Michel Agier is the director of the Institute of Research for Development (IRD) and of the Centre of African Studies at the EHESS, Paris. He is engaged in anthropological research in cities of Africa and Latin America. He focuses his research, among other topics, on social groups in situations of precariousness and marginalisation, and on refugee camps. Today he studies how peoples reconstruct their identities after being forced into exodus because of wars.

Christopher Allen has worked as a director, creative entrepreneur, and new media artist after graduating from Columbia University and studying at Trinity College Dublin. He directed the interactive documentary Capitol of Punk, part of a 2007 exhibition at the MoMA NYC, and is the founder/director of UnionDocs. Christopher was also a founding-partner of the start-up Counts Media, and played a leading role in the invention and execution of many art & entertainment concepts there, such as Yellow Arrow, a place-based storytelling project exhibited online and in galleries and museums internationally.

Melissa Anderson is a regular contributor to The Village Voice and a member of the New York Film Festival selection committee.

 

An internationally acclaimed writer and scholar of religions, Reza Aslan holds a PhD in Islamic Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara and a Master of Fine Arts in Fiction from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His first book, No god but God was an international bestseller. Aslan is Chief Creative Officer of BoomGen Studios, a mini-motion picture and media company focused on entertainment about the Greater Middle East and its Diaspora communities. He is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside.

Paul Audi attended the Ecole normale supérieure, is agrégé in philosophy and holds a doctorate in philosophy. He has authored a thesis on Jean-Jacques Rousseau and about fifteen books and thirty articles, most of which concern the relations between ethics and esthetics. Convinced these relations cannot be taken into account without raising questions about the ins and outs of human subjectivity, Audi aims to found an “ethics of creation” which, since he wrote Creating, he’s called “es/thetics”. He has also worked on Romain Gary’s works and published numerous works on Schopenhauer and the German “philosophical pessimism” tradition.

 

Books by Paul Audi are available

Cross-eyed since early infancy, neurobiologist Susan Barry saw the world in a very different way. Although she had three childhood operations, the pathways in her brain that allow for binocular vision did not develop normally; instead, she saw a flat, 2D world. Over 40 years later, she defied expectation by teaching herself to see in 3D. She recalls this experience in Fixing My Gaze. She has been featured on NPR and in a New Yorker article by renowned neurologist Oliver Sacks entitled “Stereo Sue.”

Pierre Bayard is a professor of French literature at the University of Paris VIII and a psychoanalyst. He is the author of Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?  and How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read (Bloomsbury USA, 2009) among many other books.

Nina Berman is a documentary photographer with a primary interest in the American political and social landscape. Her work has been recognized with awards in art and journalism from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the World Press Photo Foundation, the Open Society Institute Documentary Fund, and Hasselblad. She is the author of Purple Hearts – Back from Iraq, 2004, portraits and interviews with wounded American war veterans, and Homeland, 2008, an examination of militarism in post 9-11 America. Exhibitions in 2010 included the Whitney Museum of American Art 2010 Biennial; the Milano Triennale; Septembre de la photographie, Lyon; the IPPNW World Congress, Basel; Melkweg Gallery, Amsterdam; the Scottish Parliament; and Princeton University. She advocates for a broad social engagement with her work, focusing special attention on high school audiences and traveled the country with a wounded veteran to public schools and universities. She has photographed editorially for twenty years, publishing in Time, Newsweek, Harper's, the New York Times Magazine, French Geo, Die Zeit and Mother Jones. She taught at the International Center of Photography in New York City from 1999 to 2009 and was an artist in residence at the Whitney Museum in 2010.  She is a member of NOOR images, the photography collective based in Amsterdam.

Jonah Bokaer is an award-winning choreographer and media artist. His works aims at expanding possibilities for live performance through choreography, digital media, crossdisciplinary collaborations, and social enterprise, in the United States and internationally. His approach to choreography, addresses the human body in relation to contemporary technologies. Bokaer’s work has been presented widely throughout venues in the United States and abroad, including Cornell University, Dance Theater Workshop, Danspace Project, Dixon Place, the ISB (Bangkok), Studio Théâtre (Vitry), La Générale (Paris), Les Subsistances (Lyon), La Ferme Du Buisson (Marne-la-Vallée), and many others.

 

 

Fabienne Brugère teaches philosophy a the University of Bordeaux 3. Also the president of the sustainable development council of the Bordeaux urbane community, she is co-editor, along with Anne Sauvagnargues of the "Lignes d’art" PUF collection, co-editor with Guillaume le Blanc of the "Diagnostics" collection at Editions Le Bord de l’eau and also sits on the editorial board of the Nouvelle Revue d’Esthétique. Her research deals with 18th century philosophies, the philosophy of art, as well as moral and political philosophy (moral feelings, the ethics of care and the new distribution of the public and the private).

 

Judith Butler, Ph.D., Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School EGS, attended Bennington College and then Yale University, where she received her B.A., and her Ph.D. in philosophy in 1984 on the French Reception of Hegel. Her first training in philosophy took place at the synagogue in her hometown of Cleveland. She taught at Wesleyan and Johns Hopkins universities before becoming Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Judith Butler is the author of numerous books, articles and contributions on philosophy, feminism and queer theory. In 2011, she is ranked among the Guardian’s “Top 100 Women” and is described as a “superstar academic whose influential work Gender Trouble changed the way we conceptualise gender”.

 

Wally Cardona is an artistic director, a choreographer and a performer. He has been recognized nationally and internationally for creating vast yet intimate works that use scale, setting and materials as integral partners in the creation of movement. He is currently teaching Creative Process at The Juilliard School and Performance/Phenomenon: Theory and Philosophy into Physical Practice at The New School University in New York. He is the recipient of a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship in choreography and a 2006 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (“Bessie”) Award for the creation of Everywhere. He resides in Brooklyn.

Barbara Cassin is head of research at the CNRS. Her training is in philosophy and philology, as a specialist of ancient Greece. Most recently, she has initiated and directed an international research team at the CNRS, and published a Vocabulaire Européen des Philosophies, Dictionnaire des Intraduisibles (European Vocabulary of Philosophies, Dictionnary of the Untranslatable) (Paris, Seuil-Robert, 2004). She also worked on contemporary rhetorical and political issues, such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, to experiment in concreto what kind of things words can do in our days.

