Laurie Margot Ross
Laurie Margot Ross is the founder and director of Glocal Matters—a research and curatorial firm in the Catskills dedicated to visual culture and emotions at the intersection of religion and performance. Laurie is the author of The Encoded Cirebon Mask: Materiality, Flow, and Meaning along Java’s Islamic Northwest Coast (Brill 2016). She is working on her second book, Embodied Objects, which explores how agentive, religious objects are translated into emotion in Muslim Southeast Asia and West Africa. Both book projects were generously supported by Transregional grants from the Social Science Research Council (SSRC). Other awards include Fulbright IIE; Fulbright-Hays; the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV); and the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). She has also held fellowships through Cornell University (SEAP) and the Yale InterAsia Institute. Dr. Ross is delighted to offer cross-cultural empathy-building workshops to educators, therapists, and students who incorporate masks.