MoMA R&D

Es Devlin is a British contemporary artist who aims to amaze people into changing their minds. She creates large-scale sculptures that combine light, music, and language in order to encourage the cognitive and behavioral shifts that are becoming ever more urgent in the context of the Climate Emergency. Her work has been displayed at Tate Modern, Serpentine, V&A, and PACE Gallery’s Superblue Miami alongside a new work by James Turrell. She has created stage sculptures for Beyoncé, The Weeknd, U2, the Royal Opera House, National Theatre, La Scala, and the Met Opera as well as the 2022 Super Bowl featuring Dr. Dre, Kendrick Lamar, and Eminem.

Rediet Abebe is a PhD candidate in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University. Her research focuses on algorithms, AI, and applications to social good. She is a co-founder and co-organizer of Black in AI, a group for sharing ideas, fostering collaborations and discussing initiatives to increase the presence of Black people in the field of artificial intelligence. She is also a co-founder and co-organizer of Mechanism Design for Social Good, an interdisciplinary, multi-institutional research group working on applications of algorithms and AI to social good. Her work has been supported by fellowships and scholarships through Facebook and Google. She is also a 2013-2014 Harvard-Cambridge Fellow.

Aina Abiodun is cofounder of StoryCode, an open-source, global community for emerging and established cross-platform and immersive storytellers. Aina is an award-winning filmmaker who has expanded her creative work across media platforms. Aina has written, directed and produced campaigns and platform extensions for Project Runway, Barbie, Hot Wheels, Seamless Web, and The Huffington Post.

Nancy Adelson is Deputy General Counsel, The Museum of Modern Art. Before joining MoMA in 1998, Nancy worked with Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts (VLA), a legal aid organization that provides free legal assistance and information to low-income artists. Nancy counseled artist-clients, taught legal clinics, and lectured on legal issues of concern to the arts community.

Christina Agapakis is a biologist, writer, and artist known for her experiments exploring the future of biotechnology. She collaborates with engineers, designers, artists, and social scientists to explore the many unexpected connections between microbiology, technology, art, and popular culture. During her PhD in synthetic biology at Harvard University she explored biological design principles through interdisciplinary work with complex biological systems, from hydrogen producing bacteria to photosynthetic animals to cheese. She is currently creative director at Ginkgo Bioworks, an organism design company that is bringing biology to industrial engineering.

Liz Agbor-Tabi is Associate Director, City Relationships at 100 Resilient Cities, an initiative pioneered by the Rockefeller Foundation. Liz helped develop and implement health system programs in Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and Latin America. She served as a Health Policy Analyst and Presidential Management Fellow at the US Department of Health and Human Services, where she developed and implemented Emergency Preparedness policies for vulnerable populations.

Ola Ronke Akinmowo is a Brooklyn-born artist and community activist. She is a recent Culture Push Fellowship recipient for her new performance piece: The Free Black Woman’s Library, a radical mobile library and interactive biblio installation that focuses exclusively on the literary output of Black Women, highlighting authorship that is often ignored.

Alexandra Amon is an astrophysicist whose research focuses on cosmology and understanding our dark Universe, mostly using a tool called ‘weak gravitational lensing’. At present, she is Assistant Professor of Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University co-coordinates the team within the Dark Energy Survey – a large international collaboration. Recently, she won the Caroline Herschel Prize. After growing up in Trinidad and Tobago, Alexandra studied at the University of Edinburgh, and then took a research fellowship at Stanford University. Her doctorate thesis won the Royal Astronomical Society Michael Penston Thesis Prize. An avid science communicator, she has featured on platforms such as New Scientist, Al Jazeera and PBS ‘Ancient Skies’.

Elijah Anderson, the William K. Lanman Jr. Professor of Sociology at Yale University, is a pioneering urban ethnographer who has explored the space of the city from a sociological perspective, focusing on race. He is the author of several books, including Streetwise: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community (1990), Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City (1999), and A Place on the Corner (1978; second ed. 2003). His talk, focusing on “White Space,” is based on his most recent book, The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Race and Civility in Everyday Life (2012).

Laura Anderson Barbata is an artist born in Mexico who works between New York City and Mexico City. Barbata’s work is focused on participatory art projects that document communities and traditions, using art forms as platforms for social change, contemporary performance, and group participation. Among them is her ongoing project The Repatriation of Julia Pastrana, begun in 2005, which resulted in the removal of Pastrana’s body from the Schreiner Collection in Oslo and its successful repatriation and burial in Sinaloa, Mexico, Pastrana’s birth state.

Stefan Andriopoulos is Professor of German and co-founder of the Center for Comparative Media at Columbia University. He is author of Ghostly Apparitions: German Idealism, the Gothic Novel, and Optical Media (Zone Books, 2013), which was named book of the year in Times Literary Supplement. His previous book Possessed: Hypnotic Crimes, Corporate Fiction, and the Invention of Cinema (University of Chicago Press, 2008) won the SLSA Michelle Kendrick award for best academic book on literature, science, and the arts.

He is currently working on a new project that adopts a historical perspective on how the introduction of new technologies has increased the circulation of rumors and misinformation, from Gutenberg to QAnon. A short and accessible article, “The Multiplication of Monsters,” came out recently in Public Books. A longer essay, “Rumor and Media: On Circulations and Credence (via Kant and Marx),” has been published in Grey Room.

Ashton Applewhite is a leading spokesperson for a movement to mobilize against discrimination on the basis of age. She blogs at This Chair Rocks, has written for Harper’s, Playboy, and The New York Times, and is the voice of Yo, Is This Ageist? She has been named as a Fellow by the Knight Foundation, The New York Times, Yale Law School, and the Royal Society for the Arts. In 2015, Ashton was included in a list of 100 inspiring women who are committed to social change in the inaugural issue of Salt magazine.

Jake Barton is Principal and founder of Local Projects, a media design firm for museums and public spaces that is currently responsible for creating the media design for the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum (with Diller Scofidio + Renfro), and the Frank Gehry–designed Eisenhower Presidential Memorial. Jake is recognized as a leader in the field of interaction design for physical spaces, and in the creation of collaborative storytelling projects in which participants generate content.

Sunny Bates operates wherever executives, thinkers, artists, creators, innovators, and entrepreneurs connect and collide around the globe. Her medium is people, her expertise human network development. Author, serial entrepreneur, mentor, and advisor, her client roster has included some of the world’s most prominent organizations, from GE, TED, and Credit Suisse to MTV, the National Academy of Sciences, Techstars, and Kickstarter, of which she is a founding board member. Bates’s approach to unleashing potential is unique: it puts people, network building, and management at the center of growth and possibility. She finds the connecting threads that exist all around us and brings them together in new and imaginative ways.

Danielle Belton is a journalist and the editor in chief of HuffPost. She is the former editor-in-chief of The Root, a position she held from 2017 to 2021. Belton has written and edited for publications including theGrio, Essence, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. She also created the award-winning blog The Black Snob. Before joining The Root, Belton was editor-at-large for black women’s news site Clutch Magazine Online, and was the first black woman to lead a writer’s room in late night as the head writer for BET Networks’ NAACP Image Award-nominated talk show, “Don’t Sleep”.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat is Professor of History and Italian Studies at New York University. She writes about fascism, authoritarianism, propaganda, and democracy protection. She is the recipient of Guggenheim and other fellowships, an advisor to Protect Democracy, and an MSNBC opinion columnist. She appears frequently on CNN, MSNBC, PBS, and other networks. Her latest book, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present (2020; paperback with a new epilogue, 2021), examines how illiberal leaders use corruption, violence, propaganda, and machismo to stay in power, and how resistance to them has unfolded over a century. She is also a consultant for businesses, civil society organizations, and television and film productions, including Guillermo del Toro’s Academy Award-winning 2022 movie Pinocchio and the 2024 Netflix docuseries Hitler and the Nazis: Evil on Trial.

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.

Rich Benjamin is the author of Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America, selected as an Editor’s Choice by Booklist and The American Library Association. This groundbreaking study is one of few to have illuminated in advance the rise of white anxiety and white nationalism. His cultural and political analysis appear regularly in public debate, including in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Guardian, The New York Times Sunday Book Review, NPR, MSNBC, and CNN. His research has received support from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Roger Benson is the Macaulay Curator and the Curator-in-Charge of Fossil Amphibians, Reptiles, and Birds and Fossil Plants in the Division of Paleontology at the Natural History Museum in New York. His research spans from field discovery and detailed anatomy of fossils, up to quantitative analysis of the large-scale patterns of evolution that have shaped biodiversity. It incorporates 3D morphometric and comparative study of both living and fossil species, phylogenetic palaeobiology, quantitative studies of form-function relationships, and classic elements of palaeontology/systematics. His expertise is focused on Mesozoic and Late Palaeozoic groups including dinosaurs and other reptiles. His research group has addressed fundamental questions on the deep time evolutionary history of tetrapods more widely, including mammals, birds, crocodylians, turtles, lizards and their ancestors. It also finds links between the past and the present, using large datasets of extant species anatomy to test hypotheses of the ecology of extinct species such as dinosaurs.

