Marc Johnson’s Public defence

Marc Johnson’s artistic doctoral project has been published in DiVA. 
Link to DiVA: Doctoral thesis
 

Participants

PhD candidate:
Marc Johnson

Opponent:
Season Butler

Committee:
Find Defence Committee Biography below
Nicole R. Fleetwood
María Elena Ortiz
Florian Schneider
Jon Refsdal Moe (reserve)

Main supervisor:
Mick Wilson

Supervisor: 
John Paul Zaccarini
Magnus Bärtås

Schedule 

13:00–13:10
Welcome by the Committee Chair (Camilla Damkjaer) and the Head of the Subject Area (Tinna Jone)

13:10–13:30
Presentation by the Doctoral Candidate (Marc Johnson)

13:30–13:50
Summary by the Opponent (Season Butler)

13:50–14:45
Discussion between Season Butler and Marc Johnson

14:45–15:15
Break

15:15–16:00
Questions from the Committee, followed by Questions from the Audience
—
Break
—
Deliberation of the Committee
—
Announcement of the Result
(expected end ≃ 18:00)
 

Defence Committee (Biography)

Dr. Season Butler is a writer and artist working across fiction, performance and installation. Through projects in literary and live art contexts, she explores the poetics of survival, flight and how labour shapes belonging and transformation. Her debut novel Cygnet (Dialogue Books and Harper Collins, 2019) received the Writers’ Guild Award for Best First Novel, and her artwork has appeared in spaces including the Whitechapel Gallery, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Tate Exchange, Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art and Zürcher Theater Spektakel. A former fellow of the Berliner Förderprogramm Künstlerische Forschung (2022-23), she currently lives between Berlin and London.

Dr. Nicole R. Fleetwood is the Paulette Goddard Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication (NYU Steinhardt) and the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis (NYU College of Arts and Science). A MacArthur Fellow, she is a writer, curator, and art critic with interests in Black art, cultural history, aesthetics, photography, documentary studies, and the intersection of art and activism. She is the author of Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (Harvard University Press, 2020). Her other books are On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination (Rutgers University Press, 2015) and Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (University of Chicago Press, 2011).

María Elena Ortiz is Curator at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (USA), where she has curated exhibitions such as Surrealism and Us: Caribbean and African Diasporic Artists Since 1940 (2024), among others. Previously, she was Curator at the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), where she curated the group shows Allied with Power: African and African Diaspora Art from the Jorge M. Pérez Collection (2020-2022), The Other Side of Now: Foresight in Caribbean Art (2019-2020), and solo exhibitions with Firelei Báez, Ulla von Brandenburg, William Cordova, Teresita Fernández, José Carlos Martinat, Carlos Motta, and Beatriz Santiago Muñoz. At PAMM, she founded the Caribbean Cultural Institute (CCI), a curatorial platform dedicated to Caribbean art.

Dr. Florian Schneider is Professor for art theory and documentary practices at Trondheim Academy of Fine Art (NTNU). He is also a filmmaker, writer-researcher, curator, president of the Society for Artistic Research, and Director of the Institute for Creativity (University of Galway). He authored “Imaginary Property” (Sternberg Press, 2013) and initiated “Kein Mensch ist illegal! [Cross the border]” in the “Hybrid workspace” media lab of documenta X in 1997.