Speakers

Invited Speakers

Alice and Burt Lefkowich Keynote Speaker:
Eric Avery, MD
For forty years Dr. Eric Avery has worked at the intersection of visual art and medicine. His social content prints explore issues such as human rights abuses, and social responses to disease (HIV and Emerging Infectious Diseases), death, sexuality and the body. In clinical art spaces set up in art museums and galleries, his art medicine actions have explored the liminal space between art and medicine. From 1992-2012, while a faculty psychiatrist at the University of Texas Medical Branch Galveston, he was a member of the Institute for Medical Humanities. He had time set aside from clinical work to make prints, and art actions that reflected his clinical work with HIV/AIDS. After retiring from UTMB in 2012, he moved to his studio in San Ygnacio Texas, on the Rio Grande? Near Laredo Texas. He continues making and exhibiting his art.

He has had numerous solo exhibitions in the United States and his prints are in many collections including: Smith College Art Museum, Baltimore Art Museum, the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, Firestone Library at Princeton University, The Library of Congress, ARS MEDICA collection Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, Philadelphia, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, Blanton Museum of Art, Austin Texas, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, Texas, The Boston Museum of Art, The National Library of Medicine, The Cushing/Whitney Medical Library at Yale University School of Medicine.

Emily Waples, PhD – Creative Nonfiction
Emily Waples is Carol C. Donley Chair of Biomedical Humanities and Director of the Center for Literature and Medicine at Hiram College. Her essays have appeared in literary journals including Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, River Teeth, Ploughshares, and Southern Humanities Review. She is also a contributing writer for the online health humanities journal Synapsis.

Beth Halasz, MFA, CMI – Medical Illustration
Beth is a graduate of the Cleveland Institute of Art with a BFA and MFA in Medical Illustration. She is a certified medical illustrator and a Professional Member of the Association of Medical Illustrators and a member of the Guild of Natural Science Illustrators. She previously worked for Cleveland Clinic as a medical illustrator prior to her position as an Associate Professor at the Cleveland Institute of Art in the Life Science Illustration program. She also maintains a studio practice in medical/scientific illustration. Outside clients include equestrian magazines, medical/scientific publishing companies and both local and national hospitals and institutions.