Margaret and Christine Wertheim are twin sisters, born in 1958 in Australia. Now they live and work in Los Angeles. There, in 2003, they founded the Institute for Figuring.
Margaret is an internationally noted writer, artist, and curator. Her work focuses on the relations between science and the wider cultural landscape. She is the author of six books and has written for such publications as The New York Times, Guardian, New Scientist, Washington Post.
She has designed art and science exhibits for galleries and museums worldwide. In 1990 she conceived and wrote a six-part television science series (Catalyst) for ABC Australia. Her writing is in Best American Science Writing, and Best Australian Science Writing. In 2004 she was the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Visiting Journalist to Antarctica, from which she wrote a series of articles about women scientists “on the ice” that earned her the 2006 Print Journalism Award from the American Institute of Biological Sciences. In 2016, the American Association of Physics Teachers gave her their annual award for public science communication.
Christine is a poet, performer, critic, curator, crafter, and collaborator teaching at CalArts. She has eight books, including three poetic suites: The Book of Me, mUtter-bAbel, and +|’me’S-pace—experiments in auto-biography fusing graphics and text to explore the potentialities of the English tongue. In performance these become a unique form of S(w)Ound poetry.
Her edited anthologies, Feminaissance, The n/Oulipean Analects, and Séance were produced from a series of seminal literary conferences funded by an Annenberg Foundation grant and co-produced with Matias Viegner at REDCAT and MOCA L.A. between 2004 and 2010. These gathered over 120 experimental writers from the US, Canada, and Europe to explore various themes, including, (in)-formal constraints, sex writing, 21st century feminism, communality, and collaboration in literary life.
Zoom link to attend: https://otis.zoom.us/j/92235820715.
