CIRCA Catalyst: Joan Kelly, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and Renée Lambert-Bretière, UMBC
Wednesday, October 10, 12 p.m.
216 Performing Arts and Humanities Building (Dresher Center Conference Room)

UMBC's Center for Innovation, Research and Creativity in the Arts (CIRCA) showcases the work of Joan Marie Kelly, Nanyang Technological University, School of Art Design and Media, and Renée Lambert-Brétière, assistant professor of linguistics and French at UMBC.

Joan Marie Kelly, Nanyang Technological University, School of Art Design and Media, is a practicing artist, exhibiting and publishing internationally. Her creative work emanates from ethnographical practices such as “fieldwork”. She is a social art practitioner implementing participatory art workshops since 2009 with sex workers in Kolkata India as the founder of ‘The Kolkata Women’s Dialogue.’ She works to sustain endangered languages with three linguists, Lauren Gawne, Alexander Coupe and Frantisek Kratochvil. In each linguist’s focus area she creates artistic engagement with members of the host communities. The focus of the workshops is to expose and gain understanding of visual iconography embedded in the culture of the host community. Kelly teaches at Nanyang Technological University, School of Art Design and Media in Singapore, since 2005.

Renée Lambert-Brétière is assistant professor of linguistics and French at UMBC. Her research focus is on the relationship between language and culture, and on fieldwork-based documentation and description of lesser-known languages, from a typological discourse-based functional and cognitive linguistics perspective. She works on languages exhibiting very different typological profile, ranging from a mildly agglutinative language where meaning plays a large role in the grammar (Kwoma, East Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea), to a polysynthetic language exhibiting an intricate morphological system (Innu, Northeastern Quebec and Labrador in Canada), to an isolating language making use of complex syntactic constructions (Fon, Republic of Benin), and to languages formed by the contact between West-African languages and European languages (Caribbean Creoles).