Arts & Sciences in Dialog: Representing Antarctica & Climate Change
Come to a panel discussion featuring U Professors Emelie Mahdavian and Kenneth M. Golden, and visiting artist Cheryl E. Leonard.
Thursday, February 1 | 5:30pm-7:30pm
Alfred Emery Building Room 320
Cheryl E. Leonard
Cheryl Leonard is a San Francisco-based composer, performer, field recordist, and instrument builder whose works investigate sounds, structures, and objects from the natural world. Her projects cultivate stones, wood, water, ice, sand, shells, feathers, and bones as musical instruments, and often feature one-of-a-kind sculptural instruments and field recordings from remote locales. Leonard is fascinated by the subtle textures and intricacies of sounds, especially very quiet phenomena. She uses microphones to uncover and explore micro-aural worlds within her sound sources, and develops compositions that highlight the unique voices she discovers. Structurally and thematically, her creations often reflect on natural phenomena and processes. Her recent work focuses on environmental issues, especially climate change in the polar regions and California and the extinction of species.
Kenneth M. Golden
Kenneth M. Golden is a Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and Adjunct Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Utah. His research is driven by interests in sea ice, the climate system, composite materials, statistical physics, polar ecology and remote sensing. He has published papers in a wide range of journals in mathematics, science and engineering, been on eighteen polar expeditions to study sea ice, and given over 500 invited lectures on six continents, including three presentations in the U.S. Congress. Golden is an award winning teacher and research mentor to over 90 young investigators, from high school students and undergraduates in majors across science and engineering to mathematics graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. His work has been covered by media around the world, including profiles in Science, Scientific American, Physics Today, and a BBC series, with numerous interviews on radio, television, and the internet. Golden is a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, cited for “extraordinary interdisciplinary work on the mathematics of sea ice,” an Inaugural Fellow of the American Mathematical Society, and a Fellow of the Explorers Club, whose members have included Neil Armstrong, Sir Edmund Hillary, Robert Peary, and Jane Goodall.
Emelie Mahdavian
Emelie Mahdavian is an Emmy, Peabody, and Sundance Award-winning filmmaker who was selected for DOCNYC’s 2020 “40 Under 40” list. Her nonfiction feature BITTERBRUSH screened at Telluride Film Festival, Doc Fortnight at the MoMA, won a Special Jury Prize at Visions du Réel and is in release with Magnolia Pictures/Hulu. She produced, wrote, and edited MIDNIGHT TRAVELER, which won numerous international prizes and was nominated for a Gotham Award for Best Documentary.
Her current project is PLANET A, a film about a women-led science team who are the last humans to set foot on the ice shelf of Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica. The film was the result of a solo-filming expedition in winter 2022/2023 and is currently in the edit.
Emelie was previously a professional dancer, and she is also completing a documentary about the creative process of Alonzo King LINES Ballet. She was Assistant Director of Ballet Afsaneh and a company member of Isadora Duncan Award-nominated Wan-Chao Dance. Her dance film work has screened at museums and international festivals including the Los Angeles Craft and Folk Art Museum and Dance on Camera at Lincoln Center.
Emelie has a Ph.D. in Performance Studies with an emphasis on Film Practice as Research from the University of California, Davis. As a scholar, Emelie focuses on dance and film, often in the context of gender and cultural performance. She has published on dance performance of gender in the context of rising nationalism in post-Civil War Tajikistan.