GRACIE KENDAL: also know as Kristine Schomaker, is a Los Angeles based new media and performance artist, painter and art historian. She received her BA in Art History and her MA in Studio Art from California State University at Northridge. For over 12 years, she has been experimenting with various interdisciplinary art forms including using online virtual worlds and social networking technologies to connect with international audiences and local arts communities. Gracie’s current work explores notions of online identity, specifically the construction of Avatars. Her work as a whole stands as an allegory of the relationship between appearance and identity, illusion, belief and reality. Two projects she is presently working on include, “My Life as an Avatar: The Gracie Kendal project” and “1000 Avatars” a contemporary anthropology of portraits of avatars in the virtual world of Second Life.