Female Mysteries of the Substratum
Rila Monastery, Bulgaria
June 7-12, 2004
Bios of Presenters
Cristina Biaggi, Ph.D. earned her doctorate in Art and Philosophy at New York University and is an internationally known sculptor and multi-media visual artist who has lectured widely on the art and cultures of prehistoric Europe. She is the author of Habitations of the Great Goddess (1994) and In the Footsteps of the Goddess (2000). Her articles include, “The Significance of the Nudity, Obesity and Sexuality of the Maltese Goddess Figure” in Archaeology and Fertility Cult in the Ancient Mediterranean, A. Bonanno, ed. (1986); “The Priestess Figure of Malta” in The Meaning of Things, Material Culture and Symbolic Expression, Ian Hodder, ed. (1989); and “Temple-Tombs and Sculptures in the Shape of the Body of the Great Goddess,” in From the Realm of the Ancestors: An Anthology in Honor of Marija Gimbutas, J. Marler, ed. (1997). She is also a pilot, scuba diver, photographer, costume and set designer, mountain climber (with Mount Kilimanjaro and Mount Acongagua to her credit), and a Fourth Degree Black Belt in the Korean martial art of Tae Kwan Do.
Glenda Cloughley, is a Jungian analyst and psychotherapist in private practice in Canberra, Australia. She has a long standing interest in mythology and the relevance in culture of Jungian thought, as reflected in her post-graduate studies the field of Social Ecology. She teaches postgraduate students in Cultural Psychology (Jungian Studies) at the University of Western Sydney, is a consultant on mythology and archetypal process to artists and arts organizations, and is a founding member of A Chorus of Women.
Mary Condren, Ph.D., is Director of the Institute for Feminism and Religion in Ireland, and is Research Associate with the Centre for Gender and Women’s Studies, Trinity College, Dublin. She earned her Doctorate in Theology at Harvard Divinity School, and has lectured in Gender and Religion at Harvard University; in Women’s Studies at University College Dublin; in Theology at the Dominican House of Studies in Tallaght; and in Gender Analysis at the Mount Oliver Institute. Mary Condren is the author of The Serpent and the Goddess: Women, Religion, and Power in Celtic Ireland (1989, 2002); is a founding editor of Irish Journal of Feminist Studies; section editor of Field Day Anthology of Irish Women’s Literature, and has written many articles on feminism, theology, and spirituality. She has coordinated Brigit festivals in Ireland for the past ten years.
Michael Dames is a writer, artist, and prehistorian. He was a senior lecturer on the history of art at Birmingham Polytechnic 1971-76, and town artist of Rochdale Metropolitan Borough 1977-82. He is the author of The Silbury Treasure (1976, 1992), The Avebury Cycle (1977), Mythic Ireland (1992), and Merlin and Wales (2002).
Max Dashu is the Founder and Director of the Suppressed Histories Archives, a center for research on international women’s history. Drawing on a collection of over 14,000 slides, she has created a series of presentations on the subjects of Women’s Power; Mother-Right and Gender Justice; Goddess Cosmologies; Racism, History and Lies; Priestesses; and Woman Shaman. Max Dashu has presented at many major universities as well as for grass-roots audiences. She is completing a sourcebook on European witches and the witch hunts.
Miriam Robbins Dexter, Ph.D., holds a B.A. in Classics and a Ph.D. in Indo-European Studies (comparative linguistics, archaeology and mythology), both from the University of California, Los Angeles. For thirteen years, she taught courses in Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit language and literature in the department of Classics at the University of Southern California, and is presently teaching at both UCLA and Antioch University in Los Angeles. She has authored several journal and encyclopedia articles on ancient female figures and wrote a new Introduction to O.G.S. Crawford’s seminal work, The Eye Goddess (1991). She is the author of Whence the Goddesses: A Source Book (1990), and co-edited two collections of articles: Varia on the Indo-European Past: Papers in Memory of Marija Gimbutas (1997); and a monograph of Dr. Gimbutas’ own collected articles, The Kurgan Culture and the Indo-Europeanization of Europe:Selected articles from 1952 to 1993 (1997). She edited and supplemented The Living Goddesses by Marija Gimbutas (UC Berkeley Press, 1999).
