Harmony Bench is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Dance at The Ohio State University. She received her PhD in Culture and Performance from the University of California, Los Angeles. She has organized and presented at conferences nationally and internationally, and her publications appear in Forumes Modernes Theater and The International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media. Bench currently serves on the editorial board of the Screendance Journal, which aims to foster sustained intellectual discourse around dance created for screen media. Her research interests include histories and theories of corporeality, bodily articulations with digital media, and critical theories of dance and performance. Her current projects include mobile and social media as sites for choreographic investigation and analysis, the impact of communications technologies on movement and gestural patterns, and the possibilities for site-specific performance in everyday technologized spaces. 

Dr. Blanco Borelli joined the Dance, Film and Theatre department in the fall of 2008. Previously, she was a Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Scholar in the Music and Theatre Arts department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has also taught at UCLA, UC Riverside and Citrus College. She holds a PhD in Dance History and Theory (now Critical Dance Studies) from the University of California, Riverside, an MA in Communications Management from the University of Southern California, and a BA in Music and International Relations from Brown University. Her manuscript She is Cuba: A Genealogy of Mulata Corporeality examines the mulata body through comparative social dance and everyday embodied histories in Havana (and New Orleans) from the nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. An edited volume, Mediated Moves: A Popular Screen Dance Reader is in progress as well. Before her academic career, Dr. Blanco Borelli worked in the entertainment industry, coordinating soundtracks and music licensing for Overbrook Entertainment (Will Smith's company at Universal Studios), wrote liner notes for Rhino Records, and taught foreign languages (Spanish, French and Italian) to celebrities and students at a private high school in Santa Monica, California. She has taught and performed Afro-Cuban sacred dance in Los Angeles, London, and Havana, Cuba, and she dances/performs other Latino/Latin American social dance forms as well.

Maaike Bleeker is a Professor and the Chair of Theatre Studies. She studied Art History, Theatre Studies and Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam where she also completed her PhD on Visuality in the Theatre (2002). Previously, she lectured at the Department of Theatre Studies of the University of Amsterdam, The Piet Zwart Post-Graduate program in Fine Arts (Rotterdam), Media Gn: Centre for Emergent Media (Groningen), The School for New Dance Development (Amsterdam), the post graduate program Arts Performance Theatricality (Antwerp), and in the IPP Performance and Media Studies Summer School of the Johannes Gutenberg Universität, Mainz. Since 1991, she also worked as a dramaturge for various theatre directors, choreographers and visual artists. She performed in several lecture performances, ran her own theatre company (Het Oranjehotel) and translated five plays that were performed by major Dutch theatre companies. She was an Artist in Residence at the Amsterdam School for the Arts (2006-2007) and member of the jury of the Dutch National Theatre Festival TF (2007-2008). Prof. Bleeker is President Elect of Performance Studies International, Member of the International Advisory Board of Maska (Ljubljana) and of Inflexions: A Journal of Research-Creation (Montreal), and Member of the Editorial Board (Humanities) of the Amsterdam University Press.

Ian Condry is a cultural anthropologist and Associate Professor in Foreign Languages and Literatures at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  He is the author of Hip-Hop Japan (2006, Duke), published in Japanese as Nihon no Hip-Hop (2009, NTT). His forthcoming book is The Soul of Anime:  Collaborative Creativity and Japan’s Media Success Story.  He is currently conducting comparative research in Japan and the US on social and mobile media. He founded and organizes the MIT / Harvard Cool Japan research project (http://mitcooljapan.com). From 2009-10 he was Associate Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program.  http://iancondry.com

Simon Ellis is a New Zealand born independent performance maker and performer with a broad practice founded on choreographic traditions. He has a practice-led PhD (investigating improvisation, remembering, documentation and liveness) and is currently senior lecturer in dance (practice-based) at Roehampton University in London. His choreographies have included site-specific investigations, screendance, installation, webart, and conventional black box works. In 2008 his solo performance Gertrud was a finalist in the Place Prize, and his screendance project Anamnesis was awarded Best Film at InShadow International Festival of Video, Performance and Technology in Portugal. www.skellis.net

