IDSVA Students and Alumni Take the Stage at Conferences Across the Country and Around the World This Fall

This October and November, students and alumni of the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts are presenting, chairing, and exhibiting work at conferences spanning the country and beyond. Headlined by strong showings at both the SECAC Annual Conference in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and the Pacific Association for the Continental Tradition's 17th Annual Meeting in Hilo, Hawai'i, and extending to gatherings in Vancouver, Portugal, and points in between. Below is the full rundown of where to find IDSVA this season.*

SECAC
October 21–24, 2026, Winston-Salem, NC

Stanley Bermudez (PhD Candidate, Cohort ’21) will participate in the Annual Juried Exhibition, presenting two paintings, Élégance dans un café parisien and Spanish Beauty, on October 21, 2026.

Crystal Brown (PhD Candidate, Cohort ’23) will chair the session "Storytelling as Resistance" and present "Lilith: Examining Fear, Threading Narratives." Tory Schendel-Vyvoda (’23), Matthew Fields (Driskell Fellow ’23), and Alicia Thompson (’22) will also present on this panel.

Rachel Daichendt (IDSVA PhD 2026) will chair the panel "From Disruption to Renewal: Rethinking Art History with AI" on October 23, 2026.

Lucas Alan Dietsche (PhD Candidate, Cohort ’23) will curate the show The Square Halo of Hotel Room Art: Poetics of Floating Temporal Signifiers, Arrested Time, and the Commodification of Cultural Difference Using Bergson and Said on October 21, 2026.

Shana Dumont Garr (PhD Candidate, Cohort ’22) will co-chair the panel "Aesthetic Witnessing and Nonviolent World-Building: Art, Beauty, and Relational Ethics in Conditions of Crisis" with Alicia Thompson (PhD Candidate, Cohort ’22) on October 24, 2026.

Michael Hogan (IDSVA PhD 2025) will present "Language Happening: Mythology and the Art of Allan Kaprow" on October 23, 2026.

Tory Schendel-Vyvoda (PhD Candidate, Cohort ’23) will present "Earthrise: A Commentary on Planetary Emancipation and Freedom" on October 23, 2026.

Vanessa Schuster (PhD Candidate, Cohort ’22) will present "Narrative, Participation, and the Making of Experiential Worlds!" on October 22, 2026.

Alicia Thompson (PhD Candidate, Cohort ’22) will co-chair the session "Aesthetic Witnessing and Nonviolent World-Building: Art, Beauty, and Relational Ethics in Conditions of Crisis" with Shana Dumont Garr. She will also present "The (Accidental) Wound and Being" in the session "Storytelling as Resistance," with her colleagues Matthew Fields and Tory Schendel-Vyvoda, chaired by Crystal Brown.

Jessica Wagner (PhD Candidate, Cohort ’21) will present "Intertwining: Agnes Denes’ Tree Mountain: A Living Time Capsule, and Merleau-Ponty’s Chiasm" in the session "Immersive Threads: Narrative, Participation, and the Making of Experiential Worlds," chaired by Angela Whitlock (IDSVA PhD 2024), on October 23, 2026.

Angela Whitlock (IDSVA PhD 2024) will chair two sessions, "Immersive Threads: Narrative, Participation, and the Making of Experiential Worlds, Session I – Embodied Space and Relational Immersion" and "Immersive Threads: Narrative, Participation, and the Making of Experiential Worlds, Session II – Mediated Environments and Experiential Narratives," on October 22 and 23, 2026. She will also present the paper "Becoming-With and Coming-Apart: The Making and Unmaking of Immersion as an Ecological and Synergetic Practice" on October 22, 2026.

Pacific Association for the Continental Tradition (PACT) 17th Annual Meeting
October 8-10, 2026, The University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo

Margaret Coleman (IDSVA PhD 2023) will present “Crossing the Footbridge, Exploring Radical Vulnerability through Daily Encounter.”

Keren Moscovitch (IDSVA PhD 2020) will present "Anasyrma and the Mutual Metamorphosis of Sex and Nature."

Jacqueline Viola Moulton (IDSVA PhD 2025) will present “Mourning-With the More-Than-Human: Becoming-Animal and the Aesthetics of Worlding.”

Gabriel Reed (IDSVA PhD and Interim Director) will moderate the Plenary Session with George Smith (IDSVA Founder and President Emeritus), who will present on the “Artist Philosopher.” Reed will also present “ Lithochronos: On the Metamorphosis Between Stone and Clay” at the panel “Rocking Out.”

Jessica Rodríguez-Colón (IDSVA PhD 2022) will present "Shedding, Molting, Letting Go…" (Live Version).

Jeff Siemers (IDSVA PhD 2024) will present “The Metamorphosis of a Coming Community: A Listening to the Future.”

Jason Wirth (IDSVA Dissertation Director) will present “Why Is There Something Rather than Nothing? Metamorphosis and Malick’s The Voyage of Time.” 

Society for the Study of Affect (SSA): MAKE (Methods, Atmospheres, Knowledges, Energies) Conference
October 23–25, 2026, Vancouver, Canada

Nandita Baxi Sheth (IDSVA PhD 2025) is Organizer and Co-Chair of 8 Panels for Stream 21: "Sensational Affects, Strange Aesthetics, and (Counter) Pedagogies."

Ghalib El-Khalidi (IDSVA PhD 2025) will present "The Dancing Ape: How Play Makes the World."

Beth Martin (PhD Candidate, Cohort ’23) will present "Petrichoric Ontology: Towards an Atmospheric Understanding of Being."

Zoma Wallace (Driskell Fellow, IDSVA PhD 2026) will present "In Lieu of Hospitality: Finding Chorosity in the Blue Note."

Other Conferences

Kylie Ellis Cariddi (PhD Candidate, Cohort ’21) will present "Excerpts from a Lichen Phenomenology: Prayer and Play" at the IV International Conference on the Counter Image at the University of Algarve in Faro, Portugal, on November 18, 2026.

Lucas Alan Dietsche (PhD Candidate, Cohort ’23) will present "Oualinguistics: Oumuamua’s Undoing of Exo-Imperialist Hermeneutics Through The Blur" at the NSU-DEML International Conference, "Encountering the Human(ities): Anxiety, Storytelling, Futurity," October 30–31, 2026.

Santana Nash (Driskell Fellow, Cohort ’25) will present "Blackness on Bourbon Street: Life, Performance, and the Aftermath of Hegemony" at the American Society for Aesthetics: Southern Aesthetics Workshop, at the University of South Carolina, on October 10, 2026.

Alaina Plowdrey Forehand (PhD 2026) will co-present and chair the panel “Collage as Thought, Form, and Technology,” at the International Visual Literacy Association, Seeing Through Time: The Legacy of Images in Memory, Place, and Representation in Charleston, SC on October 7, 2026.

Jessica Rodríguez-Colón (IDSVA PhD 2022) will present "The Gaze Economy of (M)others in US Films" at the Mallen Conference on the Economics of Filmed (and Other) Entertainment, a virtual conference, October 11–12, 2026, and at the 1st International Remote Conference hosted by Unruly Scholars Mothers Network and Demeter Press, on the theme "Unruly Mothers and Mothering as Lived and Represented," October 20–24, 2026.

*This list reflects presentations shared with us as of publication.

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