Holly Block is Executive Director of The Bronx Museum of Modern Art. Co-commissioner of the American Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale. Previously, Holly was the art director of Art in General, a nonprofit organization, founded in 1981, that is famed for assisting artists early in their careers with the production and presentation of new work.

Neil Blumenthal is cofounder and co-CEO of Warby Parker, a lifestyle brand offering designer eyewear at a revolutionary price, while leading the way for socially conscious businesses. Prior to launching Warby Parker in 2010, Neil served as director of VisionSpring, a nonprofit that trains low-income women to sell affordable eyeglasses to individuals in the developing world. In 2012, he was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum and one of the 100 Most Creative People in Business by Fast Company.

Adam Bly is a scientist, entrepreneur, and thought leader who has spent the past 15 years innovating at the nexus of science and society. He is founder and CEO of Seed Scientific, the global data innovation firm. Adam was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, was a Visiting Senior Fellow in Science, Technology & Society at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and is a recipient of the Queen Elizabeth II Golden Jubilee Medal. Prior to founding Seed Scientific, Adam founded and served as editor-in-chief of Seed, a print and online magazine (published from 2001 to 2012) with a mission of modernizing science’s place in society. “The best comparison for Seed,” wrote a media critic, “is the early years of Rolling Stone, when music was less a subject than a lens for viewing culture.”

Paul Boghossian is Silver Professor of Philosophy at New York University and Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Birmingham, UK. He is the director of the New York Institute of Philosophy and NYU’s Global Institute for Advanced Study. He was also Chair of Philosophy at NYU from 1994 to 2004. His research interests are primarily in epistemology, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He has written on a variety of topics, including color, rule following, eliminativism, naturalism, self-knowledge, a priori knowledge, analytic truth, realism, relativism, the aesthetics of music, and the concept of genocide.

Bénédicte Boisseron is an Associate Professor of Afroamerican & African Studies at the University of Michigan. Her most recent book, Afro-Dog: Blackness and the Animal Question draws on recent debates about black life and animal rights to investigate the relationship between race and the animal in the history and culture of the Americas and the black Atlantic.

Tega Brain is an Australian-born artist and environmental engineer examining issues of ecology, data, automation, and infrastructure. She has created digital networks automated by environmental phenomena, schemes for obfuscating personal data, and a wildly popular, online smell-based dating service. Through these provisional systems she investigates how technologies orchestrate and reorchestrate agency. She has recently exhibited at the Smithsonian (Arts and Industries), the Vienna Biennale for Change, the Guangzhou Triennial and in venues like the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin and the Whitney Museum of Art, NYC. She is a 2023 Creative Capital Awardee and has also been a fellow at Eyebeam, Data & Society and the Australia Council for the Arts.

Her work has been widely discussed in the press including in the New York Times, Art in America, The Atlantic, NPR, Al Jazeera and The Guardian and in art and technology blogs like the Creators Project and Creative Applications. She has given talks and workshops at museums and festivals like EYEO, TedxSydney and the Sonar Festival.

Tega’s first book is Code as Creative Medium, co-authored with Golan Levin and published with MIT Press. She earned her PhD in New Media Arts and Technology at the Australian National University, School of Art and Design and she serves on the board of the School for Poetic Computation.

Leonardo Bravo is an artist, educator, and curator. His work in the museum and non-profit arts field has exemplified building public and private partnerships that highlight the power of the arts to transform and catalyze vulnerable and underserved communities. Leonardo is currently the Director, Public Engagement within the Learning and Engagement Department at MoMA where he oversees adult and artist related programs and is shaping a civic engagement strategy to work with communities throughout the New York region. Some of his most recent positions have included, Director of Curatorial and Strategic Programs for Clockshop, an arts organization dedicated to using the arts as a lens to how we experience public green space in Los Angeles; Director of Education and Public Programs with the Palm Springs Art Museum where he oversaw partnership development and program implementation with school districts in the Coachella Valley and the development of new curatorial and social engagement projects with contemporary artists at the museum; Director of School of Programs for The Music Center where he oversaw arts education partnerships with school districts throughout Los Angeles County. He is the founder and organizer of Big City Forum, an interdisciplinary, social practice and curatorial research project that brings attention to emergent practices across design, architecture, and the arts. Big City Forum provides an ongoing exploration of the intersections between these creative disciplines and new ways of knowledge making within the context of public space and social change. As a programming and curatorial platform it has developed collaborations and partnerships with Art Center Media Design Practice program, the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, Cal State University Dominguez Hills – College of Arts and Humanities, Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture, and Woodbury University School of Architecture among many others. Bravo has also been an adjunct professor with UCLA’s Department of World Arts Cultures/Dance within the School of the Arts and Architecture, and has served on the board of CREATE CA advising on arts education policy that impact students throughout the state of California. He holds a Master in Fine Arts from University of Southern California, Los Angeles with a focus in Fine Arts and Critical Theory and a BFA from the Otis School of Art and Design, Los Angeles.

Eric de Broche des Combes is an architect and industrial designer, and a lecturer in landscape at Harvard Graduate School of Design. As head of the visualization studio Luxigon, based in Paris, he has produced architectural renderings for high-profile architecture firms including OMA, MVRDV, REX, and Oppenheim. He has lectured widely and recently launched a new visualization project called “Le Nirvalab.” He will talk about his renderings, which borrow from real and virtual imagery.

Tania Bruguera is a Cuban installation and performance artist who lives between New York and Havana. Bruguera’s work pivots around issues of power and control, and several of her works interrogate and re- present events in Cuban history. As part of the work, Bruguera has launched an Immigrant Respect Awareness Campaign and launched an international day of actions on 18 December 2011 (which the UN has designated International Migrants Day), in which other artists will also make work about immigration.

Gregg Buchbinder was born and raised in California with a love and concern for the environment. With a dream to protect and preserve our environment, in 1998 Gregg saw the potential in Emeco, a down-at-the-heels military fabricator in Hanover, Pennsylvania. Gregg bought Emeco and transformed it from an industrial Navy producer into a top design furniture brand that uses waste material for input to make the best possible long lasting chairs.

Distinguished Professor of Political Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center, NYC, where she is a core faculty member of the Committee on Globalization and Social Change. She is Professor Emeritus in the Government Department of Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. Her training is in Continental Theory, specifically, German Critical Philosophy and the Frankfurt School. Her work crosses disciplines, including Art History, Architecture, Comparative Literature, Cultural Studies, German Studies, Philosophy, History, and Visual Culture. She is currently writing on the philosophy of history: History as the Cosmology of Modernity.

Crystal Z Campbell, is a multidisciplinary artist, experimental filmmaker, and writer of Black, Filipinx, and Chinese descents. Campbell finds complexity in public secrets—fragments of information known by many but undertold or unspoken. Campbell’s works use underloved archival material to consider historical gaps in the narrative of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, revisit questions of immortality and medical ethics with Henrietta Lacks’ “immortal” cell line, and salvage a 35mm film from a demolished Black activist theater in Brooklyn as a relic of gentrification. Select honors include a 2022 Creative Capital award, Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts, Harvard Radcliffe Fellowship, Pollock-Krasner Award, Rijksakademie, and Whitney ISP. Exhibitions and screenings include Artists Space, MOMA, Drawing Center, SFMOMA, ICA-Philadelphia, REDCAT, SculptureCenter, and Berlinale Forum Expanded. Campbell was a featured filmmaker at the 67th Flaherty Film Seminar, and their film, REVOLVER, received the Silver Hugo at the Chicago International Film Festival. Campbell is currently a Visiting Associate Professor in Art and Media Study at the University at Buffalo and lives in New York and Oklahoma.

Tracie Canada is an assistant professor of cultural anthropology and affiliated with the Sports & Race Project at Duke University. As a Black feminist anthropologist and ethnographer, her work uses sport to theorize race, kinship, care, and gender. In her first book project, under contract with University of California Press, Dr. Canada analyzes the performing athletic body to reveal how processes of injury, violence, and care impact the everyday lived experiences of Black college football players. An overall goal of her ethnographic research is to recenter not only what we consider to be anthropological knowledge, but also who we consider to be academic and public knowledge producers. Because she is committed to bringing current social, political, and popular culture events into the intellectual conversation, she founded and directs the HEARTS Lab. This innovative intellectual environment will engage scholars, fans, athletes, and writers to integrate academic and public audiences who are not usually in conversation about sport. In addition to her academic publications, Dr. Canada is a public writer who has contributed essays to outlets like Scientific American, SAPIENS, and Black Perspectives.

Dr. Micha Cárdenas is an artist/theorist who creates and studies trans of color movement in digital media, where movement includes migration, performance and mobility. Cárdenas is an assistant professor of interactive media design at the University of Washington Bothell. She completed her PhD in media arts and practice at the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. She is a member of the artist collective Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0, and her solo and collaborative work has been seen in museums, galleries, biennials, keynotes, and community and public spaces around the world. She tweets @michacardenas.

