Art & Nature keynote speaker Jane Munro, UCSD evolutionary biologist Lin Chao, and artist and UCLA professor Victoria Vesna discuss art and nature in a conversation moderated by LAM executive director Malcolm Warner.

Included with museum admission. Advance tickets are recommended.

For questions or to purchase tickets by phone, please call 949.494.8971 x203.

Jane Munro is the Keeper of Paintings, Drawings and Prints and Acting Assistant Director of Collections at the Fitzwilliam Museum at the University of Cambridge. Her research interests and publications have focused on British and French art from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, much of it interdisciplinary in nature. She is the curator of Degas: A Passion for Perfection and has previously curated Endless Forms: Darwin, Natural Sciences and the Visual Arts and Silent Partners: Artist and Mannequin from Function to Fetish.

Lin Chao is a Chinese-Brazilian-American evolutionary biologist and geneticist. Professor Chao gained his PhD in 1977 from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, as a student of Bruce R. Levin (now at Emory University), and was an NIH postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University in the laboratory of Edward C. Cox. Before taking his present position, he spent most of his career in the Department of Biology of the University of Maryland, College Park. He is currently in the Ecology, Behavior and Evolution Section at the University of California, San Diego.

Victoria Vesna is an artist and professor at the UCLA Department of Design Media Arts and Director of the Art|Sci center at the School of the Arts and California Nanosystems Institute (CNSI). Trained as a painter (Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Belgrade, 1984), she has followed an exploratory path in work that can be defined as experimental, creative research, residing between disciplines and technologies. Her art has been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions, and she is involved in long-term collaborations with composers, nano-scientists, neuroscientists, and evolutionary biologists. Professor Vesna is currently working on a series of essays on art, science, and technology.

Malcolm Warner joined Laguna Art Museum as Executive Director in January 2012. Previously he was Deputy Director at the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas; Senior Curator of Paintings and Sculpture at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven; and Curator of European Art at the San Diego Museum of Art. He pursued both undergraduate and graduate studies at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. He received his PhD from the Courtauld in 1985. His doctoral dissertation was on the British Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais. He remains the leading authority on Millais and, as a long-term project, is preparing a catalogue raisonné of the artist’s works.