Mark Allen | Machine Project | Los Angeles, USA
Mark Allen is an artist, educator and curator based in Los Angeles. He is the founder and executive director of Machine Project, a non-profit performance and installation space investigating art, technology, natural history, science, music, literature, and food in an informal storefront in the Echo Park neighbor-hood of Los Angeles. Under his direction Machine has produced shows with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, the Contemporary Art Museum St Louis, and the Walker Museum in Minneapolis. He has produced over 500 events in Los Angeles at the Machine Project storefront space, and recently concluded a year long artist residency addressing topics of public engagement at the Hammer Museum at UCLA.
He has taught at the California Institute of the Arts and the University of California San Diego, and is currently an Associate Professor of Art at Pomona College. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts in New York, and served for three years as a member of the Artist Advisory Board of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Mark received his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, following a residency with the Core Fellowship of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.

Event as site – theory and practice of curating programming
This participatory workshop focuses on the use of traditional and non-traditional exhibition spaces for the presentation of performative, experiential, social, or pedagogical art practices and events. Topics covered will include curation as an empathic process, why events are an important site for curatorial practice, and moving past a model of success and failure towards a process/experimental based methodology.