Vija Celmins is a Latvian-born American painter, sculptor, object-maker, and draughtswoman. Vija is most renowned for her photorealistic depictions of nature. Armed with a nuanced palette of blacks and grays, Vija renders these limitless spaces—seascapes, night skies, and the barren desert floor—with an uncanny accuracy, working for months on a single image.

Mark Chambers is an architect and Chief Sustainability Officer for Mayor Bill de Blasio and the City of New York. In this role, he leads the development of policies and programs to create an equitable, sustainable city where every resident can thrive. Mark’s work for NYC focuses on both battling climate change and confronting social inequality, two inextricable parts of the same fight for an inclusive green economy. Most recently, Mark served as the Director of Sustainability and Energy for Mayor Bowser in Washington, DC. He holds a graduate degree in Public Policy & Management and an undergraduate degree in Architecture, both from Carnegie Mellon University.

Rita Charon is Professor of medicine and founder and executive director of the Program in Narrative Medicine, Columbia University. Her research focuses on the consequences of narrative medicine practice, reflective clinical practice, and health care team effectiveness. At Columbia, she directs the Foundations of Clinical Practice faculty seminar, the Narrative and Social Medicine Scholarly Projects Concentration Track, the required Narrative Medicine curriculum for the medical school, and Columbia Commons: Collaborating Across Professions, a medical center–wide partnership devoted to health care team effectiveness. She is the author of Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness (Oxford University Press, 2006) and co-author of Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine (Oxford University Press, 2017).

Kyle Chayka is a contributing writer at The New Yorker, covering technology and culture on the Internet. His work has also appeared in The New Republic, the New York Times Magazine, and Harper’s, among other publications. Chayka’s first nonfiction book, “The Longing for Less,” a history of minimalism, was published in 2020. He is at work on his second book, “Filterworld,” which explores the impact of algorithmic technology on culture. Recently, he co-founded Dirt, a Web3 media company.

Marcia Day Childress is Professor Emerita of Medical Education and Harrison Distinguished Teaching Professor Emerita in the School of Medicine. For twenty-five years (1996-2021), she directed Programs in Humanities in the Center for Health Humanities and Ethics, including humanities and arts courses and co-curricular activities for medical students. During those same years, she directed and produced the Medical Center Hour, the School of Medicine’s weekly public forum on medicine, society, and healthcare, which marked its fiftieth year of continuous production in 2020-2021. She was founding director of the center-based Edward W. Hook Scholars Program, a four-year track for selected medical students who wish to make the humanities, bioethics, or arts part of their pathway into medicine. A literature scholar by training, Professor Childress designed and taught medical school courses in Literature and Medicine and Images of Medicine, directed senior students’ research in humanities and the arts, and oversaw humanities elective courses for medical students. She co-developed Clinician’s Eye, an art museum-based visual analysis workshop for health professionals. Together with a law professor, she led Interprofessional Seminars in Ethical Values and Professional Life for medical, law, and graduate design students. Within and beyond the medical school, she developed and led numerous special programs, interprofessional conferences, and public events featuring humanities and arts in relation to health, healthcare, and health professional education.

Dan Choi founded REMY NY, an ethical, fair-trade hair extensions company, in 2017. With a mission of bringing more equity and transparency to the hair trade, his social enterprise is now providing life-changing opportunities to impoverished women around the world, as well as raising the standards for a multi-billion dollar industry that has historically suffered from corruption and shady business practices. Predominantly sourcing his hair from Vietnam, Dan is pioneering change for women who are prone to exploitation by paying high and fair wages for women’s hair all while providing work opportunities.

Hazel Clark is a Professor of Design Studies and Fashion Studies at Parsons School of Design, where she has also served as Dean of Art and Design History and Theory and Research Chair of Fashion. Her scholarship focuses on uncovering new perspectives, cultures, and geographies for the study of fashion and design, in Europe, the United States, and China. She is the author of numerous books and articles, including: The Fabric of Cultures: Fashion, Identity, and Globalization and Fashion and Everyday Life: London and New York.

Alexa Clay, who describes herself as a “culture-hacker” and “innovation specialist,” has a background in ethnography, history, philosophy of science, moral philosophy, and creative writing. She has specialized in research on underground activities in times of economic transition, and her recent book The Misfit Economy explores innovation among those who break the rules or operate in informal or illegal economies.

Jane Coaston was the host of Opinion’s podcast “The Argument.” Previously, she was the senior politics reporter at Vox, with a focus on conservatism and the G.O.P. Her work has appeared on MSNBC, CNN and NPR and in National Review, The Washington Post, The Ringer and ESPN Magazine, among others. In addition, she is a former resident fellow at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics. She attended the University of Michigan and lives in Washington.

June Cohen is a journalist by training, and has spent most of her career at the intersection of media and new technology. In 1991, she led the Stanford University team that developed the world’s first multimedia publication, dubbed Proteus. Then, in 1994, June helped launch HotWired.com, the world’s first professional website. In her current role as director of TED Media, June has led the development of TEDTalks, she produces TED’s salons, edits the TEDBlog, and co-produces the conference in Monterey.

Gabriella Coleman is an anthropologist, academic and author whose work focuses on hacker culture and online activism, particularly Anonymous. She currently holds the Wolfe Chair in Scientific & Technological Literacy at McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Nathan Schneider writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education named her “the world’s foremost scholar on Anonymous.”

Brian Collins is a designer, creative director, and educator who now runs his own communication and branding firm, COLLINS. His work has been featured in The New York Times, Forbes, Creativity, Fortune, NBC News, ABC News and Fast Company, which named him an American Master of Design. Business Week named his flagship store for Hershey as a design “Wonder of the World.” His team’s design of Helios House in Los Angeles, the first gas station using environmentally sustainable principles, is included in The Cooper Hewitt National Museum of Design. Brian’s clients have included Airbnb, Coca-Cola, Facebook, The Ford Motor Company, Giorgio Armani, IBM, Jaguar​ Cars​, ​Instagram, ​Levi Strauss & Co., Mattel, Microsoft, Nike, Spotify, Target, Unilever, The Walt Disney Co., and The Guggenheim Museum.

Stuart Comer was appointed Chief Curator of the Department of Media and Performance Art at The Museum of Modern Art in 2013. He has previously held positions at the Institute of Visual Culture in Cambridge and at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles, and was co-curator of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 2014 Biennial and of the Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art in 2007. He has also organized projects at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College; Beirut Art Center; Kunstverein Munich; CASCO, Utrecht; Frieze Art Fair, London; and Whitechapel Art Gallery, London.

Aaron Straup Cope is Head of Engineering (Internets and Computers) at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. Aaron has been instrumental in the development of the Cooper Hewitt Pen. His work centers on the potential of the Internet to bridge people, ideas, and communities, and to realize the potential of the network. Previously, Aaron was the senior engineer at Flickr, and design technologist at Stamen Design. Creator of prettymaps and map=yes projects, Aaron’s work has been exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art, the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the NACIS Atlas of Design, and 20x200.

Aimee Meredith Cox is a critical ethnographer, writer, and movement artist. She is the author of Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship (Duke 2015) and editor of Gender: Space (MacMillan 2018). Cox has performed and toured internationally with Ailey II and the Dance Theatre of Harlem and has choreographed performances as interventions in public and private space in Newark, Philadelphia, and Brooklyn. Cox is also a yogi of many decades. Yoga is integral to her praxis and her overall research and pedagogical commitments. Cox leads yoga teacher trainings as well as advanced study and continuing education workshops around the globe. She is currently at work on two book projects and a performance ethnographic intervention based on research among Black communities in Cincinnati, Ohio. This overall project is called “Living Past Slow Death.” Shapeshifters earned the 2016 Victor Turner Book Prize in Ethnographic Writing, and an Honorable Mention from the 2016 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize, as well as the 2017 Book award from the Society for the Anthropology of North America. Cox was a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, a recipient of the Nancy Weiss Malkiel Award, and has served as the Virginia C. Gildersleeve Professorship from Barnard College.

Kate Crawford is visiting Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research; and Senior Fellow, New York University. Kate researches the politics and ethics of big data, and is currently writing a new book with Yale University Press. She is on the advisory board at New Museum’s New Inc, and is a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Fellow. She also has a secret life as an electronic musician.

Robert Crease is Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Stony Brook University, New York, and former chairman of the department. Robert is Co-Editor-in-Chief of Physics in Perspective, and he writes “Critical Point,” a monthly column on the philosophy and history of science, for Physics World magazine.

