Contributors

Brenda Farnell is associate professor of Socio-cultural and Linguistic anthropology and American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests include multimedia ethnography, ethnopoetics and performance, Plains Indian sign language (Nakota/Assiniboine and Kiowa) in the context of language revitalization, dances of the Northern Plains, discourse, movement literacy, and problems in social theory and embodiment. She is the author of Do You See What I Mean?: Plains Indian Sign Talk and the Embodiment of Action (Texas 1995, pb Nebraska 2009) and the award-winning CD-ROM Wiyuta: Assiniboine Storytelling with Signs. Current research involves a collaborative project with Robert Wood Dance-New York Inc. on the choreographic process and relationships between speech and movement in the making of contemporary concert-dance work. Recent papers include “Choreography as Live Theoretical Practice” (with Robert Wood), Proceedings of the Society of Dance History Scholars (2007) and “The Second Somatic Revolution” (with Charles Varela), Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior (2008). Dr. Farnell is active in applying anthropological knowledge to issues of social justice and human rights and serves on the Committee on Minority Issues in Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association.

Gina Lalli was born in Binghamton, New York, during the Great Depression. She is an outstanding performer of two idioms of Indian dancing, who began her studies of Indian dancing, language, and music in New York City when she was eighteen. She worked with several teachers in the New York before her first of several trips to India to study in 1955–56. While there, she worked with Chokkalingam Pillai, who taught her a three-hour-long dance suite, subsequently performed at Carnegie Recital Hall in her American debut in 1958. Performance debuts (Bharata Natyam) in India took place in New Delhi, May 1968; in Bombay, June 1968; and in Calcutta, September 1968. She presently resides in Austin, Texas, where she has lived, taught, and performed since 1971. She was recently given the Austin “Critic’s Table Award,” placing her in the Austin Arts Hall of Fame, honoring a chosen few who have made lifetime contributions to Austin’s civic, artistic, and social life.

Richard Stanley-Baker (BA Oxon, MFA and PhD Princeton), a specialist of medieval Japanese ink painting, has written primarily on the interrelationship of Japanese ink painting with Song to Ming painting. He has taught as a visitor at U.C. Berkeley (1975), Stanford (1980), and Princeton (1999–2000). He also taught at the University of Victoria, BC, and National Taiwan University, and from 1985 to 2005 at the University of Hong Kong, where he was head of department for five years. He was the first foreign scholar to teach Japanese art history at the University of Tokyo, as professor, in 1995–96. He has published numerous articles on fifteenth-century Japanese ink painting. His research interests include medieval Japanese narrative painting and narratology and comparative approaches to the literary gardens of Japan; he is chief editor and contributor to a forthcoming book Reading The Tale of Genji: Its Picture Scrolls, Texts and Romance (Folkestone: Global Oriental, 2009). He has written on Japanese medieval gardens: “Mythic and Sacred Gardens in Medieval Japan: Sacral Mediation in the Rokuonji and Saihôji Gardens,” in Sacred Gardens and Landscapes: Ritual and Agency, Studies in Landscape Architecture (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2007) and has published numerous conference papers in Japan, both at the National Institute of Art Research (Tokyo) and at international conferences, Society for International Exchange of Art Historical Studies, headed by Prof. Shimada Shûjirô. He has written a definitive article on the fifteenth-century Japanese painter Bunsei, criticizing attempts to make this painter a Korean, in the journal Kokka. His lead article, “Japanese Ink Painting of the Muromachi Period,” appears in the Grove Encyclopedia of Art (34 vols., 1996). His works on semiotics in Muromachi studies appears in an article translated into Japanese (“Muromachi Mansion Décor and Cultural Hegemony”) in Kodansha’s Complete Collectanea on Japanese Art (22 vols., 1993).