People
Seth Brodsky
Director
executive Editor, Portable Gray
Seth Brodsky is Associate Professor of Music and the Humanities at the University of Chicago. He is the author of From 1989, or European Music and the Modernist Unconscious, and is currently at work on a book tentatively titled Drive, A Musical Theory, about music and the legacy of the Freudian concept of “death drive.”
Brodsky’s scholarly and critical work pursues several lines of inquiry, generally clustered around “unconscious problems”—ideology, fantasy, influence and reception, libidinal economy, etc.—and the peculiar role music and sound play in their operations. Past work has centered on modernism and western classical music, exploring how musical modernism’s endeavors in ending and beginning engender structural cycles of repetition and inversion: traversals of (old) fantasies transform (repeatedly) into (new) fantasies of traversal. Related work on Benjamin Britten, John Cage, Wolfgang Rihm, and Arnold Schoenberg expands on these questions of tradition and what Freud called “family romance.” How does music interweave love and hate, and how are musical forms of inheritance especially effective at encoding ambivalence, the contradictory desire to fuse and to separate? Brodsky earned his PhD from the Eastman School of Music, and his BA from Wake Forest University.
To read Seth Brodsky’s faculty bio please visit here
Zachary Cahill
Director of Programs and Fellowships,
Editor In Chief, Portable Gray
As Director of Programs and Fellowships, Zachary Cahill, brings an artistic sensibility to all of his work at the Gray Center. Since joining the Gray Center in 2016, Cahill has helped produce innovative fellowships, projects, and programs to enliven and invigorate the space where scholarship and the arts meet. Cahill subscribes to an institutional ethic that posits in order for institutions to ask artists and scholars to be experimental in their approach, that they themselves must be dynamic and innovative and not conform to self-imposed rigid standardization. This work is exemplified by the Gray Center’s Fellowships, SIDEBAR conversation series, and projects. In 2018, Cahill founded the center’s biannual journal, Portable Gray, and serves as its Editor in Chief. Published by the University of Chicago Press, Portable Gray shares with the larger public the work of our fellows as well as presenting a space for others to experiment with the center. Curatorial exhibition projects at the Gray Center with Mike Schuh have included Another Idea: an actual conceptual art exhibition (2020), The Busan Biennale: The Chicago Chapter (2021) and Stephanie Cristello, ON DRAWING DRAWING ON: Ten Years of Fellowship at the Gray Center (2022), and vanessa german Gray Center Fellowship Exhibition and Stephanie Cristello (2024).
Prior to joining the Gray Center, Cahill helped found and run the Open Practice Committee in the Department of Visual Arts from 2007 to 2016 (with Tania Bruguera, Susanne Ghez, Matthew Jesse Jackson, and Stephanie Smith). He also served as a Lecturer developing experimental arts pedagogy through the Open Practice Committee, working with many leading voices in contemporary art including: Theaster Gates, Cauleen Smith, Hans Haacke, Ken Lum, Jan Verwoert, Pierre Huyghe, Susan Hiller, Tony Cokes, Our Literal Speed, Tania Bruguera, Pope.L, Charles Ray, and many others. He has also curated a number of other exhibitions at the University of Chicago including Revolution Every Day at the Smart Museum of Art with Robert Bird and Christina Kiaer in 2017, Wall Text with Monika Szewczyk (2012), Lands End with Katherine Harvath (2015) both at the Logan Center for the Arts.
As a practicing artist Cahill has worked for more than a decade on the USSA, a proposition for a country that uses exhibitionary form as a meditation on nation-state infrastructure and propaganda. In recent years his work has taken a decisive turn towards the genres of fantasy and fairytales. His art has been featured in the Berlin Biennale; Regina Rex; Contemporary Art Brussels, the Chicago Cultural Center, Neubauer Collegium Exhibitions, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, among others. Cahill has been featured in Art Reviews Future Greats issue and was included in the contemporary art survey, The Artist Who Will Change the World published by Thames and Hudson. The Black Flame of Paradise, his first novel, was released by Mousse Publishing in 2018, and features a preface by philosopher Catherine Malabou. In 2021, he self-published the graphic novel, Unicorn Death Road Trip Buddy Movie. Cahill has written two books of poetry Unicorn Death Moon Day Planner (2023) and Unicorn Death Moon Paris Guidebook (2024) both published by Red Ogre Review. He has served as an editor of the contemporary art journal Afterall, and has published his writings in Afterall, Artforum, The Brooklyn Rail, Critical Inquiry, the Journal of Visual Culture, Frieze, Mousse, among other publications. Cahill earned his BFA from Cornell University and his MFA from the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago.
Mike Schuh
Associate Director, Fellowships and Operations
Senior editor, Portable gray
As Associate Director, Mike Schuh is involved in every layer of the Gray Center, with a particular focus on actualizing projects and programs with our various collaborators. Recently, Schuh has been responsible for initiating the Gray Center’s forays into skateboarding through events, journal contributions, and our fellowship program.
In addition to his work with the Gray Center, Schuh is co-founder of Regards, a contemporary art gallery in Chicago known for supporting challenging and under-recognized artists, and has worked in exhibition planning and archiving at Susanne Veilmetter Los Angeles Projects, and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. As an artist, he has participated in exhibitions, screenings, and events across the United States.
Schuh earned his BFA at Syracuse University in 2001 and his MFA at the University of Chicago in Visual Art in 2009.
Naomi Blumberg
Associate Director, Gray Center Co-Laboratory for Arts and Science
Managing Editor, Portable Gray
Naomi Blumberg is the Managing Editor of Portable Gray and Associate Director of the Arts, Science + Culture Initiative. Before coming to UChicago, Blumberg was an editor of arts and culture at Encyclopaedia Britannica, following many years working as a curator and publications manager at art and history museums including the Chicago History Museum, the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, and the McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College. She holds a BA from Barnard College in Art History, a master’s from Tufts University in Art History and Museum Studies, and a master’s in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Desiree Foerster
Director, Gray Center Co-Laboratory for Arts and Science
Desiree Foerster studies new media arts and design from a process-relational and critical phenomenology perspective. She is a Senior Research Associate in the Cinema and Media Studies department at the University of Chicago and the director of the Art, Science and Culture Initiative. Previously, Foerster was an Assistant Professor for Digital Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University. She did her PhD at the Institute for Arts and Media at the University of Potsdam with her thesis “Aesthetic Experience of Metabolic Processes” and she holds additional degrees in Media Culture Analysis from Duesseldorf (MA) and Comparative Literature and Philosophy (BA) from Bochum. She regularly collaborates with colleagues from the arts and science on projects of research-creation.
Gray Center Leadership History
Seth Brodsky
Director (2019-present)
executive Editor, Portable Gray (2018-present)
Interim Director (2018-2019)
Leah Feldman
Interim Director (2024-2025)
executive Editor, Portable Gray (2024-2025)
Ghenwa Hayek
Interim Director (2020-2021)
executive Editor, Portable Gray (2020-2021)
Jacqueline Stewart
Director (2016-2019), Interim Director (2015-2016)
executive Editor, Portable Gray (2018-2019)
David Levin
Founding Director (2011-2016)
Leslie Buxbaum
Curator (2011-2016)
Advisory Council
The Gray Center Advisory Council is made up of faculty and staff members selected by the Director of the Gray Center and appointed for two- and three-year terms by the Office of the Provost. The Council advises on curatorial decisions, programming, and devising strategies for achieving the Gray Center mission.