Simon Critchley is Hans Jonas Professor at the New School for Social Research. His books include Very Little…Almost Nothing (1997), Infinitely Demanding (2007), The Book of Dead Philosophers (2009) and The Faith of the Faithless (2012). He has also written a novella, Memory Theatre (2015), a book-length essay, Notes on Suicide (2020) and studies of David Bowie, Football and Apply-Degger (Onassis, 2020). More recent books are Tragedy, The Greeks and Us (Pantheon, 2019) and Bald (Yale, 2021). He was series moderator of “The Stone,” a philosophy column in The New York Times and co-editor of three volumes connected to the series, most recently Question Everything (2022).He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Onassis Foundation and also 50% of an obscure musical combo called Critchley & Simmons. A book called Mysticism will be published by The New York Review of Books in 2024.

Aruna D'Souza writes about modern and contemporary art; intersectional feminisms and other forms of politics; and how museums shape our views of each other and the world. Her most recent book Whitewalling: Art, Race, and Protest in 3 Acts (Badlands Unlimited) was named one of the best art books of 2018 by the New York Times. Her work appears regularly in 4Columns.org, where she is a member of the editorial advisory board, and has also been published in The Wall Street Journal, CNN.com, Art News, Garage, Bookforum, Momus, Art in America, and Art Practical, among other places.

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.

Ebonee Davis is an actor, storyteller and supermodel who believes in the power of vulnerability and embracing one’s most authentic self. She is not only a champion of representation in fashion and media, but is making her mark in the world by sharing her personal evolution and inspiring powerful change within our society. Ebonee’s TED Talk, entitled, “Black Girl Magic in the Fashion Industry”, became a catalyst for many of the on-going changes for diversity within the fashion industry. Most recently, Ebonee launched her charity, Daughter, which supports scholars across the diaspora who wish to return to Africa and get reconnected.

Lennard J. Davis is a Professor in the English Department in the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In addition, he is Professor of Disability and Human Development in the School of Applied Health Sciences of the University of Illinois at Chicago, as well as Professor of Medical Education in the College of Medicine. He is also director of Project Biocultures a think-tank devoted to issues around the intersection of culture, medicine, disability, biotechnology, and the biosphere.

Lindsey Day is the president, co-founder, and editor-in-chief of CRWN Magazine, the world’s first natural hair magazine. Day, also a management consultant, grew up in California. CRWN Magazine is a natural hair and lifestyle magazine that celebrates women of color.

Simon DeDeo is an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University in the Department of Social and Decision Sciences, and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He is also affiliated with the Cognitive Science program at Indiana University, where he runs the Laboratory for Social Minds. For three years, from 2010 to 2013, he was an Omidyar Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. He and his collaborators study how people use words and signals, and the ideas they represent, to create a world. They have studied a diverse set of systems that includes the French Revolution, the courtrooms of Victorian London, the research strategies of Charles Darwin, the insurgency of modern-day Afghanistan, the emergent bureaucracy of Wikipedia, the creation of power hierarchies among the social animals, and the collusions and conspiracies of petrol stations in the American Midwest. They combine data from the contemporary world, archives from the deep past, statistical tools from cosmology, and models of human cognition from Bayesian reasoning and information theory to understand how cultures grow, flourish, innovate, and evolve.

Heather Dewey-Hagborg is a transdisciplinary artist and educator interested in art as research and critical inquiry. Heather has shown work internationally at events and venues including the Poland Mediations Bienniale, Ars Electronica, Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, the Science Gallery Dublin, MoMA PS1, the New Museum, and Eyebeam Art and Technology Center in New York City. Her work has been widely discussed in the media, from The New York Times and the BBC to TED and Wired.

Carly Dickson is a Fellow of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, an affiliate of the MIT AgeLab, and this year’s recipient of the KPF Paul Katz Fellowship. She is currently based in London, where is is pursuing her research around aging and the built environment. Her focus is on designing strings of public spaces between the home and the destination to enable physical access to services and social access to society that engage people of all ages.

Angela Dimayuga is the creative director of food and culture for the Standard International hotel group. Formerly, the executive chef of Mission Chinese, she was a key figure in building the restaurant and was subsequently included in Zagat’s “30 Under 30” List in 2015 as an upcoming culinary star and was nominated for a James Beard Award for Rising Star Chef of the Year in 2016. At the Standard, she oversees the hotel’s restaurants, as well as leads programming that combines food, music, art, and activism. She is also taking the lead on the opening of a new Standard restaurant in London, and is involved in further expansion projects.

Stephanie Dinkins is an artist interested in creating platforms for ongoing dialog about AI as it intersects race, gender, aging and our future histories. She is particularly driven to work with communities of color to develop deep-rooted AI literacy and co-create more culturally inclusive equitable artificial intelligence. She is a 2017 A Blade of Grass Fellow and a 2018 Truth Resident at Eyebeam, and her work has been exhibited – to quote her – “at a broad spectrum of public, private, and institutional venues by design”, including the Contemporary Art Museum Houston, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the corner of Putnam and Malcolm X Boulevard in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.

Hannah Donovan is a designer and speaker based in New York City. Hannah has worked at the intersection of music, design, and technology for the last decade, making digital products in music and entertainment. She currently leads product design at Ripcord. Previously, Hannah cofounded This Is My Jam, with incubation from The Echo Nest; led design at Last.fm in London; and designed for youth-focused brands in Toronto.

Steven Robert Donziger is an American attorney known for his legal battles with Chevron, particularly Aguinda v. Texaco, Inc. and other cases in which he represented over 30,000 farmers and indigenous people who suffered environmental damage and health problems caused by oil drilling in the Lago Agrio oil field of Ecuador.

Whitney Dow is a filmmaker and educator. He has been producing and directing films focused on race and identity for almost two decades and is a partner in Two Tone Productions. His work has been exhibited at dozens of international film festivals and institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, and the Smithsonian Institution among others. Dow’s current focus is on the Whiteness Project, a story-based interactive media and research project he is producing in collaboration with PBS’s POV and Columbia University’s INCITE Institute, and Veterans Coming Home, a digital initiative by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Dr. Ariel Ekblaw is the founder and CEO of Aurelia Institute, where she strives to bring humanity’s space exploration future to life. Through architecture R&D, education and outreach, and policy thought leadership, she is building a remarkable team and a novel FRO (Focused Research Organization) to expand humanity’s horizons and scale life in space. Aurelia Institute is spun out of the MIT Space Exploration Initiative (SEI)—a team of over 50 graduate students, staff, and faculty actively prototyping the artifacts of our sci-fi space future—of which Ariel is also the founder and former Director. Ariel drives SEI’s space-related research across science, engineering, art, and design, and leads an annually recurring cadence of parabolic flights, sub-orbital launches, and missions to the International Space Station.

Mona Eltahawy is an Egyptian-American award-winning journalist whose work spotlights Arab and Muslim issues. During the 18-day revolution that toppled Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak, she appeared on most major media outlets, leading the feminist website Jezebel to describe her as “The Woman Explaining Egypt to the West”.

Mustafa Ali Faruki is the founding partner and creative director of theLab-lab, a Brooklyn-based architecture practice that is dedicated to completely reinventing the outputs of architectural design. He was the winner of The Architectural League of New York’s 2017 League Prize for his Intake Facility proposal. For a site on Governors Island, Faruki designed a complex for “an anonymous client” intended to process extraterrestrial settlers (or angels) migrated to New York City from heaven. He created elaborate plans for various “Decelestialization” zones, in which his clients could assimilate to life on earth. TheLab-lab for architecture’s work has been exhibited in group exhibitions at LMCC Arts Center on Governors Island, and at the Nordisk Kunstnarsenter Dale in Norway, as well as at The Queens Museum and Hatton Gallery in Newcastle, UK. Mustafa is also the 2018-2019 Peter Reyner Banham Fellow, University at Buffalo School of Architecture.

Tom Finkelpearl is Cultural Affairs Commissioner of New York, a position he has held since spring 2014. Prior to his appointment, Tom was the President and Executive Director of the Queens Museum for 14 years, and the Deputy Director of P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center during its merger with The Museum of Modern Art. Most recently, he authored What We Made: Conversations on Art and Social Cooperation.

Gabriel Fontana is an independent designer and creative director. Drawing on a social design framework, his work explores how ideologies shape movements and vice versa. Through using performative and participatory methodologies, he positions design as a social practice. With this approach, he investigates how our bodies propagate, internalize and reproduce social norms. He proposes ways that this can be unlearned through new forms of pedagogy, activities and games that deconstruct group dynamics.

Sport and physical education have been his main field of research for the past five years. In this context, Gabriel develops alternative team sport games that reinvent sport as a queer pedagogy. With this method, he developed Multiform (2019) for the municipality of Rotterdam; an educational program for primary and secondary schools that contributes to inclusive physical education. More recently, Gabriel launched the Tournament of the Unknown (2022), a tournament series that reimagine togetherness.

Working towards a more inclusive future, his work infiltrates multiple layers of society through three specific sectors: education, culture and the sports industry. His games have been played in schools across Europe, at Nike World Headquarters (US) and in various museums such as MAC/VAL (FR), W139 Amsterdam (NL), Design Milan Week (IT) amongst others.

