About the Speakers

• Heidi Norton

  Heidi Norton (American b. 1977, lives in Chicago) received her BFA from University of Maryland and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she is currently a professor of photography. Norton has had solo exhibitions in Chicago at Johalla Projects, Northeastern Illinois University, and Ebersmoore, and in San Francisco at Hungry Man Gallery. Her work was also included in the exhibition Snapshot at the Contemporary Art Museum in Baltimore, and in other group shows Mark Wolfe Contemporary in San Francisco, Monique Meloche Gallery and Andrew Rafacz Gallery, both in Chicago, and in New York at NADA Hudson, and the Knitting Factory. She is represented in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago and in the Midwest Photographers Project at the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago. Norton’s work is featured in the exhibition, BMO Harris Bank Chicago Works: Heidi Norton.

• J.C. Gabel

  J.C. Gabel is the founding editor and publisher of STOP SMILING, the magazine for high-minded lowlifes, which published from 1995 to 2009. He is presently Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of literary organization The Chicagoan as well as Hat & Beard Press, a new book imprinted dedicated to nonfiction titles in the realm of art, architecture, design, film, music and pop culture. He is also an editor-at-large for Chronicle Books and Taschen Books and writes regularly for a variety of culture magazines, including Print, Bookforum, Playboy, The Oxford American, and Wallpaper.

• John Edel

  John Edel is the Founder and Executive Director of The Plant. After purchasing the building in July 2010, he immediately began deconstruction and renovation with a vision of intentional reuse, economic development, and truly sustainable food. John’s foray into building redevelopment was at the Chicago Sustainable Manufacturing Center, a green business incubator in the Stockyards Industrial Corridor. As General Contractor, Edel took the facility from a burnt-out shell to 100 percent occupancy while using a mixture of waste-stream recycled materials and leading-edge technology to make the building exceptionally energy efficient and pleasantly non-toxic. The renovation was assisted by a core group of volunteers and by bartering with suppliers, tenants and scrappers. In previous careers, John taught computer graphics, designed sets for broadcast television, art directed video games, and worked as a chef on private railroad cars. He has a lifelong dream of combining industrial preservation and plants in a productive, conservatory-like project.

• Paul Cowan

  Paul Cowan was born in Kansas City and currently lives and works in Chicago. He received his BFA from Milwauke Institute of Art & Design and an MFA from University of Illinois at Chicago. Exhibitions include Clifton Benevento in New York, Shane Campbell in Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Young Art in Los Angeles, James Cohan in New York, Golden Age in Chicago, Michael Jon in Miami, and Green Gallery in Milwaukee. Cowan’s work is featured in the exhibition, BMO Harris Bank Chicago Works: Paul Cowan.

• Michael Williams and Richard Cahan

  Michael Williams and Richard Cahan, co-authors of Vivian Maier: Out of the Shadows, have collaborated on seven other books, including Real Chicago, Richard Nickel’s Chicago: Photographs of a Lost City, Who We Were: A Snapshot History of America, Edgar Miller and the Handmade Home, and The Lost Panoramas: When Chicago Changed Its River and the Land Beyond. They own CityFiles Press, a Chicago publishing company that focuses on art and photography books.

• Martin Kastner

  Martin Kastner is the founder and principal of Crucial Detail. Kastner, born in the Czech Republic, trained as a blacksmith and spent some time restoring historical metalworks at a castle in Western Bohemia before moving onto natural materials design and sculpture. He founded Crucial Detail in 1998 shortly after his arrival in the US. He is best known for his Alinea serviceware concepts, which landed him on The Future Laboratory’s list of 100 most influential individuals in contemporary design. Alinea book, which he designed in collaboration with Naissance Inc., was one of the winners in 2009 Communication Arts Design Annual for Best Book Design and is included in Altitude’s The Best of Cover Design. His work has been featured in numerous publications running the gamut from Gourmet to Fast Company.

• Carolina O. Jayaram and Abigail Satinsky

  Carolina O. Jayaram is a licensed attorney and community activist who creates ambitious programming geared towards empowering artists to thrive in the creative sector. She serves as the Executive Director of the Chicago Artists’ Coalition where she has revitalized the 38-year-old organization into a vital resource offering a critically acclaimed residency, exhibition and educational programs, and earning the organization “The Most Auspicious New Start Award” from the Chicago Tribune and “The Top 5 Reinventions in Everything in Art” from NewCity. She recently oversaw the acquisition of the Chicago Artists Resource website from the City’s Department of Cultural Affairs which further expands the organization to serve the theater, dance, literary and music communities. Before joining CAC, Jayaram was the founder and Executive Director of LegalArt in Miami, which manages a live/work residency in the Wynwood Arts District for eight national and international artists and curators. She served on the 2012 Chicago Cultural Plan Advisory Committee, and sits on the boards of threewalls and LegalArt. She earned her Bachelor of Arts from the New School University and her Juris Doctorate from the University of Miami School of Law, where she was a H.O.P.E. Award recipient and a Miami Fellows Initiative Fellow.

  Abigail Satinsky is the Program Director at threewalls in Chicago and a member of InCUBATE, a research collaborative dedicated to art economies. She’s a regular contributor to Bad at Sports podcast and blog, and has written for Proximity Magazine, AREA Chicago, Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, The Artist-Run Chicago Digest, Temporary Services’ Art Work: A National Conversation about Art, Labor and Economics, as well as the forthcoming exhibition catalogue for Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art. She coedited the most recent PHONEBOOK, a directory of artist-run spaces and projects across the United States (published by threewalls, formerly by Green Lantern Press) and co-organized the Hand in Glove conference, a national convergence on grassroots arts organizing and administration. She was a Fellow at the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage at Brown University and received her Master’s in Art History and Art Administration from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2009.

• Beth Kligerman and Dylan Rice

  Beth Kligerman has been with The Second City since 1993. She has helped produce countless Second City revues in Chicago and currently maintains The Second City productions aboard Norwegian Cruise Line. Other Second City producing credits include work presented at Vienna’s English Theatre, Vienna, Austria, Arkansas Repertory in Little Rock, numerous appearances at Charleston, South Carolina’s Piccolo Spoleto Festival, and USO tour that have included stops is Saudi Arabia, Alaska and Bosnia. As Director of Talent, Kilgerman oversees casting for the three Second City Touring ensembles based in Chicago as well as a variety of other projects.

  Dylan Rice joined the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE) in September 2012 as the Director of Creative Industries-Music. As head of the new Music Office, Dylan helps to promote and create policy for the economic growth of Chicago’s music industry. Rice spent seven years at as a production coordinator for cultural programming Navy Pier/Metropolitan Pier & Exposition Authority where he planned and produced hundreds of public events in music and dance. At Navy Pier, he launched the Neighborhoods of the World festival and oversaw the booking and operations of the Beer Garden Summertime Concerts. Prior to Navy Pier, Dylan spent five years as a public programs associate at the Department of Cultural Affairs under the Chicago Cultural Center Foundation, coordinating music, theater, and family programs. Dylan is also an accomplished rock singer-songwriter/guitarist, performing with a band at multiple local and national venues and festivals, and releasing two albums independently. He has opened for Paula Cole, Shelby Lynne and Eric Hutchinson. Currently he is lead vocalist of the band Software Giant.