Lena Herzog is a Russian-born American artist based in Los Angeles and New York. She is the author of six books of photography. Her work has appeared in and was reviewed by The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, the Los Angeles Times, The Paris Review and Cabinet, among other publications. Lena’s work has been widely exhibited in Europe and the United States. She is the Director and Producer of Last Whispers, a project on the mass extinction of languages which premiered at the British Museum.

Jenna Freedman is the Associate Director of Communications and Zine Librarian at the Barnard College Library and has worked there since 2003. She is a founding member of the Zine Librarians Yahoo Group and of Radical Reference and writes and speaks frequently for trade and scholarly publications, and library and academic conferences about zines. Jenna founded and edited the quarterly Zine Reviews column in Library Journal, which ran from 2008-2012.

Isha Datar has been the CEO of New Harvest since 2013. She has been pioneering the field of cellular agriculture since 2009, when she published “Possibilities for an in-vitro meat production system” in the food science journal Innovative Food Science and Emerging Technologies. She co-founded Muufri, making milk without cows, in April 2014 and Clara Foods, making eggs without chickens, in November 2014. She was recognized as one of 13 women leading the life sciences movement in Silicon Valley in TechCrunch in 2016.

Fred Benenson is a Kickstarter Fellow and emoji translation expert. With the support of Kickstarter fundraising, Fred published Emoji Dick, an emoji translation of Herman Melville’s classic Moby Dick, which in 2013 became the first emoji book acquired by The Library of Congress. He is also the author of How to Speak Emoji. Founder of Free Culture @ NYU and a former Creative Commons representative, he occasionally teaches copyrights and cyberlaw at NYU.

Mark Fettes is Associate Professor, Faculty of Education and Associate Director, Imaginative Education Research Group (IERG). He is also the President of the World Esperanto Association, an organization that works to promote the Esperanto language while also stimulating discussion of the world language problem and to call attention to the necessity of equality among languages. He has previously worked with First Nations organizations around issues of language maintenance and revitalization. This in turn is related to his long-term interest in cultural diversity and intercultural communication, and particularly the management of multilingualism in a globalized world.

Emma Ramadan is a literary translator based in Providence, Rhode Island. She attended Brown University and later earned her Master’s degree in Cultural Translation at the American University of Paris. She specializes in translating French to English, and has received various honors and awards for her work, having been the recipient of an NEA Translation Fellowship, a PEN/Heim grant, and a Fulbright scholarship. In 2015 she completed a Fulbright Fellowship in Marrakech, Morocco, where she catalogued and translated the archives of the late Moroccan author Ahmed Bouanani.

Karthik Dinakar is a research scientist and Reid Hoffman Fellow at MIT who started the Applied Machine Learning and the Cambridge Computational Clinical Psychology Org interest groups at MIT and Harvard. He is interested in large scale bayesian data science - scalable machine learning, probabilistic graphical models, human-in-the-loop computation and fail-soft computing. Before his work at MIT he ‘machine learnified’ large scale query-entity relationships for the Bing search engine’s knowledge graph Satori. He has previously held positions at Deustche Bank and at Yahoo R&D, where he worked with a team on the Enthusiast Platform. At Carnegie Mellon University he studied human-computer interaction and machine learning.

Shigetaka Kurita is an artist and designer who created the first emoji in 1999 for the Japanese telecom giant NTT DoCoMo. While the system offered emails, they were restricted to 250 characters, so emoji were a way to say more in a limited space. While emoji were immediately copied by other Japanese telecoms companies, the symbols were not standardized, meaning they could not be used across different networks. Additionally, they stayed fairly limited to Japan until 2010 when they were incorporated into Unicode, the standard that governs the software coding of text. That year, 722 emoji were released on both iPhone and Android. In 2016, the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired 176 miniature drawings of faces, objects, and abstract places, etc.

Janice Kamrin is an Associate Curator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Janice holds a BA from Bryn Mawr College and a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests include Middle Kingdom tomb art and the archaeology of Thebes. Before coming to The Met, Janice lived in Egypt, where she directed several projects at the Egyptian Museum, Cairo, and worked with the head of the Antiquities Service.

Sara Bodinson is Director, Interpretation, Research & Digital Learning at The Museum of Modern Art. She joined the Museum in 2000, coordinating internships for college and graduate students as well as programs and web initiatives for teens. In 2009, she began to oversee the Museum’s interpretive planning process and the development of resources including labels, audio, apps, games, and participatory spaces, as well as qualitative visitor research and evaluation. In 2015, her responsibilities expanded to oversee digital learning initiatives, including online courses and podcasts. Bodinson holds a BA in art history and film studies from Smith College and an MA in art history from Hunter College, where she wrote her thesis about the Arab Image Foundation. She is a member of the executive committee of the Professional Organization of Women in the Arts and the Smith College Museum of Art Visiting Committee.