Vivek Bald is a documentary filmmaker and scholar whose work focuses on histories of migration and diaspora, particularly from the South Asian subcontinent.

His current work, which examines the desertion and settlement of Indian Muslim merchant sailors in U.S. port cities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, is the basis for a forthcoming book, Bengali Harlem and the Hidden Histories of South Asian New York, and a documentary film, In Search of Bengali Harlem.

Beth Coleman’s fields of research interest include new media, contemporary aesthetics, electronic music, critical theory and literature, and race theory. She is a faculty member of the MIT C3 game culture and mobile media initiative.

Her writing has been published in a variety of catalogues, presses and journals. Coleman is a 2003-2004 Rockefeller New Media Fellow, a 2004 Ford Foundation fellow, and a 2006 AAUW Emerging Scholar fellow. Under the name M. Singe, she co-founded the SoundLab Cultural Alchemy project, established in 1995. Her artwork has been exhibited internationally at P.S.1 Museum of Contemporary Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Parkett, Mirror's Edge exhibition, ARC/Musee d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, List Gallery, among other venues.  Coleman received her BA from Yale University and her PhD in comparative literature from New York University. She is currently working on a monograph titled Difference Engines: Race as Technology. Her global media research initiative Project Good Luck was launched in China the summer of 2006.

Chris Csikszentmihályi directs the Media Lab's Computing Culture group, which works to create unique media technologies for cultural applications. He also directs the MIT Center for Future Civic Media, which develops new technologies and techniques to strengthen geographic communities.

He has worked in the intersection of new technologies, media and the arts for 13 years, lecturing, showing new media work, and presenting installations in both Europe and North America. He is a 2005 Rockefeller New Media Fellow, and recently finished a solo exhibition at the Location One Gallery in New York's Soho.

Csikszentmihályi has taught at the University of California at San Diego, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and at Turku University. He toured museums and nightclubs with his mechanical hip hop device, DJ I, Robot, which was nominated for the Best Artistic Software award at Berlin's Transmediale, while a previous piece, Natural Language Processor, was commissioned by the KIASMA Museum in Helsinki, Finland. The catalog for his installations Skin and Control is published by Charta and distributed by DAP, and he served on the National Academy of Science's IT and Creativity panel.

Csikszentmihályi received an MFA from the University of California at San Diego, and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Csikszentmihályi is currently David and Roberta Loge Fellow at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Jay Scheib recently premiered his adaptation of Tolstoy's The Power of Darkness with Pont Mühely in Budapest at the TRAFO House of Contemporary Arts. Other recent works include The Medea after Heiner Müller and Euripides at La Mama in New York City with subsequent performances in Istanbul and Adana Turkey, and a multimedia adaptation titled In this is the End of Sleeping after Chekhov’s Patonov fragment for the Chekhov Now Festival in NYC.

Other credits include: New York Premier of Kevin Oakes’ The Vomit Talk of Ghosts at the Flea Theater; The Demolition Downtown by Tennessee Williams at MIT; Musset’s Lorenzaccio at the Loeb Drama Center; Koltès’ West Pier at the Ohio Theatre; Falling and Waving, at Arts at St. Ann’s in Brooklyn. Projects in Berlin include MARGARETHHAMLET at Schwedterstr 12; an adaptation of Aeschylus’ trilogy ORESTIA AMERICA AMERICA, dreamlife of thousandaire affluence commissioned by the Exiles Festival, Berliner Staatsbank; two new plays by Lothar Trolle, Fernsehen and Vormittag in der Freiheit on the 3.Stock Volksbuehne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz in Berlin, co-production BAT.

Other international credits: Glass/Moan and THIS PLACE IS A DESERT, both in Budapest; The War Plays by Edward Bond, and In the Solitude of the Cotton Fields by Bernard-Marie Koltès, at the Mozarteum, Salzburg Austria. Winner of the Richard Sherwood Award, The Wade Award and numerous fellowships, Scheib is a regular guest professor at the Mozarteum Institute für Schauspiel und Regie, in Salzburg, Austria. He holds an MFA from Columbia University.

Hanna Rose Shell, a historian and media artist is an assistant professor in the Program on Science, Technology and Society.

Her recent films include Locomotion in Water (2005), about the history of chronophotographic practice in science, and Secondhand (Pepe) (2007), co-directed with CMS-alum Vanessa Bertozzi, an exploration of textile recycling, diaspora cultures and cross-cultural history which recently screened all over Haiti, and at MOMA.

Shell’s multimedia installations, based on her camouflage work, have been exhibited in Boston and Los Angeles. Her latest film BLIND is in final post-production.

Shell received an MA in American Studies from Yale University in 2002, and a PhD in the History of Science from Harvard in 2007. For her PhD, she focused on the history of camouflage in the 19th and 20th centuries, at the intersection of the histories of biology, military strategy, technology and film media practice. She was elected as a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows in 2007, where she was in residence in 2008-2009, and will return in 2010-2011.

Shell’s book Hide and Seek: Camouflage and the Media of Reconnaissance, will appear from Zone Books in Spring 2010. Shell edited a reprint of W.T. Hornaday’s Extermination of the American Bison (Smithsonian Press, 2002 [1889]), and has published widely on natural history preservation and display practices, the history of ecology, experimental film history, and renaissance history of geology and art.