Please register for the event here: Registration for Sensing Matters
Please feel free to contact [email protected] with questions or concerns.
9 am Doors Open with Coffee and Light Refreshments
9:20 am Opening Remarks
9:30–10:45 am Session 1: Bodily Norms and Hierarchies (Moderated by Angela Crenshaw)
Speakers:
Jude Pettit (BGC)
Remembering Colonization: The Bodily Experience of Monuments
Jude Pettit (they/them/theirs; White Earth Nation descendant) is a first-year graduate student pursuing an MA in decorative arts, design history, and material culture at Bard Graduate Center in New York. They earned their BA in art history, with a minor in the Russian language, from the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities in 2024. Prior to beginning their graduate studies, Pettit completed a one-year appointment as the 2024–25 Lisa and E. Gerald O’Brien Curatorial Fellow at the Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis, where they curated the forthcoming exhibition SHOUT MY LAUGHTER TO THE STARS, highlighting activist legacies and networks on college campuses. Their current research focuses on contemporary Ojibwe artists, ceramic revitalization practices, and the broader implications of colonial paradigms on material culture.
Joyce Gayo (Parsons)
Bijou Kreyol (Creole Jewelry): The 19th and 20th Century Material Culture of the French Caribbean
Joyce Gayo is an MA fashion studies student at Parsons School of Design, New York. Her research centers on the material culture of the French Caribbean during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with particular attention to Creole dress, jewelry, textiles, and their roles in identity, resistance, and postcolonial history. Drawing from her Afro-Caribbean heritage, Gayo examines how race, gender, and colonial power have shaped fashion histories and their contemporary legacies. Her work also examines through a critical lens the systemic exclusion of Black women designers from dominant fashion narratives through archival research and visual culture analysis.
Corey Loftus (IFA)
“The Origin of Life”: Sex, Gestation, and Frederick Hollick’s Papier-Mâché Uterine Models in the Antebellum Period
Corey Loftus is an MRC Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and a PhD candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Her dissertation centers on imaginative uses of gestational imagery in artwork and visual culture before the invention of the ultrasound. Previously, Loftus has worked in curatorial and programming roles at institutions including the Asheville Art Museum; Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; and Whitney Museum, New York. Additionally, she has published her work in journals including Feminist Studies, Journal of Black Mountain College Studies, and Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture Journal.
10:45–11 am Short Break
11 am–12:15 pm Session 2: From Ephemeral to Accumulated (Moderated by Theodora Brown)
Speakers:
Ellie Botoman (CUNY)
Earthly Delights: Multisensory Contaminations of Queer Ecological Materiality in the Sculptural Installations of Precious Okoyomon and Daniel Lie
Eleonor Botoman is a PhD student in art history at the City University of New York Graduate Center. An interdisciplinary scholar working across architecture, design, material culture, museum studies, plant and animal studies, and environmental science, their research explores the impacts of climate change and ecological disaster on artistic production and cultural heritage preservation, particularly in frontline communities across the American South. They are also a published art critic, poet, and amateur perfumer. They continue to work in environmental advocacy, fighting for the protection of cultural landscapes across Miami.
Emily Hayflick (Cornell)
One Whole Eagle: Assembling Eagle Bodies at the National Eagle Repository
Emily Hayflick (she/her) is a PhD candidate in anthropology at Cornell University, Ithaca. Her research is centered on the entanglements of American legal frameworks, bureaucracy, and multispecies relations. Her dissertation focuses on US federal management of protected bird species through a focus on the handling and circulation of both deceased birds and bird parts. Her research has received funding from the Wenner-Gren Foundation and she was recently an American Bird Conservancy Conservation and Justice Fellow. She received her master’s degree from Bard Graduate Center in 2020.
Aisha Servia (Parsons)
Potentials of the Digital Hoard
Aisha Servia is a writer and filmmaker. A graduate of screen studies and sociology, her filmmaking and research practice is interdisciplinary, reflexive, and grounded in materiality, informed by her upbringing in the postcolony. Her work contends with access, extraction, and mobility on a bordered [E/e]arth, in the making of collective memory, personal histories, and a shared futurity. She owes her curiosity and practice to the work of pirates. She is currently pursuing a masters in media studies with a minor in migration studies at the New School. Her mother describes her as an idealist.
