ROBIN VUCHNICH, is a new media artist, adjunct lecturer at the North Carolina State University College of Design, and founder of the interactive art studio XO Immersive. Her immersive installations leverage light-based and interactive art to engage with public science, social change, community, and the natural world. Her recent work explores themes of diminishing biodiversity, climate change, sea level rise, and coastal erosion—reflecting on the fragility of ecosystems and the temporal nature of both the natural world and human life, each shaped and interconnected by impermanence and continual transformation.
She creates light-based immersive environments that merge scientific data with art inspired by the natural world, using visual storytelling and interaction to foster shared understanding and a quiet awe of nature and what it has to tell us. Vuchnich has been commissioned for light-based public art initiatives across the country, appearing serendipitously in national parks, on buildings in city centers, museums, galleries, and in unexpected urban spaces. Her art has been featured at the The Harvard Museum of Natural History, The North Carolina Museum of Art, GreenHill Center for North Carolina Art, The North Carolina Museum of History and The Gregg Museum of Art & Design.
LEAH SOBSEY Artist, Associate Professor of Photography, curator and Director of the Gatewood Gallery at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro.
Sobsey’s multidisciplinary photographic practice reaches into the fields of science, design, installation and textile. Leah exhibits nationally in galleries, public spaces, and museums. She is part of the documentary team that produced the best-selling book, Bull City Summer, published in 2013. Her first Monograph, Collections was released in July 2016 by Daylight Books.
Her images have appeared in New Yorker.com, the Paris Review Daily, slate.com, Hyperallergic.com, The Telegraph, and Audubon Magazine among many others. She has taught at the San Francisco Art Institute, the Maine Media Workshops, Duke University’s Center for Documentary studies, and the North Carolina Museum of Art. She has been an artist in residence at Virginia Center for the Arts, Dumbarton Oaks Plant Humanities residency, Ayatana Research residency, Penland, Mother’s Milk, The National Park system, Vermont Studio Center, Hewnoaks artist colony, and Hambidge .
Dr. EMILY MEINEKE, Assistant Professor of Landscape Entomology, Hellmann Fellow, University of California, Davis. Emily and her lab members investigate the effects of climate change on plants, plant-eating insects, and their interactions with one another. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on these topics harnessing advanced pedagogical techniques, notably art-science fusion. From 2016 to 2019, Emily was a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard University Herbaria in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology where she used herbarium specimens to document how urbanization and climate change have affected plant-insect relationships worldwide over the past 120 years.
Dr. MARSHA GORDON, Professor, Film Studies, North Carolina State University. Marsha teaches film history and documentary studies. She is the author of three books and two co-edited collections, as well as dozens of articles. Marsha has also co-directed three award-winning short documentary films and produced several art projects, including a multi-media installation based upon Thomas Edison Co.’s 1896 film depicting a kiss, Public Displays.
Dr. CHARLES DAVIS, Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University. He is also Curator and former Director of the Harvard University Herbaria–the world’s largest university herbarium. His research and teaching in evolution and ecology ranges broadly from classification to global change biology to molecular evolution and extensively leverages natural history museums and digital herbarium records. He was the senior and corresponding author of the key published research that informed the exhibition’s scientific dimensions and intellectual framework. Charles served as a scholarly consultant on the exhibition’s original mounting at the Harvard Museum of Natural History.