Transart MFA alum Rachel Epp Buller receives Fulbright Research Chair award

Rachel Epp Buller leading a workshop on listening and sharing knowledge through our bodies, at Flutgraben, Berlin, July 2018

Rachel Epp Buller was recently awarded a 2021-22 Fulbright Canada Research Chair in Arts and Humanities at the University of Alberta. She is spending winter/spring 2022 on site in Edmonton, in partnership with the University's Research-Creation and Social Justice CoLABoratory. Her multimodal research-creation project is titled Acts of Listening: Art and Relational Attunement.

In this project, she proposes that listening is not just an action but an orientation, a way of being in the world, a reciprocal gesture that invites being in relationship; that listening can be carried out not just with our ears but with our whole bodies as a means to forge these relational connections; and that specific artistic practices and gestures enact and facilitate this relational listening. She draws here on her training as an art historian, a visual artist, and a certified practitioner of Pauline Oliveros' Deep Listening.

This is Rachel's second Fulbright. Her first, when she was hosted as a researcher at the Akademie der Kuenste in Berlin in 2011, resulted in the first-ever retrospective exhibition and catalogue of German artist Alice Lex-Nerlinger, exhibited at Das Verborgene Museum, Berlin, in 2016.