Johanna Mendelson Forman is Adjunct Professor at the American University’s School of International Service where she teaches Conflict Cuisine: An Introduction to War and Peace Around the Dinner Table, a course that encourages new ways of looking at diplomacy by highlighting the role of food in driving conflict and connecting people and communities. She has written extensively about food and conflict, and topics related to Latin America. Her work has been published in a wide-range of publications including, the Miami Herald, Washington Post, Americas Quarterly, The Globalist, and World Politics Review. Previously, Johanna served as the Director of Peace, Security, and Human Rights at the UN Foundation, and as a Senior Advisor to the UN Mission in Haiti.

Severin Fowles is Professor in the Barnard College Department of Anthropology. Trained as an anthropological archaeologist, Severin’s research centers on questions related to pre-modern religion, cultural landscapes, human-object relations, indigeneity, Native American studies, and the archaeology of the present.

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.

Paul Friedland is a professor of political and cultural history at Cornell University, focusing on France in the Revolutionary period and on the interplay of ideas and culture between France and its Caribbean colonies. His research and writing have been supported by fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and by visiting fellowships from the Davis Center for Historical Studies and the Institute for Advanced Study, both at Princeton University.

Agustín Fuentes is a Professor at Princeton University and an anthropologist whose research focuses on the biosocial, delving into the entanglement of biological systems with the social and cultural lives of humans, our ancestors, and a few of the other animals with whom humanity shares close relations. From chasing monkeys in jungles and cities, to exploring the lives of our evolutionary ancestors, to examining human health, behavior, and diversity across the globe, Professor Fuentes is interested in both the big questions and the small details of what makes humans and our close relations tick. Earning his BA/BS in Anthropology and Zoology and his MA and PhD in Anthropology from UC Berkeley, he has conducted research across four continents, multiple species, and two-million years of human history. His current projects include exploring cooperation, creativity, and belief in human evolution, multispecies anthropologies, evolutionary theory and processes, and engaging race and racism. Fuentes is an active public scientist, a well-known blogger, lecturer, tweeter, and an explorer for National Geographic. Fuentes was recently awarded the Inaugural Communication & Outreach Award from the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, the President’s Award from the American Anthropological Association, and elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Bobbito Garcia is a radio host, filmmaker and basketball enthusiast whose voice and passion guided an entire generation. As one half of the Stretch Armstrong & Bobbito Show, broadcasted out of Columbia University’s WKCR weekly between 1990 and 1998, Bobbito helped to launch the careers of hip-hop legends like Nas, the Notorious B.I.G., Jay Z and Big Pun. But while the man also known as Kool Bob Love is often remembered for his contributions to hip-hop culture, his reputation goes beyond: He has also served eminently behind the scenes, via his vinyl-only imprint Álala Records, as a b-ball pro for ESPN, and most recently as a documentary maker and producer.

Lee Gelernt is a lawyer at the national office of the ACLU in New York, and currently holds the positions of deputy director of the ACLU’s national Immigrants’ Rights Project and director of the project’s Access to the Court’s Program. Over his career, Lee has argued dozens of other notable civil rights cases at all levels of the federal court system. In addition to his work at the ACLU, he is adjunct professor at Columbia Law School, and for many years taught at Yale Law School as an adjunct.

Alex Gibney is an Academy Award and Emmy Award-winning writer, producer, and director. His works include Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, which was nominated for an Academy Award, and Taxi to the Dark Side, which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2007, among many others.

Anand Giridharadas is a writer and the author of Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, published by Knopf in 2018. His other books are The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas and India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking. He is an editor-at-large for TIME, an on-air political analyst for MSNBC, and a visiting scholar at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University. He is a former columnist and correspondent for The New York Times, having written, most recently, the biweekly “Letter from America.”

Nan Goldin is a photographer known for her intimate portraits. She is particularly celebrated for The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, a filmic slideshow, which documents hundreds of images of the lives of her friends and loved ones throughout the 1970s and 80s. Most recently, through her founding of P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), she has used activism to ‘make the personal political’ to combat the opioid crisis. As a survivor of the opioid crisis herself, and as an artist, Nan has particular stake in pressuring the Sackler family (the manufacturers of the opioid crisis) to be held accountable, and for museums to reject Sackler donations.

Jon Gray is co-founder of Ghetto Gastro, a culinary collective and cultural movement that operates at the intersection of food, design and community empowerment. Ghetto Gastro was formed in 2012 and has since then used food to spark larger conversations around inclusion, race, and economic empowerment, with the ultimate goal of establishing the Bronx as a culinary destination.

Roger Griffith is an Associate Objects Conservator at The Museum of Modern Art since 1998. He received his MA from the Royal College of Art/ Victoria & Albert Museum in 1997. Prior to MoMA he worked at various institutions including: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and the University of East Anglia: Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich England. Roger has published and lectured internationally on various topics of conservation and his recent research examines the nature of the collaborative process of art professionals in regards to the exhibition installation, preservation, maintenance, and storage of ephemeral contemporary art.

Lori Gruen is the William Griffin Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Science in Society at Wesleyan University where she coordinates Wesleyan Animal Studies. She works primarily in ethics and social and poitical philosophy and is a prolific scholar. She is the author and editor of over a dozen books, including Ethics and Animals: An Introduction (Cambridge, 2011, second edition 2021), Entangled Empathy (Lantern, 2015), Animal Crisis (Polity, 2022) co-authored with Alice Crary, Carceral Logics (Cambridge, 2022) co-edited with Justin Marceau, Critical Terms for Animal Studies (Chicago, 2018), Ecofeminism: Feminist Intersections with Other Animals and the Earth (Bloomsbury 2014, second edition 2022, co-edited with Carol J. Adams), Ethics of Captivity (Oxford, 2014), and others. Gruen’s work focuses on ethical and political issues that impact those often overlooked in traditional philosophical investigations, e.g. women and other marginalized genders, people of color, incarcerated people, and non-human animals. She is a Fellow of the Hastings Center for Bioethics, was a Faculty Fellow at Tufts’ Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine’s Center for Animals and Public Policy, is a fellow of the Brooks Animal Studies Academic Network and was the first and founding chair of the Faculty Advisory Committee of the Center for Prison Education at Wesleyan. Gruen has documented the history of The First 100 chimpanzees in research in the US and has an evolving website that documents the journey to sanctuary of the remaining chimpanzees in research labs, The Last 1000. Gruen has written on a range of topics in practical ethics, feminist philosophy and political philosophy. Her current projects include exploring captivity and the ethical and political questions raised by carceral logics.

Jack Halberstam is a Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and English at Columbia University. Halberstam is currently working on a book titled Wild Thing, on queer anarchy, performance and protest culture, the visual representation of anarchy and the intersections between animality, the human and the environment.

Mark Hansen is a statistician by training who works at the triangulation of data, art, and technology. He is currently the Director of the David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute for Media and Innovation, and Professor of journalism at Columbia University. Mark works with data in an essentially journalistic practice, crafting stories through algorithm, computation, and visualization. In collaboration with Ben Rubin and Jer Thorp, Mark explores new modes of engagement with data at The Office for Creative Research. Previously, Mark was a longstanding visiting researcher at The New York Times R&D Lab.

Bethann Hardison was a supermodel-cum-entrepreneur, who became a household name when she took her turn on the catwalk at the Battle of Versailles, a historic fashion show that took place in Versailles and put American fashion on the map. With that moment, she became one of the first Black models to walk a European runway. She has since turned her efforts toward fashion activism, starting her own agency (Diversity Coalition) to increase diversity in the fashion industry and expose racial prejudice.

K8 Hardy is an artist, founding member of the queer feminist journal and artist collective LTTR, and creator of the cult zine FashionFashion, which parodies fashion magazines and photography, targeting their portrayal of women and the female body as a site for capitalist consumption. K8 Hardy also directed music videos for groups including Le Tigre, Lesbians on Ecstasy, and Men.

Kim Hastreiter is co-editor and founder of Paper magazine, “the most sophisticated chronicle of New York’s heart-stopping cultural encephalogram over the past 30 years.” With Kim at the helm, Paper has served as a pop-culture incubator, documenting the fashion, music, and art born from surfing, skateboarding, hip-hop, and gay life.

Born in 1978 in Paris, France, Camille Henrot now lives and works in New York City. The practice of French artist Camille Henrot moves seamlessly between film, painting, drawing, bronze, sculpture, and installation. Henrot draws upon references from literature, psychoanalysis, social media, cultural anthropology, self-help, and the banality of everyday life in order to question what it means to be both a private individual and a global subject. A 2013 fellowship at the Smithsonian Institute resulted in her film ‘Grosse Fatigue,’ for which she was awarded the Silver Lion at the 55th Venice Biennale. She elaborated ideas from ‘Grosse Fatigue’ to conceive her acclaimed 2014 installation ‘The Pale Fox’ at Chisenhale Gallery in London. The exhibit, which displayed the breadth of her diverse output, went on to travel to institutions including Kunsthal Charlottenburg, Copenhagen; Bétonsalon – Centre for art and research, Paris; Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster, Germany; and Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, Japan. In 2017, Henrot was given carte blanche at Palais de Tokyo in Paris, where she presented the major exhibition ‘Days Are Dogs,’ She is the recipient of the 2014 Nam June Paik Award and the 2015 Edvard Munch Award, and has participated in the Lyon, Berlin, Sydney and Liverpool Biennials, among others. Henrot has had numerous solo exhibitions worldwide, including the New Museum, New York; Schinkel Pavilion, Berlin; New Orleans Museum of Art; Fondazione Memmo, Rome; Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, Japan, among others.

