[af]s Keynote Speakers

photo credit: Ingrid Barrentine

Ellen Dissanayake is an independent scholar, author, and lecturer whose writings about the arts synthesize many disciplines, including evolutionary biology, ethology, cognitive and developmental psychology, cultural and physical anthropology, neuroscience, and the history, theory, and practice of the various arts. Since 1991, she has presented over a hundred invited lectures to audiences in Europe, Australia, Argentina, Russia, and Bangladesh, as well as the United States and Canada. Combining her interests in the arts and evolutionary biology, and using insights drawn from fifteen years of living and working in nonwestern countries (Sri Lanka, Papua New Guinea, India, and Nigeria), she has developed a unique perspective that considers art (including music) to be a normal, natural, and necessary component of our evolved nature as humans. She is the author of three books published by the University of Washington Press (What Is Art For?, Homo Aestheticus­--translated into Chinese and Korean, and Art and Intimacy), as well as more than eighty scholarly and popular articles and book chapters. Just published is an Italian translation of seven of her scholarly articles in a volume titled L’infanzia dell’esthetica: L’origine evolutiva delle pratiche artistiche.  She currently resides in Seattle where she is an Affiliate Professor in the School of Music at the University of Washington.

See also: www.ellendissanayake.com 

Harry Francis Mallgrave received his PhD in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania in 1983 and has enjoyed a distinguished career as an award-winning scholar, translator, editor, and architect. He has published more than a dozen books on architectural history and theory, including his last book, Architecture and Embodiment: The Implications of the New Sciences and Humanities for Design. He is currently working on a book that considers the place of architectural research within current directions of cultural and ecological thought.