Teaching and lecturing Archives

Arrivederci, Ernesto: A Remembrance of Professor Ernest B. Gilman (1946-2026)

Professor Ernest Gilman, my friend and mentor, died last week. Many called him Ernie, but I always called him Ernesto. He seemed to enjoy it. It was a holdover from his days teaching at NYU Florence, where, I learned at his funeral service, his full title was Ernesto il Magnifico! I never called him that. Ernesto was one of the… Read more

Scent Lectures at the New School and NYU Tanden

I had so much fun being a guest lecturer/visiting artist in Cara Hagan‘s graduate theater class at the New School last month. I brought my boxes of smells and told them sometimes more, sometimes less about what they were and how I used them in my scent performances, such as Becoming Blind (as a Bat). I also gave them prompts… Read more

Image Description and the Critical Blind Gaze * NYPL Public Lecture

*As a 2023-24 Diamonstein-Spielvogal Fellow at the New York Public Library, I was asked to give a public lecture in the Vartan Gregorian Center for Research in the Humanities on March 8, 2024 called: “Image Description and the Critical Blind Gaze.” Below is the recording of the lecture—including questions from the star-studded audience!—followed by a cleaned-up transcript of my lecture… Read more

AI Describing AI * Whitney Museum * Photo/Description Journal

Thanks to Bojana Coklyat for inviting me to co-lead a verbal description tour with Art educator Paula Stuttman at the Whitney Museum on May 9! It was great fun to discuss some of the works in “Harold Cohen: AARON” with the help of Be My AI, an app for blind people powered by GPT4 that produces robust, nearly instantaneous image… Read more

New York Public Library Talk: “Image Description and the Critical Blind Gaze” – In-Person on March 8

I’m thrilled to present “Image Description and the Critical Blind Gaze” at The New York Public Library (NYPL) in-person on March 8, 2pm! Free, but please register. About the Talk Author and scholar M. Leona Godin uses photographs in the Library’s collections to explore the strange relationship between sighted photographers and blind subjects. The photography division of The Miriam and… Read more

Blindness, Disability, Accessibility, and Innovation * ACT Talk +Essay

ACT Equity Keynote, May 23, 2023 My flurry of travel speaking gigs in the spring finished with an online presentation for ACT (known for their college test). It touches on a lot of the #DownWithOcularcentrism/up with #BlindPride points I discuss in much of my writing and have been developing in recent talks, where I also incorporate storytelling techniques to keep… Read more