Vision Lab Collective (Works 2018-2023)

Abstract: Vision Lab Collective is an international socially-engaged art and research collective, based at Harvard Divinity School. We create artistic and literary works, performances, scholarly research projects, and other innovative spaces of engagement combining radically imaginative cross-disciplinary conversations and experiential practices spanning the areas of contemporary spirituality, social and environmental justice, technology, and literary and artistic practice. We have created and presented our work through public performances and workshops, residencies, conferences, and experiential retreats, in residence at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and MIT’s Experimental Collections. Check out our website at www.visionlabcollective.com to find out more about our previous work.

Presenter bio: Kythe Maryam Heller is a poet, essayist, interdisciplinary artist, and scholar. She is author of the poetry collection Firebird (Arrowsmith), writing and inter- media works including Immolation, Thunder Perfect Mind, and Rite of Spring (with Meghan McNealy), film and installation work presented in the US and Canada, and critical studies published by Cambridge University Press, Akron Series in Contemporary Poetics, and Harvard Divinity School Graduate Journal. She is the founder of Vision Lab, a socially-engaged art and research collective in the future of the human spirit (based at Harvard Divinity School), the editor-in-chief of Forecast Journal, and a faculty member of the Language and Thinking Program at Bard College. She has received fellowships and grant awards from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (to support a writing fellowship in poetry at the MacDowell Colony), The Mellon Foundation, Harvard University, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and elsewhere. Currently, she lives in Cambridge, MA, and is completing a doctorate in Comparative Religion at Harvard University.

Affiliation: Harvard University