Tor Erik Hermansen is the cofounder of Stargate, a prolific record producing and songwriting team. Working alongside, Mikkel Storleer Eriksen, Tor is responsible for, among other hits, Beyonce’s “Irreplaceable,” Rihanna’s “What’s My Name”, and Wiz Khalifa’s “Black and Yellow.”

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.

Michael Hirschorn is an Emmy-award winning President and CEO of Ish Entertainment. Previously, Michael headed programming at VH1, and was responsible for thousands of hours of programming, scripted and non-scripted, and set-up a documentary shingle, VH1 Rock Docs. A former journalist and magazine editor (New York, Esquire, Spin), he has continued to explore the revolutionary impact of digital media as contributing editor at the Atlantic Monthly.

Laura Hoptman is Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art. Previously, Laura was the Curator and head of the Department of Contemporary Art at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art, and Senior Curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York.

Alexandra Horowitz is a professor at Barnard College, Columbia University, where she teaches seminars in canine cognition, creative nonfiction writing, and audio storytelling. As Senior Research Fellow, she heads the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard. Her most recent book, Our Dogs, Ourselves explores aspects of the unique and complex interspecies pairing between humans and dogs.

Seth Horowitz is a neuroscientist whose work focuses on brain development, the biology of hearing, and the musical mind. As chief neuroscientist at NeuroPop, Inc., Seth has applied his research skills to real-world applications ranging from health and wellness to educational science outreach. Seth authored The Universal Sense: How Hearing Shapes the Mind and his New York Times article “The Science and Art of Listening” was one of the most e-mailed articles of 2012.

Deb Howes is Director of Digital Learning at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Previously, Deb was the assistant director of the Johns Hopkins University Museum Studies program, and museum educator in charge of educational media at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Jamer Hunt is Professor of Transdisciplinary Design at Parsons School of Design. Hunt collaboratively designs open and adaptable frameworks for participation that respond to emergent cultural conditions. He was founding director of the graduate program in Transdisciplinary Design at Parsons School of Design (2009-2015). From 2016-2021 he served as Vice Provost for Transdisciplinary Initiatives at The New School. He is the author of Not to Scale: How the Small Becomes Large, the Large Becomes Unthinkable, and the Unthinkable Becomes Possible (2020), a book that repositions scale as a practice-based framework for navigating social change in complex systems. Fast Company has named him to their list of “Most Creative People.” With Paola Antonelli at the MoMA he was co-creator of the award-winning, curatorial experiment and book Design and Violence (2013-15). With Hilary Jay he co-founded DesignPhiladelphia in 2005, at that time the country’s largest design week. He has published over twenty articles on the poetics and politics of design, including for Fast Company and the Huffington Post, and he is co-author, with Meredith Davis, of Visual Communication Design (2017).

Randy Hunt is Creative Director of Etsy, where he leads the team of designers building Web products and creating off-line experiences. Prior to joining Etsy, Randy cofounded Supermarket, a curated design marketplace; founded Citizen Scholar Inc.; and worked at both Milton Glaser, Inc., and Number 17. More recently, he authored the book Product Design for the Web: Principles of Designing and Releasing Web Products.

Ekene Ijeoma is an artist and director of the Poetic Justice Group at the MIT Media Lab. Through his practice, he researches intersectional issues, such as racial and environmental justice, and develops artworks that critique their realities and propose alternatives. In 2021, his Breathing Pavilion in downtown Brooklyn created a space of reprieve during a time of hardship and loss. He is currently working on a new project, Real Talk Radio, which will explore intergenerational knowledge and expression with Black music.

Wendy W. Jacob is a multidisciplinary artist, whose work bridges traditions of sculpture, performance, and invention, and explores the relationships between architecture and perceptual experience. Jacob is also a member of the Chicago-based collaborative Haha. Jacob’s work has been exhibited in museums and galleries Internationally, including the Centre Georges-Pompidou, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Kunsthaus Graz.

Erica Caple James is a medical and psychiatric anthropologist who received an A.B. from Princeton University (Anthropology 1992), an M.T.S. from Harvard Divinity School (1995), and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University (Social Anthropology 1998, 2003). Her work focuses on global health and security; violence and trauma; human rights and humanitarianism; democratization and postconflict transition processes; race, gender, and culture; and religion and healing. Her first book, Democratic Insecurities: Violence, Trauma, and Intervention in Haiti (2010), documents the psychosocial experience of Haitian torture survivors targeted during the 1991-94 coup period and analyzes the politics of humanitarian assistance in “post-conflict” nations making the transition to democracy. Her second major book project, entitled Wounds of Charity: Corporate Catholicism in the Archdiocese of Boston, analyzes the “biopolitics of charity” at a faith-based social service organization promoting health and education programs for Haitian immigrants and refugees. Her third project, Governing Gifts: Law, Risk, and the “War on Terror”, continues this focus on the politics of charity by tracing the impact of U.S. anti-terrorism financing laws and practices on both faith-based and secular NGOs in the United States. She is editing a volume called Faith, Charity, and the Security State and has recently launched the Global Health and Medical Humanities Initiative.

Jeff Jarvis is Professor and Director of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. Jeff is the founder of the blog Buzzmachine.com and cohost of the podcast This Week at Google. He has authored Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live, What Would Google Do?, and the Kindle Single Gutenberg the Geek.

John Jay is the President of Global Creative at Fast Retailing, where he leads the creation of products and concept stores, as well as directing brand strategy and communications campaigns for the company’s suite of retail holdings including Uniqlo, Helmut Lang, and Theory. Prior to his appointment at Fast Retailing, he held positions as the Creative Director at Bloomingdales and then as the Executive Director at the advertising agency Wieden + Kennedy.

Dr. Willie James Jennings is currently Associate Professor of Systematic Theology and Africana Studies at Yale University Divinity School. Dr. Jennings, who is a theologian, teaches in the areas of Christian thought, race theory, and decolonial and environmental studies. Dr. Jennings is the author of The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race published by Yale University Press. Dr. Jennings is also the recipient of the 2015 Grawemeyer Award in Religion for his groundbreaking work on race and Christianity. Dr. Jennings recently authored Commentary on the Book of Acts won the Reference Book of the Year Award, from The Academy of Parish Clergy. He is also the author of After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging, which was the inaugural book in the much-anticipated book series, Theological Education between the Times, winning the 2020 book of the year award from Publisher’s Weekly. It was also selected as a finalist for the 2021 American Academy of Religion Book of the Year in the Constructive- Reflective Studies category, and in 2023 won the Lilly Fellows Program Book Award. Dr. Jennings has been selected to give several prestigious lectures, including the Bampton Lectures at Oxford University, the Huslean Lectures at Cambridge University, the Cole Lecture at Vanderbilt University, the Parks-King Lecture at Yale University, the Ferguson Lecture at Manchester University, and the Hughes-Cheong Lecture at the University of Melbourne. And now Dr. Jennings is hard at work on a two-volume book on the doctrine of creation, tentatively entitled, “Reframing the World.” Volume two is on Race and the Built Environment.

Sarah Stewart Johnson’s research is driven by the underlying goal of understanding the presence and preservation of biosignatures within planetary environments. Her lab is also involved in the implementation of planetary exploration, analyzing data from current spacecraft as well as devising new techniques for future missions. A former Rhodes Scholar and White House Fellow, she received her Ph.D. from MIT and has worked on NASA’s Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity Rovers. She is also a visiting scientist with the Planetary Environments Lab at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Her recent book, The Sirens of Mars, was a New York Times Editor’s Choice and selected as one of the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2020.

Bill T. Jones is recognized for his contributions as a dancer and choreographer. Renowned for provocative performances that blend an eclectic mix of modern and traditional dance, Mr. Jones creates works that challenge us to confront tough subjects and inspire us to greater heights. Artistic director of New York Live Arts and artistic director/co-founder of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, Bill T. Jones has received major honors ranging from a 1994 MacArthur “Genius” Award to Kennedy Center Honors in 2010. Jones was honored with the 2014 Doris Duke Award, recognized as Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government in 2010, inducted into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2009, and named “An Irreplaceable Dance Treasure” by the Dance Heritage Coalition in 2000. He is a two-time Tony Award recipient for Best Choreography for FELA! and Spring Awakening and received an Obie Award for Spring Awakening‘s off-Broadway run. His choreography for the off-Broadway production of The Seven earned him a 2006 Lucille Lortel Award.