Ashley Caudill-Mirillo joined US Citizenship and Immigration Services as an Asylum Officer at the New York Asylum Office in August 2008. In that capacity, she adjudicated affirmative asylum applications, determined USCIS jurisdiction over minors in removal proceedings pursuant to the TVPRA, and processed Bhutanese refugees in Nepal while on detail to theRefugee Corp. In her current position, she manages a team of five Asylum Officers and reviews asylum decisions for legal sufficiency. Prior to joining USCIS, she assisted in the legal representation of non-citizens through various internships and clinics, including internships with the Legal Aid Society Immigration Law Unit and Brooklyn Law School's Safe Harbor Asylum Law Clinic.

Grégoire Chamayou holds an agrégation in philosophy and is a researcher at the Max-Planck institute in Berlin. He has translated Clausewitz’s On War, an anthology of Kant’s texts on body and mind, Ernst Kapp’s Principes d’une philosophie de la technique and Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte into French. After a first essay on the topic of medical experimentation on human beings, he published Les Chasses à l’homme (manhunting), which rereads the history of philosophical politics through the central hypothesis that any domination link presupposes a predation link. He also manages "Zones", a publisher that focuses on counter-culture, activism and new forms of protest.

Jim Chu is manager.

Mitchell Cohen is currently CUNY Writing Fellow at the Levy Biography Center at the Graduate School of the City University of New York. He is former co-editor of Dissent Magazine and his essays and articles have appeared in many publications including the TLS, The New York Times Book Review, and Raisons politiques. He is professor of political science at Bernard Baruch College and the Graduate Faculty of the City University of New York. Among is books are Zion and State (Columbia Univ Press), The Wager of Lucien Goldmann (Princeton), and as co-editor, Princeton Readings in Political Thought (Princeton). He has guest lectured at numerous European universities.

American artist Brody Condon's work has been exhibited at the Whitney Biennial 2004 and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, the 2008 Sonsbeek International Public Sculpture Exhibition and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Recent exhibitions and performances include Greater New York at PS1/ MoMA, and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Concerned with the over-identification with fantasy in contemporary culture, Condon’s process often finds its final form performative situations and video installation. The work re-contextualizes and then modifies existing pop culture, historical events, as well as other artworks. Steeped in dark humour and a unsypathetic gaze into his own unreliable post traumatic memories, the work directly engages with various modes of “projection of self” into other spaces via computer and live roleplaying games, religious experience, psychoactive substances, and dissociative disorders.

Jen Davis lives and works in New York City. She received her MFA from Yale University (2008), and her BA from Columbia College Chicago (2002). She is represented by Lee Marks Fine Art.

"The perfect body image in this culture requires that one be thin. Images of perfectly fit individuals saturate the visual media, creating icons which establish a norm that makes all else seem to be deviant. Overweight people do not satisfy what is attractive or desired. In this body of work, I deal with my insecurities about my body image and the direct correlation between self-perception and the way one is perceived by others." Jen Davis.

Mireille Delmas-Marty holds the Chair of Comparative Legal Studies and the Internationalization of Law at the Collège de France. In 2007, she became a member of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques. Aside from her teaching, Mireille Delmas-Marty has devoted herself to research, directing seminars at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and at the CNRS. She founded and co-directed the collection "Les voies du droit" (PUF) and sits on the editorial boards of many juridic reviews, be they national or international. Finally, Mireille Delmas-Marty has taken on responsabilities as an expert, for the French presidency, the French Ministry of Justice or the European Union.

A graduate of the École Polytechnique and the École des mines, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, is a professor at Stanford University. For many years he taught social and political philosophy and ethics of science and technology at the École Polytechnique, where he created the Centre de Recherche en Épistémologie Appliquée (Center for research in applied epistemology) and manages the Groupe de Recherche et d’Intervention sur la Science et l’Éthique (Research and intervention group on science and ethics). He was recently elected to the Académie Française des Technologies (French academy of technologies). He has notably published Pour un catastrophisme éclairé (for an enlightened catastrophism) (Seuil, 2002).

Ala Ebtekar describes his work as "a visual glimpse of a crossroad where present day events meet history and mythology". As a young teenager he joined the seminal group K.O.S. (Kids of Survival), working with artist Tim Rollins on collaborative artworks involving groups of urban youth. He received his BA from the San Francisco Art Institute and his MFA degree from Stanford University. His work has been exhibited internationally and was recently featured in two prestigious exhibitions: "One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now", a touring exhibition originating at the Asia Society, NYC, and in the 2006 California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art. He is a visiting lecturer at UC Berkeley and Stanford University.

Didier Fassin is an anthropologist and a sociologist who has conducted field studies in Senegal, Ecuador, South Africa, and France. Trained as a physician in internal medicine and public health, he dedicated his early research to medical anthropology, illuminating important issues about the AIDS epidemic, social inequalities in health, and the changing landscape of global health. More recently, he has developed a new domain of inquiry he terms “political and moral anthropology,” analyzing the reformulation of injustice and violence as suffering and trauma, the expansion of an international humanitarian government, and the contradictions in the contemporary politics of life. His present project, a contribution to an anthropology of the state, explores the political and moral treatment of disadvantaged groups, including immigrants and refugees, through an ethnography of police, justice, and prison.

Books by Didier Fassin are available .

Guilhem Flouzat is a drummer and a composer. A much in demand sideman, Guilhem left Paris two years ago–where he had made his musical training in the the National Conservatory in Paris (CNSMDP)–for the Manhattan School of Music, where he is currently a full scholarship student and Fulbright grantee. Since moving to New York, Guilhem has played with musicians such as Ben Wendel, Tigran Hamasyan or Harish Rhagavan. His many collaborations led him to tour in Belgium, Italy, Spain and China. He studied with Eric Harland, John Riley, Gerald Cleaver, Chris Rosenberg, Dan Weiss, Mark Guiliana, Kendrick Scott, Henry Cole and Bill Stewart. His first album is entitled "One Way…Or Another".

