Artist-in-Residence Program

Brett Cook is an interdisciplinary artist and educator who uses storytelling to distill complex ideas and creative practices to transform outer and inner worlds of being. In his work with the Exploratorium's Arts and Public Programming teams, Cook will look at the ways an artist can interpret, remix, amplify, or challenge Exploratorium pedagogy.

Cook's installations feature painting, drawing, and photography to tell pluralistic stories with broad representation. His public projects typically involve community workshops that apply arts-integrated pedagogy and contemplative strategies—along with music, performance, and food—to create a fluid boundary between art making, daily life, and healing.

Teaching and public speaking are extensions of Cook’s social practice that involve communities in dialogue to generate experiences of reflection and insight. He was formerly a Visiting Professor in Community Arts/Social Practice and Diversity Studies at California College of the Arts and Director of Social Practice and Pedagogy at San Francisco State University Healthy Equity Institute. In 2009, he published Who Am I in This Picture: Amherst College Portraits with Wendy Ewald and Amherst College Press; and in 2015, Clouds in a Teacup with Thich Nhat Hanh and Parallax Press.

Cook has received numerous awards, including the Lehman Brady Visiting Professorship at Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the Richard Diebenkorn Teaching Fellowship at the San Francisco Art Institute. In recognition of his history of socially relevant, community-engaged projects, he was selected as cultural ambassador to Nigeria as part of the U.S. Department of State’s 2012 smARTpower initiative. His work is in private and public collections, including the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, the Walker Art Center, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and Harvard University. He is a senior fellow at YBCA and a trustee of A Blade of Grass, an arts nonprofit dedicated to social engagement.

Heather Dewey-Hagborg is a transdisciplinary artist and educator interested in art as research and critical practice. Her controversial bio-political art practice includes the project Stranger Visions in which she created portrait sculptures from analyses of genetic material—hair, cigarette butts, chewed up gum—collected in public places.

Dewey-Hagborg has shown work internationally at events and venues including the World Economic Forum, the Shenzhen Urbanism and Architecture Biennale, the Van Abbemuseum, Transmediale, and PS1 MOMA. Her work is held in public collections of the Centre Pompidou, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the New York Historical Society and has been widely discussed in the media, from the New York Times and the BBC to Art Forum and Wired.

She is an artist fellow at AI Now, and an affiliate of Data Society and is the co-founder and co-curator of REFRESH, an inclusive and politically engaged collaborative platform at the intersection of art, science, and technology.

Photo courtesy of Thomas Dexter.

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The artwork Probably Chelsea by Heather Dewey-Hagbog and Chelsea Manning is featured in the exhibit collection Cells to Self. In this video Heather Dewey-Hagborg explains the artwork and describes how the same DNA data can be interpreted in many different ways.

Terry Berlier is an interdisciplinary artist who works primarily with sculpture and expanded media. Her work is often kinetic, interactive, and/or sound based and focuses on everyday objects, the environment, ideas of nonplace/place, and queer practice. She has exhibited in solo and group shows both nationally and internationally including the Contemporary Jewish Museum of San Francisco; Catherine Clark Gallery; Babel Gallery in Norway; and Richard L. Nelson Gallery in Davis, CA. She has received numerous residencies and grants including the Zellerbach Foundation; Berkeley Arts Council; Silicon Valley Artist Fellowship; Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research Fellowship at Stanford University; and Recology, San Francisco. She received a Masters in Fine Arts in studio art from University of California, Davis and a Bachelors of Fine Arts from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. She currently is an assistant professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University.

While at the Exploratorium, Berlier developed a way to add interactive sound components to a series of artificial tube-like “core samples.” Evocative of tree rings, the samples highlighted abstract patterns in history and nature while referencing scientific interpretation through the lens of an artist. Her results were later displayed at the Stanford Cantor Arts Museum.

John Edmark is an artist and designer whose explorations range from organically inspired cellular and kinetic works to products for storage, kitchen, and creative play. Edmark has taught in the design program of the Department of Art & Art History at Stanford since 2003. In addition to teaching classes in design fundamentals, product design, animation, and color, he is a graduate adviser to students in the Joint Program in Design.