Speakers

Video Contributors

• Yasmin Hernandez

  Yasmin Hernandez is a Brooklyn-born and Puerto Rico-based artist and writer whose work is rooted in individual and collective liberation practices. Yasmin studied art at Cornell University and served as an artist educator with Taller Puertorriqueño, Philadelphia; El Museo del Barrio, East Harlem; Studio Museum, Harlem. She has also taught art to Pre K-12th grade students in Aguadilla. In 2017 she was invited to exhibit as part of Occupy Museum’s Debt Fair installation at The Whitney Biennial, with a segment focused on the Puerto Rico debt crisis. She has subsequently used her art in aid efforts following the twin hurricanes of Irma and María.

• Adam Szymczyk

  Adam Szymczyk was the Artistic Director of Documenta 14, Athens and Kassel, from 2013 to 2017. Prior to his position at Documenta, he was Director and Chief Curator of the Kunsthalle Basel. He was also the co-curator of the 2008 edition of the Berlin Biennale, and he cofounded the Foksal Gallery Foundation in Warsaw, Poland. In 2011, the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas, gave him the Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement.

• Hillary Brenhouse

  Hillary Brenhouse is a Montreal-born writer focused on women, religion and culture, and alternative living arrangements. She is also the co-editor-in-chief of Guernica, a magazine of global art and politics, and curates its special themed issues. She is also a senior editor for The Guardian. She’s published in The New Yorker online, The Oxford American, TIME, the New York Times, and elsewhere. And she’s edited for The Guardian, Topic, and The Nation, among others. She edits nonfiction manuscripts on a freelance basis, too.

• Salil Shetty

  Salil Shetty joined Amnesty International as the organization’s eighth Secretary General in 2010. A long-term activist on poverty and justice, Salil Shetty leads the movement’s worldwide work to end human rights violations and has spearheaded a significant move of Amnesty International’s work to the global south. Before joining Amnesty International, he was Director of the United Nations Millennium Campaign from 2003 to 2010, credited with significantly increasing awareness of and accountability for the Millennium Development Goals across the world. From 1998 to 2003, Salil Shetty was Chief Executive of ActionAid, a leading international development NGO. Salil Shetty studied at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad and at the London School of Economics.

• Hawk Newsome

  Hawk Newsome is an activist and a prominent leader of New Civil Rights Movement. In 2013, Hawk joined the Justice League NYC and has engaged in their national campaign to fix the broken criminal justice system. Previously to his work with the Black Lives Matter Movement, he was a County Committee Member of New York’s District 79. He has previously worked as a paralegal and later as Special Projects Coordinator for the office of the Honorable Robert T. Johnson at the Bronx County Office of the District Attorney. As the DA’s liaison to the community, he worked with N.Y.C.H.A tenants’ associations and social service organizations throughout the Bronx. Hawk attended Howard University Law School, Washington, DC. and completed his Jurist Doctorate at Touro Law School, Long Island, NY.

• Pablo Helguera

  Pablo Helguera has been Director of Adult and Education Programs at The Museum of Modern Art since 2007. Previously, he was Senior Manager of Adult Programs at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1998–2005), and Manager of Public Programs at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1996–98), among other positions. Over the course of a 20-year career in museums, Helguera has conceptualized or directed more than 700 public programs for over 150 exhibitions. As an artist, Helguera has exhibited and performed widely in international museums and biennials. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, Creative Capital and Franklin Furnace grants, and was the first recipient of the International Award of Participatory Art of the Emilia Romagna Region in Italy (2011). He obtained his PhD from Kingston University, London, where he has been visiting professor since 2004.

• James Victore

  James Victore is an author, artist and designer to brave clients. As a creative thought leader, James is a sought after speaker known for his timely wisdom and impassioned views about creativity and its place in the world. He teaches how to illuminate individual gifts in order to find clarity and purpose. His work is represented in the permanent collections of museums worldwide.

• Jana Traboulsi

  Jana Traboulsi is a designer, illustrator, artist, and teacher. Her work focuses on image making as critical commentary, often bridging between the personal and the socio-political. She is the art director of the pan-arab quarterly Bidayat and the Lebanese publishing house Snoubar Bayrout. In 2014 she co-founded Sigil with Khaled Malas, Salim Al-Kadi and Alfred Tarazi. Sigil is an Arab art collective that seeks to explore the marvelous and terrifying metamorphoses of the Arab landscape that is the stake and site of historical and contemporary struggles.

• Guerrilla Girls

  The Guerrilla Girls are feminist activist artists. They wear gorilla masks in public and use facts, humor and outrageous visuals to expose gender and ethnic bias as well as corruption in politics, art, film, and pop culture. Their anonymity keeps the focus on the issues, and away from who they might be: they could be anyone and they are everywhere. They believe in an intersectional feminism that fights discrimination and supports human rights for all people and all genders. They undermine the idea of a mainstream narrative by revealing the understory, the subtext, the overlooked, and the downright unfair. They have done hundreds of projects (posters, actions, books, videos, stickers) all over the world. They also do interventions and exhibitions at museums, blasting them on their own walls for their bad behavior and discriminatory practices, including their 2015 stealth projection on the façade of the Whitney Museum about income inequality and the super rich hijacking art.

• Michael Hardt

  Michael Hardt is an American philosopher and a Professor of Literature at Duke University. His writings explore the new forms of domination in the contemporary world as well as the social movements and other forces of liberation that resist them. In the Empire trilogy – Empire (2000), Multitude (2004), and Commonwealth (2009) – he and Antonio Negri investigate the political, legal, economic, and social aspects of globalization. They also study the political and economic alternatives that could lead to a more democratic world. Their pamphlet Declaration (2012) attempts to articulate the significance of the encampments and occupations that began in 2011, from Tahrir Square to Zuccotti Park, and to recognize the primary challenges faced by emerging democratic social movements today.