Nan Goldin began photographing at the age of 15 and at the age of 19 had her first exhibition of black and white photographs. She received a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Tufts University, Boston, in 1977. In 1978 she moved to New York where she continued to document her "extended family". These photographs became the subject of her slide shows and Goldin’s first book, “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency”. It was groundbreaking work, as she was the first woman to use photography to present the intimate details of her personal life as a public work of art, and inspired a new generation of artists. In 1985 her work was included in the Biennial of the Whitney Museum of American Art, and gained international renown. In 1991 she moved to Berlin, Germany on a DAAD grant and continued to live there until 1994. She has participated in many artistic collaborations, including the books “Vakat” (1993) with poet Joachim Sartorious, “Tokyo Love” with Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki, and “A Double Life” with her old friend David Armstrong (both published in 1994). In 1993, her seminal work “The Other Side,” named after the Boston nightclub where she spent her early years, was published by Scalo. Three years later, in 1996, a major retrospective exhibition of her work, "I'll be Your Mirror," opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and toured to museums in Europe. That same year the documentary “I’ll be Your Mirror” was awarded a Teddy Bear Award for Best Essay at the Berlin Film Festival. Goldin made the film in collaboration with Edmund Coulthard. In 1997 Goldin went back to Naples and was inspired to make new pictures dedicated to the memory of her friends Cookie Mueller, Daniele and Vittorio Scarpati, and thus in 1997 her book “Ten Years After” was published. In 2000 she moved to Paris and in 2001 a second retrospective, "Le Feu Follet," was held at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris and it, too, toured internationally under the title "The Devil's Playground" to institutions such as the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, the Reina Sofia, Madrid, Fundação de Serralves, Porto, Castello di Rivoli, Turin and Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw. Her film  "Sisters Saints and Sibyls" at the Festival d'Automne in 2004 drew the largest attendance ever at the Chapelle Saint-Louis de la Salpêtrière. This piece, a combination of film and still images projected on three screens, is a story of three women trapped in a male hierarchy. It pays homage to her sister Barbara, whose rebellion and suicide have so deeply marked her life and work. In 2006, Goldin was awarded the prestigious “Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres” by the government of France in recognition for her significant contribution to the arts. In 2007, Goldin received the Hassleblad Foundation International Award in Photography, coinciding with the publication of a book, “The Beautiful Smile”, and an exhibition that traveled internationally. Also that year she was included in the group show “Airs de Paris” at Centre Pompidou. In 2009 Goldin was the guest curator at Recontres d’Arles festival for their 40th anniversary, she invited twelve photographers to participate in the exhibition, “Ça me touché”.  Goldin’s most recent slide show “Scopophilia” was created especially for the Musée du Louvre and was exhibited at the end of 2010. 

Currently she works and lives both in Paris and New York.

Born in New York, Jay Gottlieb studied at the High School of Performing Arts, Juilliard School, and Harvard University, where he earned his “Master of Arts” and taught. He was Nadia Boulanger’s student and has worked with the pianists Robert Casadesus, Yvonne Loriod, and Aloys Kontarsky, as well as the composers Lukas Foss, Stefan Wolpe, Olivier Messiaen, Maurice Ohana, Georges Aperghis, Luciano Berio, Pierre Boulez, Sylvano Bussotti, John Cage, George Crumb, György Ligeti, Betsy Jolas, Oliver Knussen, Giacinto Scelsi and Ralph Shapey. Gottlieb has interpreted numerous contemporary works, some of which were written for him, such as Franco Donatoni’s Jay for piano and seven horns, which was presented at the Centre Georges Pompidou. Gottlieb wrote a significant series of articles about the piano in the 20th century for the review Piano, and co-authored 10 ans avec le piano du XXe siècle [10 years with 20th century piano], published by Editions de la Cité de la Musique, Paris. He has also directed numerous radio and television programs and recordings in the United States, South America, Asia and Europe (France-Musiques and France-Culture, etc.), and has recorded film sound tracks, including La Discrète by Christian Vincent.

 

Philip Gourevitch is a long-time staff writer for The New Yorker, and the author of A Cold Case (2001) and We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (1998), which won many prestigious awards. His books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. Gourevitch’s work as a foreign correspondent began in the early 1990s in Asia Europe, and Africa. In 2004, he was The New Yorker’s Washington Correspondent, covering the presidential election. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and in 2010 was named a Chevallier de l’Ordre des Arts et Des Lettres in France.

Mark Greif is a founder and co-editor of n+1 and teaches literary studies at the New School in New York. He holds a BA from Harvard, a Mphil from Oxford and a PhD in American Studies from Yale. He is interested in literature’s relation to the world, how new ideas are embraced or refused in fiction and nonfiction, and how arguments find their way into art. His scholarly work concerns American literature and intellectual history, primarily in the 20th century.

Roger Grunwald is currently co-writing and will be starring in The Mitzvah, a one-man show that dramatically explores the diversity of the Jewish experience during World War II. The Mitzvah, sponsored by the New York Foundation for the Arts, is slated for an Off Broadway run in early 2012. Roger trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, was a founding ensemble member of the California Shakespeare Theater, the Robert (“Bobby”) Lewis Acting Company and a co-founder of New York’s Castillo Theatre where he performed in over 45 productions. He appeared Off Broadway as one of the leads at 59E59 Theaters in the NY premiere of Outside Inn, a role he originated in both Pittsburgh and Stuttgart (performing in both the English and German language versions of the play). His voice and face have been heard and seen in several feature films including The Reader, Heist and Amelia, two recent independent films as well as documentaries for HBO, Court Television Network and the Discovery Channel.