Harald Haarmann, Ph.D., earned his doctorate at Bonn University in 1970, and held a professorship at Trier University where he gained his Habilitation in 1979. From 1982-85 he was a visiting scholar at Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo, Japan, as a guest of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. Since 1985 Dr. Haarmann has worked as an independent scholar living in Finland doing research in the fields of language and culture studies, archaeomythology, and archaeolinguistics. He is the author of some 40 books in German, English, Spanish and Japanese including Early Civilization and Literacy in Europe: An Inquiry into Cultural Continuity in the Mediterranean World (1996) and Die Madonna und ihre Töchter: Rekonstruktion einer kulturhistorischen Genealogie (1996), as well as a five volume series on the languages of the world. He is editor and co-editor of some 20 volumes; author and co-author of some 200 articles in scientific journals and essays in newspapers in several languages. In 1999 he was awarded two prestigious prizes: “Prix logos 1999” (France) and “Premio Jean Monnet 1999” (Italy), and is included in “The Lifetime of Achievement One Hundred, 2005” compiled by the Biographical Centre in Cambridge, England.
Anna Ilieva, Ph.D. is the Director of the Folk Music Department, Member of the Academic Council, and Senior Research Fellow, First Degree, at the Institute of Folklore, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences in Sofia. She earned a Doctor of Art Sciences degree in 1980 with the thesis: “Structural Analysis and Principles of Formation of Bulgarian Folk Dances,” and a second doctorate in 1994 with the thesis: “Bulgarian Women’s Ritual Dances.” Dr. Ilieva has collected more than 4000 dances from all regions of Bulgaria, about 10,000 songs and instrumental tunes, and has conducted extensive research in more than 700 villages throughout Bulgaria on the living context of Bulgarian traditional dance and dance rituals. She is a member of the Union of Bulgarian Composers and Musicologists, and is a regular member of the International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM) Study Group on Ethnochoreology, UNESCO.
Ivan Marazov, Ph.D. graduated from the Institute of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg in 1967, and earned a doctorate in 1976 (thesis: “The Anthropomorphic Style in Thracian Art”) and Dr. Habil. 1986 (thesis: “Myth, Ritual and Art in Ancient Thrace”). In 1988 he was appointed Director of the Institute of Art Studies by the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. In 1995 he became Head of the History of Culture Department of the New Bulgarian University in Sofia, and in 1996-7 he served as Minister of Culture of Republic of Bulgaria and is a member of Academia Medici, Florence. His publications include: Rhytons in Ancient Thrace (1978), The Treasure from Iakimovo (1979), Myth, Ritual and Art in Ancient Thrace (1992), The Visual Myth (1992), Thracian Mythology (1994), Mythology of Gold (1994), The Rogozen Treasure (1996), Ancient Gold: The Wealth of the Thracians (1998), Thracians and the Wine (2000), and many articles in Bulgaria and abroad. He has been the editor of the Bulgarian art revue Izkustvo, as well as Orpheus: The International Journal of Palaeobalcan, Indoeuropean and Thracian Studies.
Susan Moulton, Ph.D., is Senior Professor of Art History at Sonoma State University, Rohnert Park, California. She earned graduate degrees in Art History from Stanford University and studied Art History and Archaeology at the University of Padua in Italy. She has received grants from the Carnegie Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities and was awarded the George Sarlo Teaching Excellence Award. She has lectured widely on art history and Archaeomythology and has published on a variety of topics, including the sacred feminine in history and pre-history, secular and Christian iconography in the Italian Renaissance, and cross-cultural topics in American and California art. She manages a small farm in northern California with horses, llamas, pigs, goats, exotic birds, gardens and fruit trees and is a practicing painter and sculptor.
