Ecologies of Precarious Abundance: Queer Life and Natures

Heather Davis is a writer, researcher and teacher whose work draws on feminist and queer theory to examine ecology, materiality, and contemporary art in the context of settler colonialism. She is an assistant professor of Culture and Media at The New School. Her most recent book, Plastic Matter (Duke University Press, 2022), re-examines materiality in light of plastic’s saturation. Davis is also a member of the Synthetic Collective, an interdisciplinary team of scientists, humanities scholars, and artists, who investigate and make visible plastic pollution in the Great Lakes. She was the co-curator of Plastic Entanglements: Ecology, Aesthetics, Materials (on view at the Palmer Museum of Art, the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Smith College, and the Chazen Museum of Art, 2018-2020).

Davis has written widely for art and academic publications on questions of contemporary art, politics, and ecology, and has lectured internationally, including at the MoMA and Columbia, both New York; MIT, Cambridge; Sonic Acts Academy, Amsterdam; Transmediale, Berlin; Ashkal Alwan, Beirut; the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; and the Yinchuan Biennale, Yinchuan. She is the co-editor of Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies (Open Humanities Press, 2015) and editor of Desire Change: Contemporary Feminist Art in Canada (MAWA and McGill Queen’s UP, 2017). Davis' work has been supported through numerous fellowships including the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, a GIDEST faculty fellowship at The New School, a Mellon Visiting Scholar in the Environmental Humanities at the Center for Environmental Futures, University of Oregon, a Critical Studies Teaching Fellowship at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Institute for the Arts and Humanities, Pennsylvania State University.

Tejal Shah (they/them, India) considers themselves as some kind of an artist working on some kind of nature. They are deeply invested in relationality, love, care and healing, in ways that honours difference and is sensitive to the flows of power, privilege and disadvantage along complex intersectional lines. Amongst others, Shah’s worldview is informed by nondual Buddhist philosophy and practice, queer-feminism and eco-poetics. Their works have shown widely at museums, galleries and film festivals including Documenta 13, Kassel; Kochi-Muziris Biennale; Tate Modern, London; and Centre Pompidou, Paris.

Ama Josephine B. Johnstone – Guest Faculty
Ama Josephine B. Johnstone is a scholar, speculative writer, artist and pleasure activist whose work navigates intimate explorations of race, art, ecology and feminism. Johnstone is a PhD candidate in Psychosocial Studies with Dr Gail Lewis and Dr Margarita Palacious at Birkbeck University of London. Her research takes a queer, decolonial approach to speculating and archiving interdependent, pleasurable Black climate changed futures in Ghana and across the Black diaspora. Johnstone’s wider praxis thinks through sustainable economies and ecologies of care and survival for BIPOC womxn in the arts and academia.

Johnstone is a curatorial fellow with Frame Contemporary Art Finland and EVA International (Limerick), and was the 2020/21 Keith Haring Fellow in Art and Activism with BARD College (New York). She has had essays, short fiction and art writing published internationally, and has been exhibited across Europe.