Miguel Gutierrez, a dance and music artist based in New York, has been called “one of our most provocative and necessary artistic voices” by Eva Yaa Asantewaa of Dance Magazine. He makes solo and group pieces with a variety of artists under the moniker Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People. His work, characterized by the immersive quality of the attentive state that it imposes on the audience, centers around enduring philosophical questions about desire, longing and the search for meaning. His work has toured internationally at several festivals and venues and has received support from Creative Capital, Jerome Foundation, Rockefeller MAP Fund NYFA, NEA and NPN.  In 2010 he received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Art, and United States Artists.  He is the  winner of three New York Dance and Performance "Bessie" awards.  WHEN YOU RISE UP, a book of his performance texts, is available from 53rd State Press. He also invented DEEP AEROBICS, an absurdist workout for the radical in all of us. For his new project he is researching the overlapping and divergent conceptions of “mind” in the fields of neurology, embodied philosophy, somatic practices, improvisation and the paranormal. www.miguelgutierrez.org

 

Hilary Clark has been a part of process and performance since 1992, and in New York since 1998. Dedicated to being an active and vital participant, she has been involved actively through creating, performing, learning, teaching, curating and conversation. Clark graduated with a BFA in modern dance/performance in 1998 and she has studied with Ruth Adrienne, Manfred Fishbeck, Camille Paglia and Gabriel Masson with whom she assisted at University of the Arts and Bates College. In 2008, Clark was honored with a Bessie Award for her body of work as a performer with Tere O'Connor, Fiona Marcotty, and Luciana Achugar. Clark has also danced with Jon Kinzel, Larissa Velez and Miguel Gutierrez. Clark is presently working with Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People on "And Lose The Name Of Action", which premieres in September 2012 and with Young Jean Lee's Theater Company in  the "Untitled Feminist Show" which premieres January 2012. Clark's work has been shown at Dixon Place, AUNTS, CATCH, the Painted Bride (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania), Art Space (Hartford, Connecticut),the Kitchen in December 2008, as a part of Dance and Process, as well as at Dance Theater Workshop, where Clark was a 2008-2009 Fresh Tracks Artist, performing in collaboration with Larissa Velez, and in 2010 -2011 for a Studio Series residency.   Her teaching accolades include CLASSCLASSCLASS, Dance New Amsterdam, Glenwood Springs Dance Festival, Bates Dance Festival through the Outreach Program, St. Ann's, appearing as guest lecturer at St. John's University and most recently returning to teach at the Greater Hartford Academy of Performing Arts as an alumni guest artist.

Despite a military education, Yannick Haenel, a deserter at heart since high school, calls for personal insurrection through his work. A French professor until 2005, he founded the literary review Ligne de risque (Risk Line), which he co-edits with François Meyronnis. The review defends the idea that there is more literature in the great spiritual texts than in all the novels published over the last three decades and militates for literature with “impersonal singularity”. Published in 2009, Jan Karski, which blends historical fact and fiction in a completely new form, has sparked controversy. But Haenel writes to free himself and questions the role of language in his liberation.

 

Books by Yannick Haenel are available .

Trajal Harrell was born in Douglas, Georgia. From 1991 to 1998, he studied dance and choreography at The Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance, The San Francisco Institute of Choreography, City College of San Francisco, Brown University, Movement Research, and the Trisha Brown School. In 1998, he was selected as an artist-in-residence at Movement Research and since then, he has been active in the development of research projects and curation at Movement Research. Currently his choreographic work proposes an alternative historicity of early postmodern American dance by bringing together aesthetic theories from the Judson legacy with the Voguing dance tradition. The choreographer has most recently ventured forth to examine the production and visibility of community and audience within performance.

Since joining the Library in 2004, Paul Holdengräber has been responsible for hundreds of LIVE events, all open to the public. His programs have become known nationwide for providing a forum in which audiences can engage with some of the world’s most influential public figures, including writers, historians, artists, and politicians. Participating speakers have included Paul Auster, Daniel Barenboim, Tina Brown, Ken Burns, Greydon Carter, Shepard Fairey, Thomas Friedman, Umberto Eco, Frank Gehry, Adam Gopnik, Christopher Hitchens, Maira Kalman, Spike Lee, Lawrence Lessig, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Norman Mailer, Frank McCourt, Toni Morrison, Nuala O’Faolain, ZZ Packer, Felix Rohatyn, Charlie Rose, Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, and many others. Prior to moving to New York, Paul Holdengräber was the founder and director of the Institute for Art and Cultures at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), with the idea "to challenge the perception that museums are nothing more than mausoleums for Old Masters". Under Holdengräber’s direction, the Institute became an active and lively forum for debate with its ambitious lecture series in which painters, poets, performers, writers, and thinkers address critical cultural issues through lively talks, discussions, and performances. Holdengräber is known for encouraging his guests to step outside their areas of specialization and into wider-reaching discussions. Holdengräber holdes a Bachelor’s Degree from the Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University. He was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship at the Getty Research Institute, and has taught at Princeton University, Williams College, the University of Miami, and Claremont College. He was a Fellow at the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities, a Board Member at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. He is on the Board of Directors of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference, and is a Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU. Fluent in four languages, Mr. Holdengräber has written essays and articles for journals in France, Germany, Spain, and the United States. In 2003, he was awarded the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French government.

Jamie Hook is a filmmaker and film producer.  He was the founding director of the Northwest Film Forum in Seattle, which has, in the 15 years since it’s founding, blossomed into one of the nation’s pre-eminent regional film centers, active in both production and exhibition.  He was also a producing partner with The Film Company, a unique film production company greenlighting artists, not projects. While there, Jamie Hook produced Guy Maddin’s landmark living film, Brand Upon the Brain!  More recently, he founded a new production company, Complicated, Inc, which has produced two films, Megan Murphy’s The Part I Love The Best, and Jamie Hook’s own Vacationland, which stars Karen Black. He is the curator and host of Open City Dialogues on Mondays at Pete’s Candy Store.

Romain Huret is a historian of the contemporary United States. He is an associate professor at the University of Lyon II and a junior member of the Institut universitaire de France, and he also teaches at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques (Lyon). His work focuses on the State, social and political mobilization, and the links between civil society and national organizations.

Books by Romain Huret are available .

Alicia Jo Rabins is a poet, composer, and classically trained violinist. Her poems have been published in Ploughshares, The Boston Review, 6 x 6, Court Green, Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn (NYU Press), and Horse Poems (Everyman's Library). As a violinist, singer, and composer, Rabins tours internationally; her most recent release is "Girls in Trouble," an art-pop song cycle about women in the Old Testament (Jdub Records).

An award-winning artist, Maira Kalman has illustrated numerous covers for The New Yorker and has written and illustrated a dozen children's books. Her articles and illustrations have appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, Interview, and many other publications. Now a teacher of graduate design at the School of Visual Arts, she has designed products for the Museum of Modern Art and sets for Mark Morris Dance Group. Her first online column for the Opinion section of the The New York Times, "The Principles of Uncertainty", ran from May of 2006 to April of 2007. It was followed by "And the Pursuit of Happiness", a yearlong investigation of democracy, inspired by the 2008 presidential elections.