12:15–1:30 pm Lunch Break
1:30–2:45 pm Session 3: Mapping Data, Mapping Archives (Moderated by Alex Calloway and Olivia Kormos)
Speakers:
Sydney Nguyen (NYU)
Indigenous Survivance and the Sensorial Life of Objects
Sydney Nguyen is a PhD student in anthropology at New York University. She holds a BA in anthropology and Native American and Indigenous studies from Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire. She has worked across a range of museums and archival institutions, including Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, the museums of the Five Colleges Consortium, and Smith College Archives and Special Collections. An Iipay-Kumeyaay (ii-pai-koom-yai) woman and citizen of the Iipay Nation of Santa Ysabel, her work is grounded in Indigenous epistemologies and practices of care. Her presentation centers on a Kumeyaay hoof rattle held in the collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, tracing how such objects exceed their classification as static artifacts. Instead, she approaches the rattle as a living, relational presence—one that becomes animated through sensory engagement, embodied knowledge, and ongoing intergenerational connection.
Yvonne Mpwo (Columbia)
Men of Memory
Yvonne Mpwo is a Congolese American architectural researcher and independent curator based in New York. Her work examines indigeneity, sovereignty, and material memory through exhibitions that bridge digital and physical worlds. She is the founder of bana’pwo, a nonprofit curatorial residency fostering exchange among artists, researchers, and architects engaging the cultural landscapes of the Congo, as well as its publishing arm, lóbí press. Working between New York and the Congo, she develops projects that foreground spatial storytelling, counter-archival practices, and diasporic memory through technology and material form. Mpwo holds a master of science from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP) in New York, where she studied critical, curatorial, and conceptual practices in architecture, with a focus on the Black Atlantic, technological mediation, body memory, animism, and Indigenous cartography.
Ellie Madsen (Columbia, MS)
Sonifying Pinna nobilis: Transcoding Tidalectic Measurement and Myth
Ellie Madsen is a researcher, designer, and engineer working at the intersection of media, computation, and the environment. Her research practice critically engages digital representations of the Earth, including geographic information systems, satellite embedding models, spatial data visualization, and computer graphics. Ellie holds degrees in environmental studies and computer science from Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, and is currently pursuing a MS in computational design practices at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP) in New York.
2:45–3 pm Short Break
3–4:15 pm Session 4: Reception, Perception, and Multiplicity (Moderated by Lexi McKelvy)
Speakers:
Rebecca Miralrio (Hunter)
Malodorous Strategies: Disgust and Antagonism in Feminist Olfactory Art
Rebecca Miralrio is a master’s student in the art history program at Hunter College, New York, focusing on olfactory art. She received a bachelor’s degree in art history and Latin American and Caribbean studies from Hunter College. Her research interests include contemporary art, sensory studies, and curatorial theory and practice.
Andy Salzer (FIT)
The Genderful Agency of Chromat
Andy Salzer (they/them) holds a BFA in fashion design with an art history minor from the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York. During their studies, they spent one year at Polimoda in Florence and another completing their thesis collection at Politecnico di Milano. Salzer is currently completing their MA in fashion and textile studies at FIT, where they have undertaken curatorial internships with special collections and the Museum at FIT and cocurated the exhibition Beyond Utility. Their research focuses on the intersection of queer theory and fashion studies with an integration of autoethnography.
Sam Simons (BGC)
Sensing the Erotic City: The Cinematic Staging of “White Slavery” in Progressive Era New York
Sam Simons is a master’s student at Bard Graduate Center in New York, specializing in public humanities, digital humanities, and museum studies. Their research examines how erotic labor finds expression in museum and archival collections—attending closely to the interplay between the artistic, technological, and legal dimensions of these histories. Foregrounding the built environment’s relationship to erotic labor, this project explores cinemagoers’ sensorial and affective experiences of New York City’s premier of Traffic in Souls (1913). Before attending Bard Graduate Center, Simons conducted field research on immersive installations as critical thinking tools at Gray Area Foundation for the Arts’ Experiential Space Research Lab in San Francisco. Their recent presentations include “Reimagining Digital Futures: Sex Work, Art, and Design Ethics” at the University of Oregon’s History of Art and Architecture Graduate Symposium (2025). Simons is a recipient of the Textile Society of America Student/New Professional Award (2024) and is a Victorian Society New York Emerging Scholar (2026).
4:30 pm Closing Remarks
4:30–6 pm Reception