Susan Kozel is a dancer, choreographer and philosopher working at the convergence of performance and digital technologies. She is Professor of New Media with the MEDEA Collaborative Media Institute at the University of Malmö, Sweden, and is the director of Mesh Performance Practices http://www.meshperformance.org. She has published and performed widely. Her writing includes Closer: performance, technologies, phenomenology (MIT Press 2007), a book in progress called  Social Choreographies: Corporeal Aesthetics with Mobile Media (expected in 2012), and recent pieces on artistic research, ubiquitous computing, and bodily expression in electronic music.  Her collaborative performances and installations include the Technologies of Inner Spaces series (immanence 2005, Other Stories 2007 and The Yellow Memory 2009), whisper[s] wearable computing 2002-2005, and trajets 2000-2007. In her role as collaborating researcher with the Intuition in Creative Processes initiative based at the Theatre Academy in Helsinki she is experimenting with social networking applications for improvised performance (IntuiTweet 2009-20101) and expanding an embodied methodological basis for artistic research.

Petra Kuppers's teaches in performance studies at the University of Michigan, and she is Artistic Director of The Olimpias (www.olimpias.org). Her most recent book, Performance, Disability Culture, and Embodied Poetics: Find a Strange and Twisted Shape is forthcoming with Palgrave. It is a work of genre experimentation, incorporating dramatic texts and creative non-fiction alongside more traditional critical essays that witness international community performance.
Her previous books include Disability and Contemporary Performance: 
Bodies on Edge (Routledge, 2003), The Scar of Visibility: Medical Performances and Contemporary Art (Minnesota, 2007), Community Performance: An Introduction (Routledge, 2007), and, with performance artist Neil Marcus and photographer Lisa Steichmann, Cripple Poetics (Homofactus, 2008).

Chris Salter is an artist, Associate Professor for Design + Computation Arts at Concordia University in Montreal and a researcher with the Hexagram Institute for Research-Creation in Media Arts. Salter studied economics and philosophy at Emory University and received his Ph.D. in the areas of theater and computer-generated sound at Stanford University. He was also visiting professor at Brown University, the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and the KhM (Cologne). After collaborating with Peter Sellars and William Forsythe/Ballett Frankfurt, he co-founded and directed the art and research organization Sponge (1997-2003), whose works stretched between performance, installation, scientific research and publication. His solo and collaborative work has been seen at such venues as the Venice Architecture Biennale, Ars Electronica, Todays Art, Villette Numerique, Dance Theater Workshop, PACT Zollverein, EMPAC, Transmediale, EXIT Festival, Place des Arts, Elektra, Shanghai Dance Festival, V2_,  among others. He regularly presents at national and international conferences, has given invited talks at universities and festivals worldwide and has sat on numerous juries including NIME, ISEA and the Prix Ars Electronica. His book Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance was published in Spring 2010 from MIT Press.

Jaime Del Val / JaiVal (Madrid 1974) is a metamedia artist, performer, composer, pianist, philosopher, producer, environmental and post-queer activist, and director of REVERSO Institute for the Technologies of the Body www.reverso.org. His projects and performances, which develop in the convergence of interactive dance, electroacoustics, video, virtual architecture, performance, urban intervetions and the internet have been presented all over Europe, North and South America and Africa, as well as the Nomad Workshop of the Technologies of the Body which he organises since 2003. His writings on critical theories of the body, art and technology, have been published in numerous print and online journals. In 2000 he edited REVERSO, the first academic journal of Queer Theory and lgttbi studies in Spanish. In 2008 he was chosen by El Pais as one of the 100 Iberoamericas of the year, decribed by Tomas Marco as: “on of the most outstanding examples of an artist concerned with all art forms and with the problems of his time... a clear example of how it’s possible to change the world through art”. He is the Spanish coordinator of ETP http://www.european-tele-plateaus.eu/wp/ , a european project concerned with the development of novel telecommunication concepts and systems in the forms of interactive telematic dance installations networked across 4 european cities. He coordinates the group Common Body in Medialab Prado in Madrid http://medialab-prado.es/article/cuerpo_comun . Since 2008 he is Chairman of the Technarte International Conference in Bilbao - www.technarte.com .

