Lead Researchers

Patty Chang is a Los Angeles based artist and educator who uses performance, video, installation and narrative forms when considering identity, gender, transnationalism, colonial legacies, the environment, large-scale infrastructural projects and impacted subjectivities. Her museum exhibition and book The Wandering Lake investigates the landscapes impacted by large scale human-engineered water projects such as the Soviet mission to irrigate the waters from the Aral Sea, as well as the longest aqueduct in the world, the North to South Water Diversion Project in China. Her most recent multichannel video project Milk Debt combines the act of lactation with people’s unspoken fears. Her work has been exhibited nationwide and internationally. She teaches at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA.

Aleksija Neimanis is a veterinary pathologist and researcher who works with wildlife health and disease surveillance at the National Veterinary Institute (SVA), Sweden. She frames wildlife health findings within a One Health context, in which human, animal and ecosystem health are all connected, to help inform policy.

Astrida Neimanis is a feminist cultural theorist. Her research focuses on human-water relationships, and climate catastrophe as a symptom of corrupted social and cultural relations. She is currently Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Feminist Environmental Humanities at UBC Okanagan, on the unceded lands of the syilx okanagan people. Her most recent book is Bodies of Water (2017).