Arnas Anskaitis, doctoral candidate
Arnas Anskaitis is a Vilnius based artist and researcher. He is interested in reading as an artistic practice, and the visual, spatial and temporal nature of text as an inscription. In his practice and research, Anskaitis tries to draw attention to the physical and mental experiences of reading and writing ‘in space’, a physical dimension that both mind and body can grasp and perceive. Anskaitis engages with a variety of media, including installation, performance, moving image, and photography. He is a lecturer in the Photography and Media Art department, Vilnius Academy of Arts, and a doctoral candidate in Fine Art at Vilnius Academy of Arts.
Prof. Alvydas Lukys
Alvydas Lukys was born in 1958 in Šiauliai. In 1984 m. graduated from Vilnius Engineering Construction Institute (now Vilnius Gediminas University of Technologies). From 1984 he is a member of Lithuanian Photoartists’ Union. From 1990 worked in Vilnius Academy of Arts, Graphics Department, Photo Studio, later he became the Head of Image Studio. He is one the founders of Image Studio and later Photography and Video Arts Department (now of Photography and Media Arts Department). Currently Lukys leads the Department and is a Full Professor. Alvydas Lukys participates in photography exhibitions from 1978. He participated in a number of group exhibitions both in Lithuania and abroad. Alvydas Lukys’ works were acquired by Lithuanian Museum of Arts, Lithuanian Photoartists’ Union, Odense Museum of Photography Arts, Denmark, Corcoran Centre of Photography, Washington and a number of private hobbyists.
Irma Stanaitytė
Irma Stanaitytė (b. 1972 in Klaipėda) is lecturer at the department of Photography and Media Arts at Vilnius Academy of Arts in Lithuania. She specialize in the field of audio-visual and interdisciplinary arts. Since 1997 she have participated in numerous exhibitions, audio-visual art and film festivals, artist residencies and creative workshops in Lithuania and abroad. Irma's professional areas of interest are creative self-expression, interaction between an artist and an authority, personal identity in different socio-cultural circumstances, relationship between idealism (ideology) and reality (history).
Prof. Artūras Raila
Artūras Raila was born in 1962 in Rainaičiai (Panevėžys region). He lives and works in Vilnius, where he teaches at Photography and media department of Vilnius Academy of Fine Art. After graduating from the Sculpture department of Vilnius Academy of Fine Art in 1989, Artūras Raila changed his artistic direction towards objects, installations, video and performances. The tactics of social sculpture/social design are characteristic to the artistic practice of Artūras Raila. In his projects he closely collaborates with specific social groups or sub-cultures, integrating them into the script of his forthcoming work and also leaving the space for unexpected occurrences. A.Raila‘s works are linked to the discourses of institutional critique and national identity. The artist integrates social reality into the field of art thus eliminating the boundaries between art and life.
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Vytautas Michelkevičius
Vytautas Michelkevičius is a is a curator, researcher and associate professor whose focus was gradually shifting from photography in the expanded field to media art & theory and lately to artistic research in academia and beyond. He is teaching art practice & theory BA, MA and DA/PhD students and is Head of Photography and Media Art Department as well as Doctoral Programme in Fine Arts in Vilnius Academy of Arts. He has served as artistic director of Nida Art Colony (2010-2019). He has curated exhibitions of artistic research in various situations, among them Lithuanian Pavilion in 56th Venice Biennale (2015) with Dainius Liškevičius project "Museum".
He holds a PhD in Communication and Media studies from Vilnius University. He has undertaken fellowships at the University of Vienna (Austria) and the Academy of Media Arts Cologne (Germany). He is working with art and media projects and is interested in socializing through art, interdisciplinarity between art and research, experimental teaching, and participatory curatorial practices.
Vytautas Michelkevičius has authored or edited more than 20 catalogues and books on media theory, art and photography. Michelkevičius co-edited the following publications: Atlas of Diagrammatic Imagination (VDA, 2019) withLina Michelkevičė, Mapping Lithuanian Photography: Histories and Archives (Mene, 2007) with Agnė Narušytė and Lina Michelkevičė, (In)dependent Contemporary Art Histories: Artist-run Initiatives in Lithuania 1987-2011 (Lithuanian Interdisciplinary Artists’ Association, 2011) with Kęstutis Šapoka and Generation of the Place: Image, Memory and Fiction in the Baltics (Mene, 2011), and curated the exhibition of the same name at Tallinn Exhibition Hall (Estonia) in 2011. In 2005–2009 he was the editor-in-chief of the online media culture journal Balsas.cc.
He is a member of Society of Artistic Research (SAR) and a member of scientific editorial board of peer-reviewed journal “Acoustic Space” (RIXC and Liepaja University, LV).
assoc. prof. Laura Gudaitė
Laura Stasiulytė Gudaitė lives and works in Vilnius. Studied in Photography and Media Arts Department Vilnius Academy of Arts and Institut d´Art Visuels d’Orleans. Since 2012 Stasiulytė is teaching in Photography and Media Arts Department at Vilnius Academy of Arts.
Artist’s work primarily focused on the meanings of language, time and location. Issues of memory, collisions of the past and the present, media and education are apparent in most of the artist’s works. The artist combines diverse media in her works: video, slide projections, photography, sound recordings, texts, and drawings.
Her recent projects and exhibitions include: “Scattered and selected”, Galleri 54, Gothenburg, Sweden; Festival “Jauna Muzika”, Arts Print house, Vilnius; “The Origin of Species: 1990s DNA”, MO museum, Vilnius; “Unimaginable things”, A Selection of early Lithuanian Video art, Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius; Project Space “Montos tattoo”, Rodney Graham&Laura Stasiulytė, Vilnius; A Selection of Lithuanian Video art from the 1990s, Kumu, Art Museum of Estonia, Tallinn; “Life as a stuffed weapon”, NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART, Vilnius; “Heritage 3: Nomadic codes”, Kunstmuseum Thun, Switzerland.
Jurij Dobriakov, PhD candidate
Jurij Dobriakov (b. 1983) is a researcher of contemporary culture, curator, critic, essayist and translator. He has taught courses in cultural studies, media studies, visual communication and writing at Vilnius Academy of Arts and other schools. Publishes various critical texts and essays in Lithuanian and international cultural publications and exhibition books, regularly takes parts in international conferences and symposiums, and has curated several exhibitions, including a retrospective of Lithuanian media art titled ‘Remediation’ (as part of the 10th Centras festival of media art and music in Kaunas, Lithuania). He has published a collection of his essays and critical texts titled ‘Normal Anomalies’ (Vilnius: NoRoutine Books, 2017). Member of the Lithuanian Interdisciplinary Artists’ Association since 2016, member of AICA Lithuanian section since 2019. His PhD thesis in Art Criticism focuses on the rise and decline of the Lithuanian media art discourse in the 2000s.
