The Rutgers–Camden Department of Visual, Media, and Performing Arts becomes a central hub for interactive, online conversations with nationally and internationally renowned artists during its “ZoomOnArt” program. Artists who are luminaries in their fields Zoom in from other parts of the country and globe. They share with us images or video shorts of their work and answer questions, and the audience gets an opportunity to direct the discussion.
All lectures are scheduled during the Free Periods on Zoom between 11:30 am and 12:20 pm.
Spring 2026 ZoomOnART
All talks and/or workshops occur in FA 103/FA 105 Sculpture studios. Bring your lunch and prepare to be impressed! Contact Prof. Demaray at demaray@rutgers.edu for more info.
February 4 – Jon Compton
February 9 – Jinean Robinson
Jinean began her career as an art director and creative director in advertising, but eventually found her true calling in the social impact sector. She went on to found and lead organizations across the U.S., Haiti, Mexico, Malawi, and the Caribbean, raising and mobilizing $5 million to address critical community needs. At Women Together, she helped women in Malawi gain the skills and resources needed to achieve economic independence. Her growing interest in how solar energy could support her work in Malawi led her to a life-changing opportunity: a last-minute opening in RETI Center’s workforce development training. “I took the course to learn how to install solar, but it opened me up to a whole new industry and a whole new world,” Jinean recalls. After completing the program, she joined RETI as Community Engagement Lead and later went on to lead the organization’s Community Solar Program and Engagement Department. In this role, she has collaborated with building and land owners, residents, and investors to build a community solar network that delivers affordable, renewable energy to the NYC communities that need it most—while also creating sustainable jobs and reducing carbon emissions.
February 23 – Billy Dufala
Billy Dufala is a Philadelphia-based artist/musician engaged in a wide variety of creative disciplines. He is a cofounder and creative director at RAIR, an artist residency located at Revolution Recovery, a construction and demolition waste recycling facility in northeast Philadelphia. RAIR’s mission is to challenge the perception of waste culture by providing a unique platform for artists at the intersection of art and industry. Dufala is also known for his ongoing collaborative work with his brother Steven, as the Dufala Brothers. The brothers create drawings, prints, sculpture, performance, music, and design. They are represented by Fleisher/Ollman Gallery in Philadelphia and coteach in the Sculpture Department at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
March 30 – Dan Ostrov
Dan Ostrov was raised in Madison, Wisconsin, and lived in New Orleans before moving to East Falls in Philadelphia. He also has a few degrees, including his Bachelor’s in Fine Arts and Classical Studies and his Master’s in Glass from the Tyler School of Art. Prof. Ostrov is skilled in many different sculpting media, including glass, wood, clay, and metal. One of his favorite pieces he has done so far is Koan. It’s a piece that he made out of wood and is currently suspended in the John Phillip Sousa House in Philly. While that was his favorite piece, one of his other pieces, the Knotted Grotto, was blessed by Pope Francis XVI. Prof. Ostrov views this as one of his most significant accomplishments. More of his works are displayed in various museums and buildings across Philadelphia, including the James Michener Museum and the John Philip Sousa House. In the future, Prof. Ostrov hopes to create a series of sculptures that float in water.
https://cargocollective.com/danielostrov
April 8 – Allan Espiritu
Allan Espiritu heads the graphic design concentration at Rutgers University, Camden. Espiritu is a Philadelphia based graphic designer and educator. Espiritu received his BA in graphic design from Rutgers University, Camden Campus and his MFA in graphic design from Yale University, School of Art. He is the founder of GDLOFT, a small collaborative design studio made up of photographers, fine artists, students, designers and (aspiring) competitive food eaters, focusing on design for educational, arts and cultural and non-profit institutions. GDLOFT’s work has been published and acknowledged by AIGA, GDUSA, UCDA, Graphis, Communication Arts, Print Magazine, HOW, STEP, and Art Directors Club. His work has also appeared in Gestalten and Rockport publications.