Maria Chatzichristodoulou [aka Maria X] is a cultural practitioner (curator, performer, producer, writer). Maria holds a PhD in Art & Computational Technologies from Goldsmiths Digital Studios, University of London. She is Director of Postgraduate Studies and Lecturer in Theatre & Performance at the School of Arts and New Media, University of Hull. Previously, Maria taught at the University of London Colleges Goldsmiths, Birkbeck and Queen Mary, and Richmond the American International University, and worked as a Community Officer at The Albany in South London. She was co-founder of the international media arts festival Medi@terra and co-director of Fournos Centre for Digital Culture (1996-2002, Athens, Greece). She has performed with Diplous Eros Ensemble and director Syllas Tzoumerkas, also in Athens, Greece. Maria is co-editor of the volume Interfaces of Performance (Ashgate, 2009) and the forthcoming volume Intimacy: Across Digital and Visceral Performance (Plagrave MacMillan), which follows the Intimacy festival and Symposium that Maria initiated and co-directed in London, 2007. She has lectured and published widely.

Ian Winters is a Bay Area based  video/media artist,  photographer and occasional performer working at the intersections of performance, architectural form, and time-based media. In addition to individual work he often collaborates with composers, directors, and choreographers to create both staged and open-ended environments through performance, photographic/video/film media, and sonic environments. Winters trained in photography, video/film and performance at SMFA-Boston and Tufts University, and post-graduate training in architecture and live performance. Recent collaborators and media projects include projects with Robert Moses Kin, ODC Dance, Shotgun Players, Pamela Z, Evelyn Ficarra, paige starling sorvillo,/blindsight, Sara Kraft,  Mary Arrmentrout Dance Theater, and others. Recent work screenings, performances and video / media design projects  include venues such as London City University, the Port of Oakland, The Luggage Store, Sergei Kuryokhin Modern Art Center, Moscow Conservatory Electro-acoustic Center, I-Park Artist’s Enclave, Journées de l'électroacoustique, Paris, YBCA, ODC, Z-Space/Theater Artaud, The Kitchen, POTO Arts Festival, EMPAC, London Cutting Edge Festival, Oxford & Corsham music festivals, Moving Baltic Sea Festival and OPEN Cinema Festival in St. Petersburg, CounterPULSE, CNMAT, Highways, The Parkway Theaters, Hertz Hall at UC Berkeley, LA Freewaves festival, 21 Grand, Dance Mission and more. www.ianwinters.com

Nell Breyer was a Research Affiliate at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies and Program for Art, Culture & Technology (2002-2010); a Baryshnikov Art Center/ Summer Stages Fellow (2008-9) and Dance Theater Workshop digital ARM Fellow (2003-4). Breyer’s work addresses the intersection of dance, new media, and visual art. It has been shown in the US, Canada, Europe, the UK and Bangladesh. Breyer's commissioned public art and video installations have been shown at the Contemporary Art Museum St Louis, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Rovereto and Trento, Italy, The Philadelphia Art Alliance, Boston City Hall, Brigham & Women’s Hospital, World Financial Center Arts & Events, MIT Media Lab, The National Academy of Arts & Sciences, Ethan Cohen Fine Arts, Art Interactive, Photo NY, Dance Theater Workshop gallery and Dance New Amsterdam.  Breyer’s performance works have been presented in New York (The Joyce Soho, Judson Church, St. Mark’s, The Williamsburg Art Nexus); New England (MassMoca, The Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston, International Festival of Arts & Ideas); Canada (The MAI), the UK (The Place, Sadlers Wells Peacock Theater, Her Majesty’s Haymarket Theater), Bangladesh (The Bangladesh National Museum Auditorium, The Liberation War Museum); and Slovenia (Cankarajev Dom, TRNFEST).
Breyer completed a BA cum laude with distinction in Art & Humanities (Yale, 1994), an MsC in Cognitive Neuroscience (Oxford, 1997), and an MS in Media Arts & Sciences (MIT, 2002). Breyer has been a faculty instructor at Tufts College, Massachusetts College of Art & Design and a guest artist at Harvard’s Graphic School of Design, Marlboro College, Sewanee University, Summer Stages Festival and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. She is completing a Doctorate of Design at Harvard University Graduate School of Design this May.

The event is sponsored by the MIT program in Comparative Media Studies, the MIT program in Music and Theater Arts, and SLIPPAGE: Performance|Culture|Technology, in residence at MIT.  For more information, see web.mit.edu/slippage/dancetech; email defrantz@mit.edu, or call (617) 253-6957.