Laura Kipnis is a cultural critic whose work focuses on sexual politics, emotion, acting out, bad behavior, and various other crevices of the American psyche. Her most recent book is How To Become a Scandal; previous books include Against Love: A Polemic and The Female Thing, which have been translated into fifteen languages. Her essays have appeared in Slate, Harper’s, The Nation, Playboy, and The New York Times Magazine; she has received fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations. She is a professor in the Radio/TV/Film Department at Northwestern, where she teaches filmmaking.

Eric Klinenberg is Professor of Sociology at New York University, and editor of the journal Public Culture. His first book, Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago, won six scholarly and literary prizes (as well as a Favorite Book section from the Chicago Tribune) and was praised as “a dense and subtle portrait” (Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker); “a remarkable, riveting account” (American Prospect); “intellectually exciting” (Amartya Sen); and a “trenchant, persuasive tale of slow murder by public policy” (Salon). A theatrical adaptation of Heat Wave premiered in Chicago in 2008, and a feature documentary based on the book is currently in production. Klinenberg’s second book, Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control America’s Media, was called “politically passionate and intellectually serious,” (Columbia Journalism Review), “a must-read for those who wonder what happened to good radio, accurate reporting and autonomous public interest” (Time Out New York), and “eye-opening …required reading for conscientious citizens” (Kirkus). Since its publication, he has testified before the Federal Communications Commission and briefed the U.S. Congress on his findings. Klinenberg is currently working on two new projects. One, a study of the problem of urban security, examines the rise of disaster expertise, the range of policy responses to emerging concerns about urban risk and vulnerability, and the challenge of cultivating a culture of preparedness. The other project is a multi-year study of the extraordinary rise in living alone. He reported on parts of this research in a recent story for NPR’s “This American Life”, and is now working on a book, Alone in America, which will be published by The Penguin Press. In addition to his books and scholarly articles, Klinenberg writes for popular publications such as The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, The London Review of Books, The Nation, The Washington Post, Mother Jones, The Guardian, Le Monde Diplomatique, and Slate.

Carrie Lambert-Beatty is an art historian whose research focuses on art since 1960, especially performance and video. She received her PhD from Stanford University in 2002, and has been a fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program and the Getty Research Institute. Her writing on performance art, postmodern dance, and minimalism has been published in exhibition catalogs and in journals such as Trans, Art Journal, and October magazine, of which she has been an editor since 2008. Lambert-Beatty is working on a new project on recent intersections of art and activism, parts of which have been published in the journal Signs (Winter 2008) and October (Summer 2009). She is a 2010-11 Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Reif Larsen was raised in Cambridge, Mass., and now lives in Brooklyn. He studied at Brown University, and has taught at Columbia University, where he is finishing his MFA in fiction. He is also a filmmaker and has made documentaries in the United States, the United Kingdom, and sub-Saharan Africa. His widely acclaimed debut novel The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet traces a twelve-year-old genius cartographer attempts to understand the ways of the world. The novel, which Stephen King calls "a treasure", includes various diagrams, notes and illustrations of maps, family trees, road signs, bugs, birds and animals.

Jonathan Lear is the John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor at the Committee on Social Thought and in the Department of Philosophy at the Universtity of Chicago. He trained in Philosophy at Cambridge University and The Rockefeller University where he received his Ph.D. in 1978. He works primarily on philosophical conceptions of the human psyche from Socrates to the present. He also trained as a psychoanalyst at the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis and he serves on the Faculty of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. He has won the Gradiva Award from the National Association for Psychoanalysis three times for work that advances psychoanalysis.

Chris Lehmann is the editor of the Yahoo news blog network, co-editor of BookForum, and an editor for The Baffler. He is also the author of Rich People Things (Haymarket Books, 2011).

Chef Brian Leth brings his straight-forward, uncomplicated style of cooking to Vinegar Hill House where hecontinues to build upon the restaurant’s recipe for success with seasonally-driven dishes and a contemporary approach to familiar favorites.After graduating with a degree in History and English from the University of Virginia, Brian embarked on his culinary journey with a move to New York City, landing a spot at a restaurant equipment company.  Working on the periphery of the food industry fueled his interest in the culinary arts, pushing him into the kitchen.
Stints in New Mexico’s Santa Fe and Taos provided a taste of the restaurant industry and what was to come. Upon returning to New York, Brian was behind the stove at Gabrielle Hamilton’s East Village restaurant, Prune. A brief stop at Blue Hill where Owner and Chef Dan Barber focused on farm-to-table cuisine wasfollowed by Café des Artistes where Brian perfected classical French techniques.  He spent some time working at Annona, a then popular Italian restaurant in Westhampton Beach, before heading out west to work on a cattle ranch in Wyoming.  It was here that Brian developed a deep understanding for the art of raising cattle for quality beef.  When he returned to New York, he joined Allen & Delancey, where Executive Chef Neil Ferguson presented Brian with the technical skills to turn ordinary ingredients into extraordinary, refined dishes. Brian then brought thismentalityto Vinegar Hill House in April of 2009. Working alongside Vinegar Hill House Owner and Chef, Jean Adamson, who shares a similar cooking sensibility, Brian was able to hone his direct, honest approach in the kitchen.  Brian’s uncomplicated style of cooking has proven successful at Vinegar Hill House, where he now works as Executive Chef.  His focus is on providing a quality dining experience with modern takes on classics, highlighting ingredients and flavor combinations to bring excitement to familiar dishes.  The evolution of his craft is apparent, not only through his food, but his progress in the kitchen.  Chef Brian Leth continues to strive for integrity in his dishes and aims to maximize the potential of his kitchen and staff while providing a homey, satisfying dining experience.

 

 

Rodolfo Llinás, a founding father of modern brain science, is the Thomas and Suzanne Murphy Professor of Neuroscience and Chairman of the Department of Physiology & Neuroscience at the New York University School of Medicine. He received his medical degree from the Universidad Javeriana, in Bogota, Colombia and obtained his Ph.D. in Neuroscience at the Australian National University in Canberra, under John Eccles (Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology). His most recent book is I of the Vortex: From Neurons to Self. He has published over 400 scientific articles.

