Performance Studies with a Designated Emphasis in New Media. Her research examines transnational fan cultures, with a focus on Japanese and South Korean popular culture. Miyoko is also a playwright and performer, working in both the Bay and New York City area. While not all of her plays involve robots, many do, including Interchangeable Parts (commissioned by Second Generation, 2g), and Untitled Robot Plays, a collaboration with A. Rey Pamatmat. She is also a recipient of the George A. Kernodle Award for her play Robot Arm.
	Amanda Leigh Davis is finishing a dissertation at the University of Chicago called “Building Human Nature: Domestic Housing, Normative Strangeness, and Threatening Animation in American Fiction.” The dissertation investigates the life-sustaining and humanity-defining promises Americans have invested in home ownership by analyzing fictional genres for representing its failures. In addition to dissertation work, recently self-designed and taught courses include a lit course at the University of Chicago called “Haunted Houses: the Gothic Turn in American Fiction” and a first year writing course called “Sci-Fi Queered” at the School of the Art Institute at Chicago.
	Jilly Dreadful completed her Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing at University of Southern California. She’s the founder of The Brainery: Online Speculative Fiction Workshops + Resources. She’s currently an Associate Editor of Zoetic Press, and her work has most recently appeared in Devilfish Review, the first all-women Lovecraft anthology, She Walks In Shadows. Together with her writing partner, KT Ismael, she will be releasing a serialized fiction podcast that takes the feminist emphasis on friendship from Parks & Recreation and mixes it with a Lovecraftian strangeness—stay tuned for it at blueprintandengine.com.
	Feng-Mei Heberer recently completed her PhD in Critical Studies from the University of Southern California. Her research explores Asian and Asian diasporic media cultures, in particular how they engage contemporary conditions of globalization. She is also a film programmer for several Asian diasporic film festivals and will start as a postdoctoral fellow in Global Studies and Languages at MIT in the fall.
	KT Ismael is a musician, writer, engineer, and merchant sailor. With his band, wemew, he writes and performs original acoustic rock songs and is currently working on an album of science-fiction folk music. With his writing partner, Jilly Dreadful, he is working on a number of speculative fiction projects. In between, he works as a licensed engineer on various commercial ships and procrastinates.
	Kenji C. Liu’s writing appears in The American Poetry Review, The Los Angeles Review, Asian American Literary Review, Barrow Street Journal, CURA, RHINO, Split This Rock’s poem of the week series, and several anthologies. A recipient of fellowships from Kundiman, VONA/Voices, Djerassi Resident Artist Program, and Community of Writers at SV, he holds an MA in Cultural Anthropology and Social Transformation.
	Pablo Lopez currently resides in Los Angeles, where he writes poetry and art criticism. He holds a MFA degree from Brown University and a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of California, Berkeley. He is the editor of the online contemporary poetry journal comma, poetry (http://commapoetry.com/).
	Anne McKnight teaches modern Japanese literature, film and food culture/s at Shirayuri College, a women’s college in Tokyo, following on stints in Berkeley, Montréal, and LA. Her training is in comparative literature (Japanese and American), and her work focuses on connecting narrative operations of modern prose fiction to other modes of writing, especially ethnography, urbanism, and speculative fiction. Recent works include a book (Nakagami Japan: Buraku and the Writing of Ethnicity / Minnesota, 2011), an essay on Japanese sex films (in Camera Obscura, 2012), and a number of teaching gardens, in LA and Tokyo, working in collaboration with students, neighborhood-dwellers and gardeners to expand access to fresh, delicious, and affordable foods.
	Mark C. Marino is a writer and scholar of digital literature living in Los Angeles. He is the Director of Communication of the Electronic Literature Organization (http://eliterature.org). His works include “Living Will,” “a show of hands,” and “Marginalia in the Library of Babel.” He was one of ten co-authors of 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 (http://10print.org) and is a collaborator with Jessica Pressman and Jeremy Douglass on the forthcoming Reading Project: A Collaborative Analysis of William Poundstone’s Project for Tachistoscope {Bottomless Pit}. He is currently working with his two children on a series of interactive children’s stories entitled Mrs. Wobbles and the Tangerine House. He is an Associate Professor (Teaching) at the University of Southern California where he directs the Humanities and Critical Code Studies (HaCCS) Lab (http://haccslab.com). His complete portfolio is here: http://markcmarino.com
	Saba Syed Razvi currently serves as an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Houston in Victoria, TX. Her collection of poems Of the Divining and the Dead was published by Finishing Line Press in 2012, and her collection of poems titled Limerence is forthcoming from Chax Press. Her poems have appeared journals and such as The Offending Adam, Diner, TheTHE Infoxicated Corner, Karamu, Anthology, The Homestead Review, 10×3 plus, 13th Warrior Review, The Arbor Vitae Review, and Arsenic Lobster, among others, and in the anthologies Voices of Resistance: Muslim Women on War Faith and Sexuality (Seal Press 2006), The Loudest Voice Anthology, Volume 1, and The Liddell Book of Poetry. She completed her PhD in Literature & Creative Writing in 2012 at the University of Southern California.
	Takeo Rivera is a PhD Candidate in Performance Studies at UC Berkeley whose work examines techno-orientalism and masochism in Asian American cultural production. He is also a poet and playwright whose work has been staged in New York, the SF Bay Area, and Los Angeles.
	Isaac Schankler is a composer, pianist, accordionist, and electronic musician living in Los Angeles. His music has been described as “powerful” (Sequenza21), “ingenious” (The Artificialist), “masterfully composed,” and “extraordinarily eclectic” (Boston Musical Intelligencer). Recent commissions include works for the Friction Quartet, gnarwhallaby, the Los Angeles Percussion Quartet, Lorelei Ensemble, Juventas New Music Ensemble, flutist Meerenai Shim, and bass-baritone Nicholas Isherwood. Schankler is the artistic director of concert series People Inside Electronics, and currently teaches composition, music technology and music theory at the University of Southern California.
	Peggy Weil is a digital media artist and designer. A graduate of Harvard University, she received her Masters Degree at M.I.T.’s Architecture Machine Group (currently the MIT Media Lab.) Projects include MrMind, a reverse Turing Test; The Redistricting Game, an online game simulating redistricting procedures; with Nonny de la Peña, Gone Gitmo, a virtual installation of Guantánamo Prison in Second Life exhibited internationally; Wall Jumpers, a global visualization of political separation barriers and The IPSRESS Project,. Steuer + Weil has created and produced Cinepuzzle, a video puzzle for iOS and HTML5 platforms, an update of Weil’s 1998 award-winning Moving Puzzle. Weil founded HeadsUP! an international competition to challenge designers to visualize critical global issues in the public sphere. HeadsUP2012 launched on the TS2 signboards in Times Square in March of 2012. She is Adjunct Professor at USC School of Cinematic Arts teaching graduate level courses in both the Production and Interactive Media Divisions.
	Bryan Thao Worra is an award-winning Lao-American writer. An NEA Fellow in literature, he is a member of the Horror Writer Association and the Science Fiction Poetry Association. His work appears internationally, including Innsmouth Free Press, Tales of the Unanticipated, Illumen, Astropoetica, Outsiders Within, Dark Wisdom, and Mad Poets of Terra. He is the author of several books of speculative poetry, including On the Other Side of the Eye, BARROW, and DEMONSTRA which was selected as the 2013 Book of the Year by the Science Fiction Poetry Association. Visit him online at http://thaoworra.blogspot.com