Matt Jones is Interaction Design Director, Google Creative Labs. Previously, Matt was a principal and partner at BERG, a design consultancy specializing in connected products, and a creative director behind award-winning services like BBC News Online and Sapient’s London studio. In 2007 he cofounded Dopplr.com, a social-networking service for frequent travelers.

Jamal Joseph is a writer, director, activist, professor and former chair of Columbia University’s Graduate Film Division and the artistic director of the New Heritage Theatre Group in Harlem. Joseph was a member of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army, and was prosecuted as one of the Panther 21. His memoir Panther Baby was published in February 2012.

Sonam Kachru is an Assistant Professor specializing in the history of premodern South Asian philosophy and literature, with an emphasis on Buddhist philosophy. One day soon, he believes, the histories of philosophy and literature in premodern South Asia will more widely be seen as an integral part of the humanities. As they should be. His first book, Other Lives: Mind and World in Indian Buddhism, tracks ways in which one premodern Buddhist philosopher, Vasubandhu of Peshawar, used descriptions of experiences in dreams and non-human forms of life in thought experiments to rethink the relationship between mind and world. For more about Other Lives, which was written with a commitment to global philosophical outlook, with particular attention to a possibly connected ancient world, see this précis and this review.

Frances M. Kamm is Littauer Professor of Philosophy and Public Policy, HKS, Professor of Philosophy, FAS, and affiliated faculty, Harvard Law School. She is the author of Creation and Abortion; Morality, Mortality, Vol. 1: Death and Whom to Save from It; Morality, Mortality, Vol. 2: Rights, Duties, and Status; Intricate Ethics; Ethics for Enemies: Terror, Torture, and War; The Moral Target: Aiming at Right Conduct in War and Other Conflicts; Bioethical Prescriptions; and The Trolley Problem Mysteries. Kamm has also published many articles on normative ethical theory and practical ethics.

Joan Kee is a professor in the History of Art at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on how modern and contemporary artworks challenge our understandings of words like “world,” “value,” “abstraction,” and “scale.” In Contemporary Korean Art: Tansaekhwa and the Urgency of Method (2013), Kee argued that close attention to process in the works of artists like Ha Chonghyun, Park Seobo, Lee Ufan, Yun Hyongkeun, and Kwon Young-woo set materiality against the imposition of meaning in authoritarian South Korea. Kee is especially interested in what might be called an applied art history, in which methods central to the discipline—close visual analysis in particular—offer a framework for thinking about related cultural phenomena, from law to digital communication. Partly based on her experiences as a lawyer working in a range of areas from criminal defense to family mediation, Models of Integrity: Art and Law in Post-Sixties America (2019) explores how artists engaged with US law in ways that aimed to recuperate the integrity compromised by the very institutions supposedly entrusted with establishing standards of just conduct. Newly released, her book The Geometries of Afro Asia: Art Beyond Solidarity, asks how we might tell a history of art that begins with the global majority, spanning Asia, Africa, North America, and Europe. It sets at its center the worlds Black and Asian artists initiate through their work from roughly 1960 to the present.

Peter J. Kim is Executive Director at Museum of Food and Drink (MOFAD), the world’s first large-scale food museum. Peter began working on launching MOFAD in 2011. Since then, he has overseen all aspects of the project’s development, including the opening of the museum’s first brick-and-mortar space in October 2015. He and MOFAD have been featured in The New York Times, New Yorker, NPR, and Wall Street Journal, and he has spoken widely about the museum’s dynamic approach. He has worked as a hunger policy advocate, public health educator, and international litigator, and he founded and directed L'Art de Vivre, an arts education nonprofit in Cameroon.

Josh Kline is a New York-based artist, who works primarily in sculpture, video, and installation, to create artworks and exhibitions that consider the ways in which our humanity has been transformed, commodified, and instru­mentalized within neoliberal society. Examining the regimes of control to which the human body is increasingly subjected—ranging from governmental and corporate surveillance to the relentless pursuit of youth—Kline addresses the erosion of boundaries between labor and leisure and the incursion of consumer culture into the most literally intimate aspects of life: blood, DNA, neurochemistry. In 2015, Kline began a major cycle of installation-based projects exploring the politics and economics of the 21st Century. Kline’s solo exhibition, Climate Change: Part One, will open at 47 Canal, New York on April 27, 2019. His work will also be included in the 2019 Whitney Biennial.

Jaamil Olawale Kosoko is a multi-spirited Nigerian American author, performance artist, and curator of Yoruba and Natchez descent originally from Detroit, MI. jaamil’s practice is conceptual, process-based, and interdisciplinary from within a corporeal modality. kosoko moves across the creative realms of live art performance, video, sculpture, and poetry using both cultural and academic idioms. As an educator and community organizer, they approach politics and education as extensions of their creative practice. Through rooted ritual and spiritual practice, embodied poetics, Black critical studies, and queer theories of the body, kosoko conjures and crafts perpetual modes of freedom, healing, and care when/where/however possible. jaamil is the author of Black Body Amnesia: Poems and Other Speech Acts, released Spring 2022 blending poetry and memoir, conversation and performance theory as means to tell a personal narrative inspired by Audre Lords concept of the biomythography. kosoko is the recipient of awards including the 2022 Slamdance Jury Prize for Best Experimental Short film, 2021/22 MacDowell Fellowship, 2020 Pew Fellowship in the Arts, 2020 NCCAkron Creative Administrative Fellowship, 2019 NPN Creation & Development Fund award, 2019 Red Bull Arts Fellowship, 2019 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Choreography, 2017-2019 Princeton Arts Fellowship, 2018 NEFA National Dance Project Award, 2018-20 New York Live Arts Live Feed Residency, 2017 Cave Canem Poetry Fellowship, and consecutive 2016-2020 USArtists International Awards from the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation. In Fall of 2020, jaamil was appointed the 3rd annual Alma Hawkins Visiting Chair at UCLA World Arts & Cultures/Dance Department. Additionally, jaamil lectures regularly at Princeton University, The University of the Arts Stockholm, and Master Exerce, ICI-CCN in Montpellier, France.

Priti Krishtel is a health justice lawyer and co-founder of the Initiative for Medicines, Access, and Knowledge (I-MAK), a nonprofit organization that challenges systemic injustice and advocates for health equity in drug development and access. For two decades, Krishtel’s work has exposed structural inequalities in vaccine and medical access in the United States, and across the globe. Most recently, this included advocating for equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines across the globe, as well as ensuring that the Biden-Harris administration is prioritizing equity in the Patent and Trademark Office.

Michelle Kuo is the Marlene Hess Curator of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA, where her exhibitions include New Order: Art and Technology in the Twenty-First Century (2019), Artist’s Choice: Amy Sillman (2020), Amanda Williams: Embodied Sensations (2021), and the forthcoming Signals: Video and Electronic Democracy (with Stuart Comer). In addition to helping conceive the Museum’s collection display and acquisitions program, Kuo co-leads initiatives on web3 and blockchain technologies. She has written and lectured widely on modern and contemporary art, and her publications include More than Real: Art in the Digital Age (2018) and Acting Out: The Ab-Ex Effect (2011). Kuo is currently a critic at the Yale School of Art and serves on the advisory board of the Museum Brandhorst, Munich. From 2010 to 2017 she was editor-in-chief of Artforum International.

Logan Lane is the founder of Brooklyn’s Luddite Club, a group of teenagers who gave up their smartphones.

T. Jean Lax was appointed associate curator in The Museum of Modern Art’s Department of Media and Performance Art in 2014. For the seven years prior they worked at The Studio Museum in Harlem, where they organized over a dozen exhibitions and numerous screenings, performances, and public programs. Lax is a faculty member at the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance at Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts. They serve on the Advisory Committee at Vera List Center for Arts and Politics; on the Arts Advisory Committee of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council; as a member of the Catalyst Circle at The Laundromat Project; and on the Advisory Board of Recess. Lax received their BA in Africana studies and art/semiotics from Brown University and an MA in modern art from Columbia University. In 2015, they were awarded the Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement.

David van der Leer is Executive Director at Van Alen Institute, a New York–based independent nonprofit that researches and shapes discussions about how design influences the public realm. Previously an associate curator of architecture and urban studies at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, he was the co-curator of the mobile BMW Guggenheim Lab. In 2012, David co-curated the American Pavilion of the Venice Architecture Biennale.

Shaun Leonardo is a multidisciplinary artist whose work discusses societal expectations of manhood––namely definitions surrounding black and brown masculinities––along with its notions of achievement, collective identity, and experience of failure. His performance practice, anchored by his work in Assembly (a diversion program for court-involved youth) is participatory in nature and invested in a process of embodiment.

