CIIS Board of Trustees Welcomes Two New Members
By Gwyneth Merner
During its February meeting, the CIIS Board of Trustees elected two new members: musician and record producer Peter Baumann, and visual artist and cultural anthropologist Lydia Nakashima Degarrod.
Peter Baumann, who hails from Berlin, Germany, was a self-taught musician when he founded the electronic music ensemble Tangerine Dream. The group released numerous successful albums and wrote over sixty film soundtracks. After he left the band in 1979, Baumann became a solo artist and producer, eventually forming his own record label. As creative director and chair of the board of Private Music, he released albums by iconic pop artists and New Age musicians Yanni, Taj Mahal, Philip Glass, Ravi Shankar, Leo Kottke, Etta James, Ringo Starr, and Tangerine Dream.
Baumann sold Private Music in 1996 and pursued studies in Eastern and Western religion and philosophy. As a result of his investigations into the nature of well-being and quality of life, Baumann founded the Baumann Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to "exploring the nature of awareness and its relationship to human health and well-being."
Born in Concepción, Chile, Nakashima Degarrod has explored diverse themes such as violence and political upheaval in Chile, memory and emotion for Chilean migrants to the San Francisco Bay Area, and the experience of nature and community for bird feeders at Lake Merritt in Oakland. In her art, she often depicts hands or figures emerging from colorful landscapes. She states that she aims to produce works that "convey the aesthetics of social events or places in which individuals share experiences of an extraordinary nature."
Nakashima Degarrod received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Hawai'i and her PhD in Anthropology from the University of California, Los Angeles. During her graduate work at UCLA, she studied with Claude Lévi-Strauss. She currently teaches critical studies and diversity studies at California College of the Arts.
