Titles

• Affiliate Global Futures Scholar, Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory

Biography

Meredith Drum uses a range of new and old media to produce documentaries, experimental fictions, cinematic installations, walking tours, visually rich locative media, place-based public projects and community cookbooks. Her toolbox includes digital video; 8mm film; 2D and 3D computer animation; a range of printing processes, mobile technology and a variety of programming languages. Her artistic work is based in her wide-ranging research into cinema studies, feminism, urban planning, historical concepts of American wilderness, critical theory, Marxism, environmental justice, psychogeography, corporeality and visuality, place-based pedagogy, and somatic and haptic experiences across digital/non-digital spaces. Meredith exhibits her work nationally and internationally - in New York City, Dubai, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Brighton (UK), Paris, Copenhagen, and Valencia (ES), among other cities. Her work has been supported by grants, fellowships and residencies that include the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (2015); iLand (2015); the Wassaic Project (2014); NY State Council on the Arts and Wavefarm (2012); HASTAC at Duke University (2011); and the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts (2010). Her writing and video journalism has been published by Media-N Journal, 2012; AR(t) Magazine, 2013; and the NYTimes, 2008. She collaborates with NYC-based artist Rachel Stevens on the Oyster City Project - a constellation of projects and events that playfully reveal relationships between social, economic and ecological systems. Ongoing and past Oyster City initiatives include the following. In 2015 Oyster City was invited by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council to participate in Paths to Pier 42 for which they compiled and produced Fish Stories Community Cookbook - a collection of seafood recipes, local histories, stories, drawings and ecological information contributed by people who live and work in the Lower East Side. The Oyster City app (2011-ongoing) is an AR walking tour and game, featuring 3D objects and text in real space visible with an iOS device, which highlights the history and future of oysters in NYC. Participating in Urban Backstage and Embodied Mapping (2015), supported by LMCC and iLand, Oyster City worked collaboratively with other artists, dancers, urban designers and architects, using place-based movement research models developed by Jennifer Monson, to engage residents in conversations about the future of the Lower East Side in relation to predicted flooding.

Education

• MFA, Digital Arts and New Media, University of California-Santa Cruz, 2011
• MA, English Literature, Middebury College, 2002
• BA, English Literature, Guilford College, 1992

Expertise

• environmental justice
• urban planning
• feminism
• critical theory
• historical concepts of American wilderness
• cinema studies
• Life Below Water
• Gender Equality
• Affordable and Clean Energy
• Sustainable Cities and Communities
• Life on Land
• Climate Action
• Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions
• Partnerships for the Goals