Artist Response to Coal Transitions

Siobhan Angus works at the intersections of art history, media studies, and the environmental humanities. Her current research explores the visual culture of resource extraction with a focus on materiality, labor, and environmental justice. She is an assistant professor of media studies at Carleton University and holds a PhD in art history and visual culture from York University, where her dissertation was awarded the Governor General’s Gold Medal. Prior to joining Carleton, Angus was the Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University. She is the author of Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography (Duke University Press, 2024), and her research has been published in Capitalism and the Camera (Verso, 2021) and October. At the heart of her research program lies an intellectual and political commitment to environmental, economic, and social justice.  

Jonas N.T. Becker has exhibited internationally, including the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; FotoFocus Biennial at the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati; the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago; Craft Contemporary in Los Angeles; and Lancaster Museum of Art and History in Lancaster, California. Awards include the Magnum Foundation Counter Histories Fellowship (2022–23); Lucas Artist Residency Fellowship at Montalvo Art Center, Saratoga, California, (2016–19); Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art, Switzerland (2015); and Six Points Fellowship (2011–13). Becker is a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a 2023–24 Global Arts and Humanities Discovery Theme External Fellow at Ohio State. They live and work between West Virginia and Chicago.

The daughter of a teacher and an engineer, Anne Cornell is a conceptual artist rooted in education and innovation. Her humanities studies at Kenyon College, training as a pianist in Germany, and decades of plein-air and studio figure drawing inform her current civic practice. Cornell considers people to be her most important medium and her community as a studio. By meeting people where they are and using local, at-hand (or found) materials, her works give voice to a particular culture. Her processes compound native ingenuity and possibility. She has directed the Pomerene Center for the Arts in Coshocton, Ohio, since 2000.

Tom Dugdale is a director, writer, and associate professor of theater, film, and media arts at Ohio State. He has developed many community-engaged productions, including Calling Hours: A Theatrical Memorial for a Deceased Power Plant with residents of Coshocton, Ohio; Into the Void, a journey into space and black holes with Central Ohio Symphony; and My Whole Life Changed, a documentary film with high school students about the challenges they faced during the COVID-19 pandemic. Dugdale is the author of Directing Your Heart Out: Essays for Authenticity, Engagement, and Care in Theatre, published by Bloomsbury/Methuen Drama.

Julie Rae Powers is an artist and writer from West Virginia and Virginia. They come from a working-class family of homemakers, teachers, coal miners, and railroad laborers. Their photographic and written work has focused on family history, coal, Appalachia, and queerness.