Keynote Speakers

Claudia Rankine is the author of five books of poetry, including Citizen: An American Lyric and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric; three plays including HELP, which premiered in March 2020 (The Shed, NYC), and The White Card, which premiered in February 2018 (ArtsEmerson/ American Repertory Theater) and was published by Graywolf Press in 2019; as well as numerous video collaborations. Her recent collection of essays, Just Us: An American Conversation, was published by Graywolf Press in 2020. She is also the co-editor of several anthologies including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind.

In 2016, Rankine co-founded The Racial Imaginary Institute (TRII). Among her numerous awards and honors, Rankine is the recipient of the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, the Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, United States Artists, and the National Endowment of the Arts. A former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Claudia Rankine joined the NYU Creative Writing Program in Fall 2021. She lives in New York.

Bevil Conway is an artist and a neuroscientist, and a world-expert on color. His research transformed our understanding of color by discovering that as much brain is involved in color perception as in face recognition. Conway is a regular commentator on color, neuroscience, and society, and has appeared alongside a wide range of cultural leaders including Alan Alda, Bruno Latour, Tauba Auerbach, Mark Morris, and Sid Sriram. His scientific explanation of the viral internet sensation #thedress was read by 32 million people. Dr. Conway is a senior investigator at the National Institutes of Health. He was a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows working with the Nobel prize winner David Hubel. Conway was a founding member of the Kathmandu University Medical School and the Neuroscience Department at Wellesley College. He has authored dozens of discoveries in neuroscience and perception, with in-depth reviews and interviews in Wired, FastCo, Discover, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Scientific American, Science Friday, NPR, The Today Show, SXSW, and Quirks and Quarks.

Bevil’s artwork explores many themes including the limits of visualization, the nature of representation, and concepts of process, beauty and the sublime. He works in glass-and-silk, etching, watercolor, and oil paint, and occasionally site-specific installation. His work is in the Boston Public Library, the Fogg Art Museum Rental Collection, the N.I.H. Building 35 Public Art Collection, and many private collections. He lives in Washington DC with his spouse, twins, and pets (chameleon, canary, & dog). Bevil is the author of the forthcoming books Color Coded (W.W. Norton Press) and The Creative Brain (with Alexander Rehding, Princeton University Press).