Shanti Ganesh artist in residence

Shanti Ganesh will be an artist in residence at AIRspace in San Fransisco from August 15- January 15, 2016 to
develop herself from scientist to maker. In particular Ganesh wants to develop into a queer-maker and examine in her work the concept of identity and gender identity.

About AIRspace

AIRspace is a performing arts residency that supports the creation of new queer experimental theatre, contemporary dance, spoken word and multidisciplinary performance by providing free rehearsal and performance space as well as critical feedback and artistic development opportunities for emerging LGBTQ artists in the Bay Area; especially those artists that are least represented in the mainstream including women artists, transgender artists and artists of color.

The oldest, longest running residency program for queer performance in the United States, AIRspace was founded in 1986 by the former Jon Sims Center for the Performing Arts (JSC) in San Francisco. When the JSC closed in 2007, SAFEhouse for the Performing Arts began curating the program, serving approximately twenty artists per year.

Over the last twenty-seven years, the program has served hundreds of emerging queer performance artists in the Bay Area and launched the annual National Queer Arts Festival, staged in partnership with the Queer Cultural Center.

About Dr. Shanti Ganesh

Dr. Shanti Ganesh is a cognitive psychologist and neuroscientist from the Netherlands, working on the crossroads of art, science and technology. From 2012-2014 she was a visiting scholar postdoc with the University of California, Berkeley, CA, where she investigated the nature of creativity. Her PhD research dealt with a neuroscientific investigation of how long-term gamers of massively multiplayer online role-playing games self-identify with avatar, an online artificial agent that represents the gamer in the online world. Dr. Ganesh has increasingly become interested in the hybridization of the boundaries between the human self and artificial agents, whether these are avatars or robots. Now based in the Netherlands, dr. Ganesh has initiated and is the director of kladlab for art-science research. Website: www.kladlab.nl.