Vicki Noble is an independent scholar, international lecturer and teacher with a twenty-five year focus on women’s history and religion. She is the co-creator of Motherpeace cards and is author of seven books relating to healing, female shamanism, and women’s spirituality, including Shakti Woman: Feeling our Fire, Healing Our World (1991); and The Double Goddess: Women Sharing Power (2003).
Adrian Poruciuc, Ph.D., is an Indo-European specialist for the Romanian Institute of Thracian Studies in Bucharest, and is Professor of Germanic Studies at Catedra de Engleza, Universitatea “Al. I. Cuza” in Iasi, Romania. As a Fulbright visiting scholar (1990-1992), he taught and did research (Indo-European and Balkan Studies) in association with the Department of Linguistics, University of Chicago. His publications include Archaeolinguistica: Trei studii interdisciplinare (1994); Confluente si etimologii (1998); A History of Medieval English (1999); “Lexical Relics (Rom. teafar, Germ. Zauber, Engl. tiver): A Reminder of Prehistoric Red-Dye Rituals” (The Mankind Quarterly, Vol. XXX, No. 3, 1990); “Problems and Patterns of the Southeast European Ethno- and Glottogenesis, ca. 6500 BC – AD 1500” (The Mankind Quarterly, Vol. XXXIII, No. 1, 1992); “On Indo-European and Egyptoid (Fertile-Crescent) Correspondents of Thracian -poris” (Thraco-Dacica, Tome XX, Nos. 1-2, 1999); “The Shape of Sacredness: From Prehistoric Temples to Neo-Byzantine Churches” (ReVision, vol. 23, no. 1, 2000); among other works.
Lydia Ruyle M.A., is an artist/scholar on the visual arts faculty of the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, Colorado. She has a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Colorado at Boulder, a Master of Arts from UNC and has studied in Italy, France, Spain, and Indonesia. She works regularly at Santa Reparata Graphic Arts Center in Florence, Italy and Columbia College Center for Book and Paper in Chicago. Her research into sacred images of women has taken her around the globe. She exhibits her art and does workshops internationally. Her distinctive Goddess banners are hung at conferences and gatherings throughout the world. Visit website.
Peggy Reeves Sanday, Ph.D. is the R. Jean Brownlee Endowed Term Chair, School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. She is the author of seven books and numerous articles on anthropology, ethnography, and the anthropology of women. Her 1981 text, Female Power and Male Dominance: On the Origins of Sexual Inequality, has become a classic in its field. Women at the Center: Life in a Modern Matriarchy (2002), is the result of two decades of field work among the Minangkabau in West Sumatra, Indonesia.
Tatiana Shalganova, Ph.D. is Associate Professor and Director of “Culture of Ancient Europe” BA Program in the History of Culture Department at the New Bulgarian University, Sofia. She has written more then 20 articles, lecture courses, and research projects on the art, ritual and culture of the Late Bronze Age in Bulgaria. Her projects also focus is on Ancient Thrace in the Early Iron Age, and she is currently working on such projects as “The Catalogue of the Bulgarian Treasures from Prehistory to Middle Ages,” among others.
Anna Shtarbanova, Ph.D., is a First Degree Associate Researcher at the Folk Music and Dance Department of the Institute of Folklore, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia. She earned her Ph.D. (Doctor of Art Sciences) in 1997 with the thesis: “The horo dance event as a complex cultural phenomenon.” Dr. Shtarbanova has created documentaries for television and radio on Bulgarian traditional dance and has taught extensively throughout Europe in collaboration with her mother, Dr. Anna Ilieva. She is a member of the Union of Bulgarian Composers and Musicologists, and is a regular member of the International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM), Study Group on Ethnochoreology, UNESCO.
Elisabeth Sikie is a Masters student in the Women’s Spirituality, Philosophy and Religion Program at the California Institute of Integral Studies. She has worked in the IAM office creating a customized documentation of the Institute library, and as a videographer for the two symposia in Serbia and Bulgaria, 2004. Elisabeth also teaches yoga in the San Francisco Bay Area.