Michel Lussault is a geographer and a geography professor at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon. The author of numerous books and scientific contributions, he has published De la lutte des classes à la lutte des places (from the class struggle to the place struggle) (Grasset, 2009). In his work, he develops an original approach to the spatial action of social operators by focusing mainly on the identification of elementary spatial skills.

Pascal Mamassian was born in Lyon and was trained in Telecommunication Engineering (Sup' Télécom, Paris). He then obtained a Master in Cognitive Sciences and a PhD in Experimental and Biological Psychology (Univ. of Minnesota, USA). He has worked at the Max-Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics (Tübingen, Germany) and New York University. He was at the University of Glasgow as lecturer and then senior lecturer before taking a researcher position at the CNRS. Research in his group focuses on mid-level vision, the link between the processing of elementary features in the image and the awareness of natural scenes.

Wyatt Mason is a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine a contributing editor of Harper's Magazine. His writing also appears in The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. Modern Library publishes his translations of the works of Arthur Rimbaud, Rimbaud Complete and I Promise to be Good. A 2003 fellow of the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, he received the 2005 Nona Balakian Citation from the National Book Critics Circle and a National Magazine Award in 2006. He is a member of the core faculty of the Bennington Writing Seminars and Senior Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College for 2010-2011.

Catherine Millet is the editor of Art Press, an influential Paris art magazine. She has written books on modern art, including a monograph on the painter Yves Klein. The Sexual Life of Catherine M has sold over a million copies worldwide. She lives in Paris with her husband.

Adrien Mondot is the founder of the company Adrien M and a multidisciplinary artist whose work is a mix of juggling and computerized innovation. Originally a researcher in computer science, Mondot spent three years at the National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation (INRIA Grenoble), where he worked on conceptualizing and designing new graphic creation tools that dispense with reality. He discovered dance in 2003 when he was invited by the choreographer Yvann Alexandre to participate in the collective creation, Oz. For Mondot, creating his own company meant blending the digital and sound arts, juggling and movement. In his performances, he defies gravity and time, plays hide-the-ball and uses circus arts and computer science to create an illusion that is magical, choreographic and poetic. Mondot has multiple artistic collaborations to his credit, including with Armando Menicacci, Kitsou Dubois, Stéphanie Aubin, and Pascale Houbin. He participated in Wajdi Mouawad’s most recent show, Ciels, which was created in 2009 in Avignon.

 

A former student of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, Prof. Lionel Naccache is a neurologist and holds a PhD in cognitive neurosciences from Paris VI University. His thesis, written under the supervision of Prof. Stanislas Dehaene, is entitled “The Subliminal Perception of Numbers : Psychological Properties and Functional Brain Imaging of Unconscious Cognitive Processes". He now works both as a neurologist in the unit for nervous system diseases at Pitié – Salpêtrière in Paris, and as a professor at Paris VI University. He is co-director of the "Neuropsychology & Neuroimaging" unit (INSERM, the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research) within the ICM (Institut du Cerveau et de la Moëlle épinière). He published two essays on neurosciences of consciousness and subjectivity. His primary interest is the cerebral basis of consciousness.

Laurel Nakadate is a photographer, video artist and filmmaker.  She was born in Austin, Texas and raised in Ames, Iowa.  She received a B.F.A. from Tufts University and The School of The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and a M.F.A. in photography from Yale University. Her work has been exhibited at MoMA, The Yerba Buena, The Getty Museum, and The Reina Sofia.  In 2009, her first feature film, STAY THE SAME NEVER CHANGE,  premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and went on to be featured in New Directors/ New Films at The Museum of Modern Art and Lincoln Center. Her second feature film, THE WOLF KNIFE, premiered at the 2010 Los Angeles Film Festival and was nominated for a 2010 Gotham Independent Film Award and a 2011 Independent Spirit Award. Her solo show, "Only the Lonely", is on view at MoMA P.S.1 until August 8, 2011.  She is represented by Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects and lives in New York City.

Internationally acclaimed photographer, videographer, and filmmaker Shirin Neshat first came to prominence in the mid-1990s when she exhibited her series the Women of Allah, an extraordinary body of work exploring women in Islamic culture. Since then, the Iranian-born artist has continued to explore difficult subjects: the boundaries between East and West, men and women, the sacred and the profane, exile and belonging. Her work is marked by its graphic boldness and stirring imagery.

François Noudelmann is a professor at Paris VIII University. He is the author of several books on critical genealogy and elaborates a philosophy of family likeness. As a producer for French radio France-Culture, he is also committed to promoting sound cultures.
His last book Le Toucher des philosophes. Sartre, Nietzsche et Barthes au piano ("The Touch of Philosophers: Sartre, Nietzsche and Barthes at the Piano")(to be translated and published by Columbia University Press in December) makes the musical dimension of thought heard. His next book, Les Airs de famille, une philosophie des affinités ("Family Likeness, a philosophy of affinities") (Gallimard) will be published in February.

