About the Writers

Flaudette May Datuin, PhD is Professor of Art Studies in the Department of Art Studies, College of Arts and Letters, University of the Philippines. She is the main author of Contemporary Philippine Arts from the Regions (2018, Rex Publications), which she co-wrote with three other colleagues. Datuin teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on art and society, art theory and aesthetics, art history, and art criticism. Professor Datuin wrote numerous publications in national and international publications. Her first book on Filipina Artists in the Visual Arts from the nineteenth century to the 1990s (Home, Body Memory 2002) emerged from her engagement with women artists in the Philippines and Asia. From her research on women artists in Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, South Korea and Japan (through grants from the Asian Public Intellectuals and the Asian Scholarship Foundation, Japan Foundation Asia Center, among others), she curated and organized exhibitions and forums, among them Women Imaging Women (19961997), trauma, interrupted (2006-2007), and Nothing to Declare (2010-2011).

Her current research and pedagogical interests include gender issues in the arts, art and ecology, and art and healing. In her most recent writings and engagements she has been veering towards interdisciplinary method and pedagogy. As scholar in residence in LaSalle-SIA, Singapore, and through her keynote addresses at the University of Sydney and University of Melbourne in 2019, she brought into the masters classes and public addresses problems of art historical methods and how art history, criticism, and curation can contribute and respond to broader and urgent concerns, where the earth – as seen in the ongoing health and ecological crises – is reaching, if not already at, its tipping point in the context of environmental disequilibria on a planetary scale. •

Felipe M. de Leon Jr, PhD obtained his AB Humanities degree, cum laude, at the University of the Philippines in 1969, and later pursued graduate studies in music theory and composition in the same university. He served as Chair of the Department of Humanities of UP Diliman from 1976-82. He was elected President of the Pambansang Samahan sa Sikolohiyang Pilipino in 1985-86. His interest in Philippine culture, especially the indigenous, is widely recognized. He became the head of the Subcommission for Cultural Communities and Traditional Arts of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA), 1992-98, and later the head of the Subcommission for the Arts for several terms. Consequently, he was elected Chair of the NCCA for two consecutive terms from 2011-2016. He finished his doctoral studies in applied cosmic anthropology at the Asian Social Institute, where he currently teaches social transformation courses.

He served as Commissioner of UNESCO Philippines, 1999–2002, and Chair of its Committee on Culture, 2002. He was Vice