Biographies
Clara Balaguer
A cultural worker, grey literature publisher, and undisciplined researcher. From 2010 to 2018, she articulated cultural programming with rural, peri-urban, and diasporic communities from the Philippines through the Office of Culture and Design, a residency space and social practice platform. In 2015, she co-founded Hardworking Goodlooking, a cottage industry publishing hauz interested in the material vernacular, collectivizing authorship, and the value of the error. Currently, she coordinates the Social Practices department at Willem de Kooning Academy and teaches in the Experimental Publishing Master programme of the Piet Zwart Institute.
Florian Cramer
Florian Cramer, reader in 21st Century Visual Culture/Autonomous Practices at Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam, Netherlands. Recent publications include: “Crapularity Aesthetics,” in Making & Breaking, vol. 1, 2019; and Pattern Discrimination, with Clemens Apprich, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, and Hito Steyerl, published by University of Minnesota Press and Meson Press, 2018.
Rolf Engelen
Rolf Engelen is a conceptual artist. His practice is multidisciplinary. He is a tutor at the Fine Art department of Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam.
Deanna Herst
Deanna Herst is senior research lecturer at Willem de Kooning Academy. After graduating as an art historian with a thesis on photography (MA, Utrecht University), she is focused on art and design in the context of technology and participatory practices. In the last years, she has been developing her PhD research on authorship in open and participatory design, a topic on which she has published and lectured internationally. Within this context she currently works on a project that involves collaborations between “critical users,” artists, and designers in the field of care.
Aldje van Meer
Aldje van Meer currently works as a senior lecturer at the Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences. She is teaching, researching and exploring technical innovations relevant for artistic professions. She advises, inspires and implements the use of technology in the curricula of the Willem de Kooning Academy. Within the stations she is coordinating professional development and supervising research (through making). Aldje researched and published about the role that ICT and media technology play within the current (bachelor) art education and organises network meetings, lectures and events in which relevant developments in the field of art & technology are addressed.
Michelle Teran
Born in Canada, Michelle Teran has a transdisciplinary practice and operates within the domains of contemporary art, community-based initiatives, academic research and activism. Her research areas encompass socially engaged and site-specific art, transmedia storytelling, counter-cartographies, social movements, urbanism, feminist practices, critical and radical pedagogies. She is the practice-oriented Research Professor of Social Practices at Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam. She lives and works between Rotterdam and Berlin.
Sjoerd Westbroek
Sjoerd Westbroek is an artist living and working in Rotterdam, with a practice that involves drawing, teaching, collaborating and studying. He is a tutor at the Fine Art & Design Teacher Training programme of the Willem de Kooning Academy and the Master Education in Arts programme at Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam.