Speaker Bios

Andrea Bandelli

Executive Director & Diplomat-in-chief,
Science Gallery International

Andrea Bandelli is the Executive Director and diplomat in chief of SGI, where he manages the relationships with all network members and external stakeholders. A keen listener and an experienced speaker, Andrea is responsible for developing and implementing the network culture of Science Gallery. A world citizen by trade, Andrea's academic background includes a MA in Economics, a master in Science Communication and a PhD in Social Sciences, with a specialization in scientific citizenship. Andrea is a member of the Expert Network of the World Economic Forum and has been a Cultural Leader in Davos in 2017 and 2018, and in Dalian in 2017 and 2019. He is a member of the board of the Deutsches Museum in Munich, of the scientific board of Universcience in Paris and of the scientific advisory board of the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research at the University of Copenhagen. In his career spanning 25 years he has worked for several public and private organizations, including science museums, government organizations and universities across Europe, USA, South Africa and Brazil, leading some of the most innovative projects on science, art, democracy and public participation. He has published two books and several academic and popular articles on public engagement with science and technology.

Monique Verdin

Interdisciplinary Storyteller

Monique Verdin is an interdisciplinary storyteller who documents the complex relationship between environment, culture, and climate in southeast Louisiana. She is a citizen of the Houma Nation, director of The Land Memory Bank & Seed Exchange and a member of the Another Gulf Is Possible Collaborative, working to envision just economies, vibrant communities, and sustainable ecologies. Monique is supporting a network of indigenous gardeners, the Okla Hina Ikhish Hola (Sacred Medicine Trail), as the Gulf South food and medicine sovereignty program manager, supported by the Women's Indigenous Climate Action Network. She is co-producer of the documentary My Louisiana Love and her work has been included in a variety of environmentally inspired projects, including the multiplatform performance Cry You One, Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas, and the collaborative book Return to Yakni Chitto: Houma Migrations.

Michael G. Bennett

Director, Student Experiential Immersion Programs at Discovery Partners Institute, University of Illinois at Chicago

Dr. Michael Bennett serves as DPI’s Director of Student Experiential Learning Programs. In this capacity he is responsible for directing and overseeing DPI’s growing portfolio of formal academic and informal learning programs, and leading a team that implements and manages them. Dr. Bennett is also focused on developing and maintaining relationships with Chicago-based employers in which those programs are based.

Dr. Bennett has extensive experience in curriculum development, with a particular emphasis on innovation policy, art law, anticipatory governance and future scenarios, Afrofuturism, intellectual property law and policy, and science and technology policy. He is a regular keynote speaker across these domains.

He has been a professor for 15 years, having taught and conducted research in engineering, business management, public policy, law and social science units at University of Michigan, Michigan Technological University, Vassar College and Northeastern University. From 2015 until 2021 he worked as a Research Professor in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society, and in the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University. In this role his pedagogic research and consultations furthered the missions of several federal and state agencies, NGOs, and Fortune 500 companies.

Dr. Bennett has practiced law for more than two decades, focusing primarily on intellectual property acquisition, valuation and transactions. He is also an expert in right of publicity laws, particularly as regards public/political figures, athletes and the deceased. He regularly provides expert commentary on legal controversies and has been featured in The New York Times, Bloomberg Business Week, The Financial Times, USA Today, The Guardian, Le Figaro, as well on BBC Radio and various NPR affiliates.

From 2018 until 2021, he served as Arts and Culture Commissioner for the city of Tempe, Arizona. Since 2013 he has been the President of The Society for the Studies of New and Emerging Technologies, an international organization focused on the societal and ethical implication of technological development. He also sits on the board of Leonardo: The International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology.

Lisa Margonelli

Editor-in-chief, Issues in Science and Technology
Intersections 2021 Moderator

Lisa Margonelli is editor-in-chief at Issues in Science and Technology, a quarterly journal that is a partnership between the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and Arizona State University. She has written two books: Oil on the Brain: Petroleum's Long, Strange Trip to Your Tank and Underbug: An Obsessive Tale of Termites and Technology.

Radio Healer

Xicana/o & Native American-led collective

Radio Healer is a Xicana/o and Native American led collective founded in Phoenix, Arizona. The collective includes Edgar Cardenas, Raven Kemp, Cristóbal Martínez, and Mere Martinez. As a group, these artist-hackers create indigenous electronic tools, which they use with traditional indigenous tools to perform indigenous reimagined ceremony. Through their immersive environments, comprised of moving images, tools, regalia, performance, and sound, the collective bends media to position visual and sonic metaphors that de-familiarize the "ordinary."

Radio Healer is particularly interested in the taken for granted semiotic systems that, when observed, become irrational, inefficient, deceptive, and contradictory. These systems encode assumptions, ideologies in discourses, and dilemmas that concretize the cultural systems that help shape perceptions of reality. Radio Healer's goals are to disrupt these perceptions by creating environments that provide audiences with opportunities to engage in a heightened sense of criticality about the systems we create, maintain, and adapt. The collective strives to catalyze public discourse, and demonstrate self-determination through an indigenous knowledge systems approach to the designs and uses of their hacked tools. Radio Healer performs their tools to encourage the social transformation of semiotic systems in terms of their functions and meanings. With these goals in mind, Radio Healer stages futurist propositions during which audiences are invited to reflect on human exigencies and dilemmas tied to obsolescence, acceleration, warfare, borders, mass surveillance, land use, cybernetics, market systems, historical amnesia, hi-velocity global multi-nodal networks, and the trans-mediated market valorization of human bodies.

Radio Healer is the recipient of the 2016-2017 Arizona Commission for The Arts, Artist Research and Development Grant, and is a former project in residence at the Pueblo Grande Museum in Phoenix, Arizona. Radio Healer has performed throughout North America, in Australia, and in Namibia.

Radio Healer acknowledges the important contributions of previous collaborators: Devin Armstrong-Best, Ashya Flint, Randy Kemp, Rykelle Kemp, Melissa S. Rex, Sam Anderson, Robert Esler, Fabio Fernandes, Joe French, J.C. Golding, Zarco Guerrero, Byron Lahey, Fernando Lino, Aileen Mapes, Ryan McFadden, Jessica Mumford, Stjepan Rajko, Janie Ross, Maritza Montiel Tafur, Lisa Tolentino, Monty Walters, and mac n. zie.