Board of Directors

Jennifer Monson, Director

See Artist Biography

Elliott Maltby, President

Elliott Maltby, a landscape and urban designer, is a founding partner of thread collective, a multi-disciplinary collaborative design studio that explores the seams between building, art, and landscape. Elliott believes that art and design can improve the sustainability and vitality of the urban environment; she is particularly interested in how an ecological systems perspective can support both architectural and landscape interventions. Her current work includes defining the idea of the urban backstage, both conceptually and through design proposals. The backstage is the shadow or counterpoint of branded public space, a space to be found and explored, to wonder about, to wander around, a place to speculate. A survey of New York City backstage spaces demonstrates a common pairing of productive spontaneous ecologies and aging infrastructure; these are novel landscapes. Rather than seeing them as derelict or underutilized, she is interested in documenting and supporting the stealth success of these spaces.  She is also an Adjunct Associate Professor of Graduate Architecture and Urban Design at the Pratt Institute.

Carolyn Hall, Vice President

Carolyn Hall is a Brooklyn based freelance dancer/performer, historical marine ecologist/researcher, and instructor with the Alan Alda Center for communicating science. As a dancer she has worked with numerous choreographers and companies both nationally and internationally and received a New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award for performance in 2002. Long-term collaborations include Lionel Popkin Dance, Carrie Ahern Dance, Third Rail Projects, and Clarinda Mac Low/TRYST. As a freelance ecologist she has worked as an independent researcher for the Wildlife Conservation Society’s New York Seascape Program, as part of an academic team studying the greater ecosystem of the Gulf of Maine, and is the research assistant and fact checker for the best selling author Paul Greenberg (Four Fish, The Omega Principle). She is also on the board of Culture Push (http://www.culturepush.org/) and involved with Works on Water (https://www.worksonwater.org/). She is increasingly invested in combining her artist and scientist halves in public processes to make data-rich science more understandable, embodied, and memorable for the general public.

Barbara Bryan, Secretary

Barbara Bryan is the Executive Director of Movement Research and is an independent performing arts producer, manager and curator currently working with Sarah Michelson Inc. and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Extended Life Residency Program. From 2000-12, she was the Managing Director of John Jasperse /Thin Man Dance, Inc., Producing Director with Wally Cardona, and Project Director with Jennifer Monson/iLand, Inc. She was guest curator of Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival’s Inside/Out Series (Becket, MA) from 2002-12. She was the Associate Director of Danspace Project from January 1997 to December 1999. Barbara has served as a faculty member, mentor, guest speaker and panelist at various events including Dance/USA’s Winter Council, PICA’s TBA Festival in Portland, Oregon, On the Boards in Seattle, the National Performance Network’s annual conference, the Pacific Northwest Dance Lab conceived by the National Dance Project, Dance Theater Workshop’s Laboratory for Dance Management, Pentacle’s Help Desk, Hunter College and the ADF Intensive in New York. She is a former Trustee of Dance/USA. Ms. Bryan received her MFA in Dance from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, and a BFA in Dance and a BA in Classics from the University of Utah.

John Monson, Treasurer

Kate Cahill

Kate Cahill is an architect, researcher, and long-time member of the board of directors of the Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art, Nature and Dance (iLAND) in New York City. She studies Urbanism, Landscape and Ecology at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and serves as the lead research assistant for the Mumbai Portal of the Harvard-Mellon Urban Initiative. Before moving to Cambridge, Kate enjoyed collaborating on interdisciplinary teams and practicing architecture in New York and Beijing.

Recent past work includes research into infrastructures of mobility and control in the extraction enclave of the Atacama desert, Chile; the paradox of affordable housing shortage and neighborhood abandonment in Cancún, Mexico; and the interrelationships of housing, livelihoods and urban form in Mumbai, India. She is currently interested in the development of new, inclusive forms of collaborative practice; the pedagogy and agency of architecture + research; coastal resilience and adaptation planning; movement as a research practice and the ethics of fieldwork by design schools. Kate is co-founder of the GSD Design Research Forum and co-edits the student journal Process. She is a recent recipient of the AAUW Selected Professions Fellowship and the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies Research Fellowship.

Jason Munshi-South

Jason Munshi-South is an evolutionary biologist that examines the impact of large-scale landscape changes on the evolution of wildlife in and around New York City. A major theme of his work is how animals maintain connectivity between populations by moving through urban infrastructure and remnant green spaces. He is an Associate Professor of Biological Sciences at Fordham University, and splits his time between the Rose Hill campus in the Bronx and his lab at the Louis Calder Center, Fordham’s biological field station in Armonk, NY. Jason was an iLAND resident in 2012.

Alex Viteri

Alex Viteri is a Berlin-based writer, performer, and dance historian. I grew up in the Andes, alongside Ruco Pichincha and Cotopaxi mountains. Inspired by feminist descolonial activists and scholars, my research cares for Andean modes of knowledge and diverges into the documentation of brownness among the performing arts. In 2017, I graduated with an MFA from Columbia University. In Germany, I was awarded a Residenzpilotprojekt Stipendium (2019), a DIS-TANZ-SOLO (2021), and Recherche Stipendium (2022) from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media. These days, within the Berlin Centre for Advanced Studies in Arts and Sciences, Shuntaro Yoshida and I develop the project Einen Anderen Garten (die Recherche), Universität der Künste. Next January, we will teach the block seminar Artistic Practices at the End of the World during the Kollisionswoche organized by the University’s Studium Generale program. Lastly, I’m writing my Ph.D. dissertation supported by the Graduate Center, CUNY.

Catalina Hernández-Cabal

Colombian-American movement researcher, artist, scholar and educator. Catalina studies forms to attend to ‘how we meet others’, to challenge oppressive ideas about difference, and to provoke generative forms of encounter. This work is situated at the intersection of movement, critical and feminist pedagogies, and contemporary art practices. As part of her commitment to feminist knowledge and pedagogy, Catalina’s research relies on partnerships, collaborations, and multiple forms of dialogue. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor in Art Education at Virginia Commonwealth University. Catalina earned her PhD in Art Education, School of Art + Design, at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, where she also earned graduate certificates in Latino/Latina Studies, Gender and Women Studies and participated in the Dance graduate minor program. She is a 2022 Smalley Fellow in Gender Studies from the University of Illinois, and 2020-2021 Kate Neal Kinley Fellow in arts. Catalina has shared her work in the form of participatory workshops with different groups in locations like Bogotá-Colombia, Champaign-Urbana, New York, and Berlin-Germany. She also occasionally participates as a dancer and collaborator in dance pieces choreographed by colleagues and friends. She also holds an EdM in Aesthetic Education and a BA in Sociology and Political Science.