Professor of Contemporary Art & Theory, University of Alberta

Natalie Loveless (www.loveless.ca) is Professor of Contemporary Art and Theory in the Department of Art & Design at the University of Alberta (ᐊᒥᐢᑿᒌᐚᐢᑲᐦᐃᑲᐣ /Amiskwacîwâskahikan) in Treaty Six territory and the home of the Métis Nation. There, she directs the Research-Creation and Social Justice CoLABoratory and the Faculty of Arts’ signature area in Research-Creation. Loveless completed her MFA in Interdisciplinary Studio Art, with a focus on performance art, at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2004); and her PhD in the History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz (2010). 

She is the author of How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research-Creation (Duke UP 2019), editor of Knowings and Knots: Methodologies and Ecologies in Research-Creation (University of Alberta Press 2019), and co-editor of Responding to Site: The Performance Work of Marilyn Arsem (Intellect Press 2020). Since 2012, Loveless has been advocating for research-creation as an intervention into scholarly spaces, one that draws on the insights of the visual arts, combined with those of the interdisciplinary humanities, to foster experimental, situated, and relational knowledge modalities.

Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Haverford College 

Qrescent Mali Mason is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Haverford College and currently serves as the President of the International Simone de Beauvoir Society. She earned a Ph.D. in Philosophy, with a Certificate in Women’s Studies, from Temple University in 2014, where she wrote her thesis, “An Ethical Disposition Toward the Erotic: The Early Autobiographical Writings of Simone de Beauvoir and Black Feminist Philosophy,” which links Beauvoir’s 1920s-1940s autobiographical engagements with the erotic in her journals and memoirs to developments in her thinking on ethics, and draws parallels from these to key themes in the Black feminist writings of Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and Patricia Hill Collins on the erotic. 

From 2014-2018, she taught in the Women’s and Gender Studies department at Berea College where she solidified a commitment to the value of interdisciplinarity and intersectional theorizing through teaching and researching in Gender and Sexuality Studies and African American Studies, in addition to existentialism and phenomenology, feminist philosophy, critical race philosophy, and ethics and social/political philosophy. Her most recent writings include “The Uses of Death: Toward a Black Feminist Phenomenology in Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals,” and “Intersectional Ambiguity and the Phenomenology of #BlackGirlJoy,” and she is working on a book manuscript titled, Intersectional Ambiguity: Simone de Beauvoir, Women of Color Feminisms, and The Difference Difference Makes.