Facilitators

Merel Visse is a Dutch-born, USA-based scholar, visual artist, educator and program strategist. Her work explores the landscapes and textures of care — intimacy, tenderness, precarity, oppression and abandonment — the things we feel but cannot fully name. Around that attention she makes spaces with others, where thinkers, artists, designers, and learners gather to stay with the difficulties and joys of everyday life. She has initiated and led grant-funded, cross-disciplinary programs with civic and academic reach. Her studio practice moves between watercolor, drawing, installation, and video — ways of getting close to what will not hold still to be named.

Most recently, together with an inspiring team, she launched a project on Apophatic Art Practice and Research. The project builds on various networks, institutional spaces, and experiences. Following her two-year term as visual arts section editor at the International Journal of Education and the Arts, Merel now serves as the co-editor at Visual Arts Research, and on various other editorial boards. Merel writes articles and books, that are somewhere out there, varying from research methodology (Researching Care With Case Studies, 2025) to articles on her Apophatic-Aesthetic Inquiry approach (Sometimes, Indirect is More Direct, 2025). Together with Dutch colleagues she prepared and founded a Ph.D. Program on Meaningful Artistic Research. With Elena Cologni, she co-leads the Art & Care Platform Series. Inge van Nistelrooij and Merel founded the Dutch Gloed Collective, an ethics-and-art training collective. Merel was an artist in residence at the NARS Foundation in Brooklyn (2018), and at the School of Visual Art in NYC (2016). Merel holds a faculty position at Drew University’s Caspersen School of Graduate Studies in the U.S.A., where she has been leading a graduate program since 2019. Before that, she spent over 10 years as a faculty member at the University of Humanistic Studies in the Netherlands, with the Care Ethics & Policy Group. Merel received her Ph.D. from VU University Amsterdam.

Ryan Woodring is an interdisciplinary media artist compelled by a bilateral relationship with invisibility wrought by chronic illness and a decade+ of visual effects experience making things disappear. His work playfully engages in cycles of rendering and refusal, bobbing at the surface of communicable experience in a post-AI landscape of hyper-classification. He recently founded the Soft Data/Base, an interactive archive compiling artist projects that generate mutable data for ineffable experience, and developed an experimental drawing workshop in conjunction with his conceptual coloring book “Sick and Tired at the Met” (Irrelevant Press 2025). Woodring has exhibited and spoken internationally in various contexts such as The Museum of the Moving Image, Rochester Art Center, Sunaparanta Goa Centre for the Arts, The International Museum of Surgical Science, Portland Biennial, and elsewhere, receiving project support from the The Andy Warhol Foundation, Regional Arts & Culture Council of Oregon, Institute of Network Cultures, and others. His work has been included in publications such as Hyperallergic, Interview Magazine, and Redefine Magazine. Woodring co-founded Prequel, a free low-residency program in Portland, Oregon and belongs to Blockbusters Video Collective, New York. He holds an MFA from Rutgers’ Mason Gross School of the Arts and serves as Assistant Teaching Professor of Digital Media at Drew University. He is a co-editor of Apophatic Art Practice & Research and associate editor of International Journal of Education & the Arts. Woodring lives and naps in Queens, NY.