WHO WE ARE:

Dan Borelli, Artist and Lecturer/Director of Exhibitions at
Harvard University Graduate School of Design
danborellistudio@gmail.com

Dan Borelli is an Artist and Director of Exhibitions at Harvard University, Graduate School of Design (GSD). His art practice focuses on environmental justice, contaminated communities, and how research-based art can address shared traumas. His current project, 'Unfriending the Atom' started in 2021, is an ongoing collaboration with the scientist Marco Kaltofen. This project makes public the material samples from Marco's field science and places them in a graphic communication system that accurately conveys the exotic radioactive data that he finds from the mundane objects associated with the various productions of nuclear materials, either in energy or weaponry. His long-range and socially-engaged artwork ”Illuminating Futures: Ashland and Nyanza” makes public hidden narratives of cancer clusters, human loss, activism, and ultimately regeneration surrounding one of the first Superfund sites in the United States, and received funding from ArtPlace America, the National Endowment of the Arts, Harvard's Initiative in Learning Technology, and an ongoing collaboration with the Laborers Union New England Training Academy. Additionally, he gives guests lectures, public talks, and keynotes at a variety of venues such as RISD, MassArt, Arizona State University, the US Water Alliance, the National Park Service, Drexel University and Senator Patrick Leahy's Center for the Environment.

Dr. Kaltofen is a licensed Massachusetts civil engineer who specializes in environmental investigations involving chemical, petroleum and nuclear accidents and releases. If you have lost something radioactive, Dr. Kaltofen is the forensic engineer you would hire to find it; ditto if you have found something radioactive and need to know where it came from. He graduated from Boston University (general engineering and chemistry) and also graduated from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in 2015, with an MS in Environmental Engineering and PhD in Civil Engineering. His research publications are primarily in the field of forensic nuclear science, with a focus on Environmental Justice issues and Nuclear Nonproliferation.

Marco Kaltofen is a bilingual Indonesian-American immigrant who has studied industrial accidents and natural disasters including Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the Fukushima meltdowns in Japan, war-driven petroleum spills in Iraq, an oil-contaminated scientific base in Antarctica, radioactively-contaminated wildlife from Chernobyl, and nuclear reactor complexes ravaged by wildfire in Santa Susana near Los Angeles, CA; Hanford in Washington, and Los Alamos in New Mexico.