Audrey G. Bennett is a naturalized American design scholar of Afro-Caribbean descent, an inaugural University Diversity and Social Transformation Professor of the University of Michigan, and Professor of Art and Design at U-M’s Penny W. Stamps School of Art and Design. She is also a former Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Scholar of the University of Pretoria, South Africa, and a former College Art Association Professional Development Fellow. She studies the design of transformative images that, through interactive aesthetics, can permeate cultural boundaries and impact the way we think and behave.

Her research contributes a hypothesis called interactive aesthetics that aims to democratize control of images in society. Interactive aesthetics explains the use of technology to place designers in virtual collaboration with lay users, where technology makes it easier for remote participants in various stages of the design process to work together. Bennett currently conducts fieldwork globally to investigate the use of interactive aesthetics to affect social change. Her interactive aesthetics research agenda includes two primary strands of inquiry. First, Bennett studies the use of IA in the prevention of new HIV infections in Kenya and Ghana (funded by the National Science Foundation). Second, she investigates the use of interactive aesthetics towards ethnically and intellectually diversifying STEM education, particularly computer science, with indigenous art curricula (funded by the National Science Foundation and Google).

Bennett is a 2015 Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Scholar of the University of Pretoria, South Africa and a 1997 College Art Association Professional Development Fellow. In 2007 she secured a National Science Foundation Career Campaign Award and a competitive grant from the AIGA, the professional association for design to create GLIDE, a biennial virtual conference that disseminated visual communication design research findings on the role of designed images in global society. Bennett is the co-editor of the Icograda Design Education Manifesto 2011 and participates on the editorial boards of the Journal of Communication Design, Text & Image, and the New Design Ideas Journal. She is a member of the board of directors of CAA: Advancing Art and Design.

The Design and Technology programs at Parsons present Cloud Salon, a Zoom webinar series that invites artists, designers, technologists, and industry professionals to present projects and to engage in direct conversations with participants.

 
This spring, DT continues to partner on Cloud Salon curation with black beyond, a radical platform for artists and activists to speculate alternate realities for Blackness. black beyond interrogates understandings of Black subjectivity outside the limitations imposed on Blackness by the racist imaginary through: Afropessimism, Afronowism, Afrofuturism, Black feminist theory, and critical race studies.

This talk will begin with a 20-minute presentation by Audrey Bennett, followed by a 40-minute conversation with participants, moderated by members of black beyond.

Please click "Register" above to confirm your attendance. After you register, you will receive a confirmation email with a link to join the webinar.