In 2017, Espiritu was included in the Barnes Museum’s critically acclaimed show Person of the Crowd. He is an active member of AIGA Philadelphia, serving as president in 2013 and most recently he was named the 2017 AIGA Philadelphia Fellow, the chapter’s highest honor given to a design member.
https://www.gdloft.com/allan-espiritu-projects
April 22 – Richard Shaw
In the world of contemporary ceramics, Richard Shaw is the master of trompe-l’oeil sculpture. He has developed an astonishing array of techniques, including perfectly cast porcelain objects and overglaze transfer decals. By combining the commonplace with the whimsical, the humorous with the mundane, Shaw captures the poetic and the surreal with the sensibility of a comedian.
Shaw is one of the most respected and collected artists in contemporary ceramics. He came out of the San Francisco Bay Area art scene in the late 1960’s and he continues to add to his skills and appropriate from mass culture. He has developed a vocabulary of found objects that form intimate still life sculptures, complex figures, and personally referential assemblages. He brings life to the detritus of the studio, as a cartoonist animates the page.
Past zoomOnArt Lecturers:
Fall 2025 ZoomOnART
September 15 – Raul Romero
October 15 – Tatiana Parcero
October 27 – Stass Shpanin
November 3 – Christina Freeman
December 1 – Jenny Jaramillo
Spring 2025 ZoomOnART
February 12 – Sue Huang
February 26 – Ellie Irons
April 2 – Jemila MacEwan
Fall 2024 ZoomOnVMPA schedule
spring 2024 ZoomOnVMPA schedule
February 14 – Alice Smits
March 6 – Catherine Chalmers
Spring 2023 ZoomOnVMPA schedule
February 22 – Carlos Castellanos
March 1 – Aviva Rahmani
March 22 – Patricia Olynyk
April 19 – Orkan Telhan
fall 2022 ZoomOnVMPA schedule
September 21 – Cyril Read
September 28 – Jonah Taylor
October 5 – Anjelic Owens
October 12 – Elizabeth Pilliod
October 26 – Adam Harr Horowitz
November 2 – Stass Shpanin
November 9 – Mary Mattingly
November 30 – Jack Forman
December 4 – Kathleen McDermott CANCELLED
Spring 2019 SkypeOnArt schedule:
Aroussiak Gabrielian and Alison B. Hirsch
Monday, February 4th
Aroussiak Gabrielian Is an architectural and landscape architectural designer with a background in visual arts. She holds an MLA and an M.Arch from the University of Pennsylvania and is currently pursuing her Ph.D in Media Arts + Practice at University of Southern California’s School Cinematic Arts where she is an Annenberg Fellow. Aroussiak deploys design methodologies that use future scenarios as tools to better understand the present and that use design as a means of speculation.
Alison B. Hirsch is a landscape architectural designer, as well as urban historian and theorist. Currently an Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture + Urbanism at the University of Southern California’s School of Architecture, Alison holds a Ph.D. in Architecture, an MLA and an M.S. in Historic Preservation from the University of Pennsylvania. Alison’s design interests focus on public histories and politics of urban settlement, as well as how corporeality and human movement can inform the design process.
Eve Andree Laramee
Monday, March 4th
Eve Andree Laramee is an installation artist whose works explores four primary themes: legacy of the atomic age, history of science, environment and ecology, social conditions. Her interdisciplinary artworks operate at the confluence of art and science. She is currently Professor and Chair of the Department of Art and Art History at Pace University. Laramee currently lives in Brooklyn, NY, and Santa Fe, NM. She is also the founder and director of ART/MEDIA for a Nuclear Free Future.
Paul Vanouse
Monday, March 11th
Paul Vanouse is an artist working in Emerging Media forms. His artworks have included data collection devices that examine the ramifications of polling and categorization, genetic experiments that undermine scientific constructions of race and identity, and temporary organizations that playfully critique institutionalization and corporatization. These “Operational Fictions” are hybrid entities–simultaneously real things and fanciful representations–intended to resonate in the equally hyper-real context of the contemporary electronic landscape.