The National Theater of the United States of America was created in 2000 with the inaugural production Garvey and Superpant$:Episode #23, for which a lavish, miniature 1930's era vaudeville theater was constructed in the basement of a dilapidated deli in Times Square. The piece was a popular and critical success, and firmly established the company on the New York theater scene. In 2001, as chashama artists-in-residence, the NTUSA created Episode #17 of our Fathers, Garvey & Superpant$: Placebo Sunrise, converting a vacant storefront on 42nd St. into a 1950’s era Havana-style nightclub. An audience of forty followed the amnesiac heroes from Episode #23 on a paranoiac holiday, sipping custom ‘placebo’ cocktails in vertical tiers of seating. The show ran for three and a half months to sold-out houses and was hailed as one the years 10 best by Time Out New York. In 2002 The NTUSA was awarded Arts International’s DNA project Grant and remounted Episode #23 at the 2002 ESB-Dublin Fringe Festival. (“...blows most of what we see these days on bourgeois stages out of the water” the Guardian.) The NTUSA also offered a one night only special presentation of Jack Russell’s Superconfidence Seminar™! at Galapagos in Brooklyn. In 2003, in residence at Nest Arts in DUMBO, Brooklyn, the NTUSA created What’s That On My HEAD!?! Conceived as a theme park ride, the show’s audience rode a mobile platform pushed and pulled through the space, visiting sets on all sides. HEAD!?! explored multiple visions of the American Dream, alternate versions of accepted history and the culture's dual tendencies towards complacency and revolt. The show was extended twice and ran for ten weeks (January to March 2004). In 2004, at The Stable, the company prepared its return to the 2004 ESB-Dublin Fringe Festival with Placebo Sunrise, and work shopped material for a new work. They also provided space for companies and individuals whose work went on to be seen at St. Anne’s Warehouse, Symphony Space, the Brooklyn Museum, the Ice Factory Festival, and PS122. In January 2006 the NTUSA premiered Abacus Black Strikes Now: The Rampant Justice of Abacus Black at Performance Space 122 (2006 Village Voice OBIE award,) and developed an adaptation of Moliere’s Don Juan, which was presented as a workshop to limited audiences at chashama’s Bank Vault space in Long Island City, Queens. In May, 2007, the NTUSA received the second Annual Spalding Gray Award honoring innovative writing and performance, a co-commission for a new work entitled The Chautauqua Lectures. The piece was inspired by the Lecture series of the same name which traveled the country from 1874 to the 1930’s and was  presented at PS122, The Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, UCLA Live and other venues in 2008/2009.

Pierre Pachet became known as a literary critic (in La Quinzaine Littéraire, La Nouvelle Revue Française, Esprit, Le Monde...) and as the author of inventive novels such as Autobiographie de mon père (Autobiography of my father) (Autrement, 1994). He is also the author of literary essays on the power of sleep (La force de dormir – The strength to sleep – Gallimard, 1988), on political issues (La Violence du temps – The violence of time – Seuil, 1982), on the emergence of the modern individual (Les Baromètres de l’âme, naissance d’un journal intime – The soul’s barometers, birth of a personal diary – Pluriel, 2001). He translated Plato’s Republic, among other classical texts, and teaches literature at the University of Paris 7.

Books by Pierre Pachet are available .

Annie-B Parson founded Big Dance Theater with Paul Lazar in 1991. She has created 14 pieces for the company, touring the work both nationally and internationally. In New York, her work has been presented at Dance Theater Workshop, The Kitchen, Classic Stage Company, and the Guggenheim Works & Process Series. She was honored with a BESSIE in 2002 for her body of work with the company, and was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007. Since 1993 she has been an instructor of choreography at NYU’s Experimental Theater Wing. Her choreography for TV and film includes Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia.

is the author of the novel This Vacant Paradise, loosely based on Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth. Her story collection Drift was a finalist for the California Book Award and the 2009 Story Prize. Her work has appeared in various publications and journals, including the Los Angeles Times, Alaska Quarterly Review, and the Southern Review. Her essays appear in the anthologies Bound to Last: 30 Writers on Their Most Cherished Book (De Capo Press, 2010) and The American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books (Soft Skull Press, 2011). She lives with her family in Southern California and teaches through the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program and as a Visiting Assistant Professor at UC Riverside.

Robert Polito received his PhD in English and American Language and Literature from Harvard. His most recent books are the poetry collection Hollywood & God and The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber (2009). His other books include Doubles, A Reader’s Guide to James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover, and Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson, which received the National Book Critics Circle award in biography. He is the founder and Director of the New School Graduate Writing Program, and is completing a new book, Detours: Seven Noir Lives. He is a contributing editor of BOMB, Fence, LIT, and The Boston Review. He has taught at Harvard, Wellesley, and New York University.

Avital Ronell studied at the Hermeneutics Institute in Berlin with Jacob Taubes, earned her doctorate at Princeton University, and then worked with Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous in Paris. As one of the first translators of Jacques Derrida’s work into English, she in effect introduced his work to the American academy. She is a professor of English, German and Comparative Literature at New York University and teaches literature at the European Graduate School. Avital Ronell’s work, thoroughly transdisciplinary, consistently slips the bounds of traditional academic castes, earning her accolades from often disparate spheres of the cultural milieu. She is the author of The Test Drive and of The Telephone Book.

Israel Rosenfield received an M.D. from the New York University School of Medicine and a Ph.D. from Princeton University. He is a professor at the City University of New York and his books include The Invention of Memory: A New View of the Brain (Basic Books, 1988) and the satirical novel Freud's 'Megalomania' (W. W. Norton & Company, 2001). He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a longtime contributor to The New York Review of Books. His review of Oliver Sack's book, The Mind's Eye will appear in the April issue of Harper's Magazine.

Books by Israel Rosenfield are available .

Dan Safer comes from the wild suburbs of New Jersey. He works as a artistic director and choreographer for the dance company Witness Relocation. His work has been presented in various locations, including Off-Broadway, La MaMa, Dance Theater Workshop The Ontological Theater, Patravadi Theatre (Bangkok), Theater Krudttonden (Denmark), the CUNY Prelude Festival, Dixon Place, Danspace Project; he has choreographed operas, rock videos and fashion shows, and wrote a seven episode serial play with David Lindsay-Abaire. He founded and directed the Bangkok Performance Boot Camp, is faculty at NYU, and teaches workshops across the USA and internationally. Artforum Magazine called him "pure expressionistic danger". He used to be a go-go dancer, and once choreographed the Queen of Thailands Birthday Party.

Salette Gressett is a trans-Atlantic cultural manager with expertise in contemporary performance, Live Art, interdisciplinary and socially-engaged practices in the US, UK and EU. For over 10 years, she held a unique position at national funding agency Arts Council England of working across the departments of Visual Arts, Theatre, Dance and Combined Arts to support leading artists and curators creating work beyond traditional artform boundaries including live installation, creative re-enactment, site-specific, immersive theatre, arts activism and evolving performative practices. Prior to the Arts Council, Salette managed international touring for Momentary Fusion, the first aerial dance theatre portfolio company of the British Council. She previously worked in arts funding programs in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and in several artist-led venues including Theatre Artaud, San Francisco, and Highways Performance Space where she began her career working with the founders during the influential venue’s formative years. Salette is currently a freelance Live Art producer and advisor in New York City, living in Brooklyn.

