Photo by Rea Mucovic ©
Marko and Lisa first met at The University of Chicago in 1998 where Lisa was beginning and Marko was finishing their graduate studies.
They find common interests in Eastern spiritual and bodily practices—Lisa practices yoga and Marko practices aikido —and anthropology of the senses, visual arts and food, among other things.
They have collaborated on conference presentations and panels on art and anthropology and recently, they have travelled to Serbia and Croatia where this program was conceived.
In the Summer of 2015, we launched our first, successful month-long program with 12 willing students from the University of Alberta and Reed College.
Lisa (Ph.D in cultural anthropology, Cornell University) Lisa explores crossing cultures through art and music. Residing in Paris, France, she designs custom-made college-level cross-cultural immersion programs that incorporate alternative field methods. Drawing on an ongoing mindfulness/meditation practice, she guides students to combined embodied practice in art, and self-reflection to explore the cultural patterns that we make and that make us. Her own research uses these same techniques to learn from the music and culture of Manding griots in translocal communities between West Africa, Paris, and New York. Since 2000, Lisa has become an apprentice to a Guinean musical master by which she tuned in to the more subtle aspects of culture such as timing, flow, and ultimately the wisdom that is embedded within the Manding musical practice. She uses ethnographic film for both research and representation, and experiments in photography and oil painting, as well. A lecturer of anthropology at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, she teaches students the study of culture through an artistic lens. Lisa has also been a college-level study abroad advisor throughout Latin America, and has worked with NGOs on sustainable development in the Brazilian Amazon with the Kayapo tribe, and in small villages in Guinea and Sierra Leone. (View her work at www.lisafeder.com.)