Hannah Rogers
Monday, April 8th
Hannah Star Rogers is a curator, scholar, and poet. She received her MFA in poetry from Columbia University and Ph.D. at Cornell University on the intersection of art and science. She curated Making Science Visible: The Photography of Berenice Abbott, which received an exhibits prize from the British Society for the History of Science and resulted in an invited lecture at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. She is past Director of Research and Collaboration for Emerge: Artists and Scientists Redesign the Future 2016 and served as Guest Bioart Curator for 2017.
Fall 2018
Yuri Suzuki
Yuri Suzuki is a sound artist, designer and electronic musician who explores the realms of sound through exquisitely designed pieces. His work looks into the relationship between sound and people, and how music and sound effect their minds. His sound, art and installations have been exhibited all over the world.
Mattia Casalegno
Mattia Casalegno is an Italian interdisciplinary artist, live-media performer and installation artist working in a broad range of media. His multidisciplinary work is influenced by both post-conceptualism and digital art, and has been defined relational, immersive, and participatory. His practice explores the effects new media have on our societies, investigating the relationships between technology, the objects we create, our subjectivities, and the modes in which these relations unfold into each other.
Jane Philbrick
Jane Philbrick’s large-scale installations and sculpture range in media from ultrasound and rammed earth to magnetic levitation and found space. She works in collaboration across disciplines in science and engineering, architecture, music, and performance.
Pinar Yoldas
Pinar Yoldas is an infradisciplinary designer/artist/researcher currently based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Her work develops within biological sciences and digital technologies through architectural installations, kinetic sculpture, sound, video and drawing with a focus on post-humanism, eco-nihilism, anthropocene and feminist technoscience.
Joyce Kozloff
Joyce Kozloff has been an artist and activist for decades, from her involvement with the 1970s feminist collective Heresies to her more recent commitment to We Make America, a group of artists creating Statue of Liberty-inspired props and signage for numerous protests against Trump. In her latest exhibition, Girlhood, at D.C. Moore Gallery, Kozloff juxtaposes her adult obsession with antiquated cartography with her own childhood drawings for social studies projects, revealing the limits of our ability to comprehend “new worlds,” both historically and personally.
Natalie Bookchin
Natalie Bookchin is an artist and filmmaker who, through virtuosic editing and innovative sonic and visual montage, interrogates the American crisis and its increased inequality and polarization as well as the seismic impact of the digital tools and platforms that determine the shape and texture of contemporary life. Her critically acclaimed films and installations have shown around the world at museums, galleries, theaters, and festivals, including at MoMA, LACMA, PS1, Mass MOCA, the Walker Art Center, the Pompidou Centre, MOCA LA, the Whitney Museum, the Tate, and Creative Time. She has received numerous grants and awards, including from Creative Capital, California Arts Council, the Guggenheim Foundation, among others.
Dr. Eban Goodstein
Dr. Goodstein is the author of three books: Economics and the Environment, (John Wiley and Sons: 2017) now in its eighth edition; Fighting for Love in the Century of Extinction: How Passion and Politics Can Stop Global Warming (University Press of New England: 2007); and The Trade-off Myth: Fact and Fiction about Jobs and the Environment. (Island Press: 1999). His research has been featured in The New York Times, Scientific American, The Economist, and USA Today. In recent years, Goodstein has coordinated climate education events at over 2500 colleges, universities, high schools and other institutions across the country He serves on the editorial board of Sustainability: The Journal of Record, and is on the Steering Committee of Economics for Equity & the Environment.
Nina Katchadourian
Nina Katchadourian is an interdisciplinary artist whose work includes video, performance, sound, sculpture, photography and public projects. Her video Accent Elimination was included at the 2015 Venice Biennale in the Armenian pavilion, which won the Golden Lion for Best National Participation. She lives and works in Brooklyn, and is an associate professor on the faculty of NYU Gallatin. She is represented by Catharine Clark gallery.
Carlos Castellanos
Carlos Castellanos is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher with a wide array of interests such as cybernetics, ecology, embodiment, phenomenology, artificial intelligence and art-science collaboration. He holds a Ph.D. from the School of Interactive Arts and Technology (SIAT), Simon Fraser University and an MFA from the CADRE Laboratory for New Media, San Jose State University.