Patrick Savidan received his M.A. in political theory from the University of Ottawa, and his Ph.D from the University Paris-Sorbonne. He is currently a Professor of social and political philosophy at the University of Poitiers (France). He is also director of the philosophy journal Raison publique, and president of the Observatoire des inégalités (French Observatory of Inequalities. His research interests focus on issues of democracy, social justice, diversity, and the social and political relevance of literature. He is the translator of Charles Taylor into French. He has published several books, including Repenser l’égalité des chances (Reconsidering Equal Opportunities) (Grasset, 2007).

 

Books by Patrick Savidan are available .

Philip Schrag is a Professor of Law at Georgetown University and director of the Center for Applied Legal Studies, where students represent asylum applicants under faculty supervision. Before joining the Law Center faculty in 1981, he was assistant counsel to the NAACP Legal Defense Educational Fund, Consumer Advocate of the City of New York, a professor at Columbia University Law School, and Deputy General Counsel of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, from which he received a Meritorious Honor Award in 1981.

Poet/critic Lytle Shaw works primarily on American literature with emphasis on poetics, art and theory. His books include Cable Factory 20, The Lobe, and Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie. A contributing editor for Cabinet, he has recently published catalog essays on Robert Smithson and Zoe Leonard for DIA Center; on Gerard Byrne for Koenig Books, and on The Royal Art Lodge for the Drawing Center. His collaborative work with the artist Jimbo Blachly has been exhibited widely. Shaw is currently working on two books: one about the politics of time in depicted landscapes and another about the status of poetry in recent theoretical debates.

Justin E. H. Smith teaches philosophy at Concordia University in Montreal. He is the author of Divine Machines: Leibniz and the Sciences of Life (Princeton University Press, 2011). His new book project is entitled Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference: Early Modern Natural Philosophy in Global Context, 1600–1800. He will be a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, in the spring of 2011.

Luc Steels is professor of Computer Science at the Free University of Brussels (VUB), founder and director of the VUB Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and chairman of the VUB Computer Science Department. He also heads the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris. His scientific research interests cover the whole field of artificial intelligence, including natural language, vision, robot behavior, and knowledge representation.

Ginger Strand grew up in Texas, Missouri, Illinois, Wisconsin and Michigan, but mostly on a farm in Michigan. She has published essays and fictions in many places, including Harper's, The Believer, The Iowa Review, The New England Review, and Orion, where she is a contributing editor. A former fellow in the Behrman Center for the Humanities at Princeton, she has received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Mellon Foundation, the Eisenhower Foundation, and the American Antiquarian Society, as well as residency grants from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the Center for Land Use Interpretation, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo. She lives in New York City.

Carole Talon-Hugon is a specialist in the theory of passions in the 17th century. She teaches philosophy and aesthetics at the University of Nice where she is the director of the Centre de Recherche en Histoire des Idées (Center for Research in the History of Ideas). Her work deals mainly with the history of classical philosophy (more specifically the European 17th century), with aesthetics (more specifically 17th century theories of taste as well as the link between ethics and aesthetics or analytical and phenomenological aesthetics), and theories of affectivity.

Lynne Tillman is a novelist, short story writer, and critic. Her fiction includes the novels Haunted Houses, Motion Sickness, Cast in Doubt, and No Lease on Life, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction. Tillman's art and literary criticism has been published in Artforum, Frieze, Aperture, Nest, The Village Voice, The Guardian, Bomb, and The New York Times Book Review. She has written stories for a variety of contemporary artists' books and catalogues, including those of Kiki Smith, Juan Munoz, Jessica Stockholder, Barbara Kruger, Roni Horn, and Vik Muniz.

Peter Turchi has taught at Northwestern University and Appalachian State University, has twice been on the faculty of the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, has directed The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina, and now teaches at Arizona State University. His stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Story, The Alaska Quarterly Review, Puerto del Sol, and The Colorado Review, among other journals. He has received Washington College’s Sophie Kerr Prize, an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award, North Carolina’s Sir Walter Raleigh Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Philippe Vasset is a journalist and author. With degrees in geography, philosophy and international relations, he has worked in an American private investigation firm, among other roles. He is currently chief editor of Intelligence Online, a magazine focusing on industrial and political intelligence-gathering. He wrote several novels and a piece of non fiction, Un livre blanc : Récit avec cartes (blank book: a story with maps). In the wake of this last work he created, along with artists l’Atelier de géographie parallèle (the alternate geograhy workshop). This research collective, aiming to open new perspectives to geography, is interested in blank zones, those non-defined places, on the outskirts of towns, about which maps have nothing to say.

Radio producer Benjamen Walker hosted "Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything", a hybrid documentary format that retains many elements of personal storytelling and drama. He worked at WNYC Public Radio, where he helped produce "Street Shots", the multi-platform series exploring New York street photography. Walker can now be heard Mondays 6-7pm EST on WFMU in Jersey City, where  he produces the weekly radio show and podcast "Too Much Information".

Alex Waterman is a founding member of the Plus Minus Ensemble, based in Brussels and London, specializing in avant-garde and experimental music. In New York he performs with the Either/Or Ensemble. He has performed as guest musician with numerous ensembles, including Trio Event (Berlin), Champs d'Action-Antwerp, Q-O2-Brussels, and Magpie Music and Dance Company. Waterman has composed music for numerous European ballets and modern performances. Alex is presently working on his PhD in musicology at NYU as well as writing a book about the composer Robert Ashley with the designer and writer Will Holder. His writings have been published by Dot Dot Dot, Paregon, FoArm, and Artforum.

Born in Tijuana, Baja California, Heriberto Yepez teaches philosophy at the Autonomous University of Baja California. Yepez's collaborations with other artists and academics reveals an intellectual and creative fluency in multiple artistic languages. His poetry persuasively challenges the way we might think about the possibilities of a poem. In his most recent project, Here is Tijuana!, Yepez has collaborated with an anthropologist (Fiamma Montezemolo) and an architect (Rene Peralta) to explore and document the ever-changing and often fraught socio-cultural forms of the city. His Babellebab: Non-Poetry on the End of Translation was published in the U.S. by Duration Press in 2003