Janna Levin, the Claire Tow Professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard College, Columbia University, has contributed to an understanding of black holes, the cosmology of extra dimensions, and gravitational waves in the shape of space-time. She is also director of sciences at Pioneer Works. She is the author of How the Universe Got Its Spots and a novel, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, which won the PEN/Bingham Prize. She was recently named a Guggenheim Fellow. Her latest book, Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space, is the inside story on the discovery of the century: the sound of space-time ringing from the collision of two black holes over a billion years ago.

Kate Levin is Principal at Bloomberg Associates, a philanthropic consulting firm that collaborates with cities worldwide to improve the quality of urban life. From 2002 to 2013, Kate was the New York Cultural Affairs Commissioner, and oversaw the commissioning of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s The Gates in Central Park, among many other ambitious public art projects.

Two basic ideas motivate Betsy Levy Paluck’s research. The first idea is that social psychological theory offers potentially useful tools for changing society in constructive ways. The second idea is that studying attempts to change society is one of the most fruitful ways to develop and assess social psychological theory. Much of my work has focused on prejudice and intergroup conflict reduction, using large-scale field experiments to test theoretically driven interventions. Levy-Paluck is a professor in the department of psychology and the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, where she also serves as deputy director of the Center for Behavioral Science & Policy.

Ani Liu is an internationally exhibiting research-based artist working at the intersection of art & technoscience. Integrating emerging technologies with cultural reflection and social change, Ani’s most recent work examines the biopolitics of reproduction, labor, care work and motherhood. Ani’s work has been exhibited internationally, at the Venice Biennale, Milan Triennale, Ars Electronica, the Queens Museum Biennial, MIT Museum, MIT Media Lab, Mana Contemporary, Harvard University, and Shenzhen Design Society. Ani is the winner of numerous awards including the Princeton Arts Fellowship, the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Fellowship, the Virginia Groot Foundation Fellowship, the S&R Washington Prize, the YouFab Global Creative Awards, the Biological Art & Design Award, Triangle Arts Residency. Ani’s work has been featured in the New York Times, Art in America, Artnet News, the Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallargic, and her solo show in Ecologies of Care was named as a best of 2022 highlight in Artforum. She has been profiled by Science Friday, National Geographic, PBS, the MIT Tech Review, BOMB Magazine, VICE, WIRED, TED and Gizmodo, amongst many others. Ani is passionate about integrating multidisciplinary approaches to art making, and is currently an Associate Professor of Practice at the University of Pennsylvania. Ani has previously taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Princeton University, Columbia University, and is on critique panels at Harvard, Princeton, Dartmouth, MIT, University of Pennsylvania, NYU, Pratt, Parsons, The New School.

Hugo Liu is a consumer taste researcher, data scientist, and a partner at Hedonometrics, an innovation consulting firm conducting research into the neuroscience of play and community wellbeing and positivity. He recently helped produce a data and architecture exhibit for the Guggenheim. Previously, Hugo was a Principal Scientist at eBay, where he leveraged machine learning and a massive behavioral dataset to map out consumer tastes and forecast brand trends. Hugo is an advisor to Harvard University’s Experiment Fund and to numerous tech start-ups. He has a PhD from MIT, where he also taught courses in artificial intelligence and the philosophy of aesthetics.

Pippa Loengard is Deputy Director and Lecturer in Law, Kernochan Center, Columbia Law School. Pippa’s interest in intellectual property issues stemmed from her earlier work in documentary film production. Her legal research focuses on issues surrounding the visual arts and the entertainment industries, with a particular accent on issues of taxation as they pertain to the arts and the rights of authors and creators.

Glenn Lowry is Director of The Museum of Modern Art, a position he has held since 1995. Glenn conceived and initiated the Museum’s successful merger with P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in 1999. He has lectured and written extensively in support of contemporary art and artists and the role of museums in society, among other topics.

Lydia Lunch is an American writer, singer, poet, actress, and speaker whose career was spawned by the New York City “No Wave” scene. Widely considered one of the most influential performers originating from New York City, Lydia has worked with bands and artists such as Sonic Youth, Nick Cave, Karen Finley, Richard Kern, and Hubert Selby Jr. Lydia recently published her book So Real It Hurts, a collection of personal essays and interviews.

Giorgia Lupi is an award-winning information designer. She co-founded Accurat, a data-driven design firm with offices in Milan and New York, where she is the design director. She received her M-Arch at FAF in Ferrara, Italy, and earned a PhD in design at Politecnico di Milano. She relocated from Italy to New York City, where she now lives. She is co-author of Dear Data, an aspirational hand-drawn data-visualization book. The original collection of postcards from Dear Data was recently acquired by The Museum of Modern Art.

Jennifer McCrea is senior research fellow at the Hauser Institute for Civil Society at Harvard University; chairman of the Advisory Board at MIT Media Lab; and cofounder and CEO of Born Free, an initiative of the Millenium Development Goals Health Alliance that brings private-sector resources and expertise to the goal of eradicating mother-to-child HIV transmission by 2015. In her role as fundraiser, Jennifer has collaborated with organizations such as Acumen, DonorsChoose.org, and Grameen American, to name just a few.

Jill Magid is a Brooklyn-based artist and writer. Jill’s work blurs the boundaries between art and life. She explores the emotional, philosophical, and legal tensions between the individual and “protective” institutions, such as intelligence agencies or the police. Her work tends to be characterized by the dynamics of seduction, with the resulting narratives often taking the form of a love story.

Carmelyn P. Malalis was appointed Chair and Commissioner of the New York City Commission on Human Rights (the Commission) by Mayor Bill de Blasio in November 2014 following more than a decade in private practice as an advocate for employees’ rights in the workplace. Throughout her career, Ms. Malalis has demonstrated a fierce commitment to promoting diversity and inclusion and preventing and prosecuting discrimination and intolerance. Commissioner Malalis earned her J.D. from Northeastern University School of Law and received a B.A. in Women’s Studies from Yale University.

Andrew Marantz is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he has worked since 2011. His work has also appeared in Harper’s, New York, and Mother Jones. A contributor to Radiolab and The New Yorker Radio Hour, he has spoken at TED and has been interviewed on CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and many other outlets. Andrew recently published his first book, Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation.

Kate Marvel is a climate scientist, researcher at both Columbia University and the NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies, and author of the “Hot Planet” column for Scientific American. Her work focuses on climate modeling on a large scale to understand long-term climate change and the human impact on its prevention or acceleration. Her 2017 TED talk on how clouds can aid in the fight against climate change has been viewed 1.3 million times, and in 2019 she was named one of the 15 women leading the fight against climate change by TIME magazine.

Hilary Mason is founder and CEO of Fast Forward Labs, a machine intelligence research company, and Data Scientist in Residence at Accel Partners. Previously, Hilary was chief scientist at bitly. She cohosts DataGotham, a conference for New York’s homegrown data community, and cofounded HackNY, a nonprofit that helps engineering students find opportunities in New York’s creative technical economy. Hilary served on Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Technology Advisory Board, and is a member of Brooklyn hacker collective NYC Resistor.

Shannon Mattern is the Penn Presidential Compact Professor of Media Studies and the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. Her dad owned a hardware store and makes beautiful furniture, and her mom was a special education teacher. Before coming to Penn, between 2004 and 2022, she worked in the School of Media Studies and the Department of Anthropology at The New School and collaborated regularly with the Parsons School of Design. She won The New School’s Distinguished University Teaching Award. Her writing and teaching focus on archives, libraries, and other media spaces; media infrastructures; sites where data intersect with art and design; and media that shape our sensory experiences. She is the author of The New Downtown Library: Designing with Communities; Deep Mapping the Media City; Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: 5000 Years of Urban Media, all published by University of Minnesota Press; and A City Is Not a Computer, published by Princeton University Press. She also contributes a regular long-form column about urban data and mediated infrastructures to Places Journal. In addition, she serves as president of the board of the Metropolitan New York Library Council and regularly collaborates on public design and interactive projects and exhibitions.

Park McArthur is a New York-based visual artist who works in sculpture, installation, sound, and text. Her work has been shown both nationally and internationally, including at the SFMOMA, San Francisco; Chisenhale Gallery, London; Yale Union, Portland; Lars Friedrich, Berlin. She was included in the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo (2016) as well as the Whitney Biennial (2017). A 2014 winner of the Wynn Newhouse Award, she is represented by Essex Street Gallery in New York.

Allison C. Meier is a Brooklyn-based writer focusing on the arts and overlooked history. Currently, she is a staff writer at Hyperallergic, and moonlights as a cemetery tour guide at New York burial grounds. She has also worked as the senior editor at Atlas Obscura and has published stories in The New York Times, Artdesk, ARTnews, Mental Floss, Narrative.ly, Brooklyn Based, the Oklahoma Gazette, and others.

Susan Meiselas is a documentary photographer based in New York. She is the author of Carnival Strippers (1976), Nicaragua (1981), Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History (1997), Pandora’s Box (2001), Encounters with the Dani (2003), Prince Street Girls (2016), A Room Of Their Own (2017), Tar Beach (2020), and Carnival Strippers Revisited (2022).

Meiselas is well known for her documentation of human rights issues in Latin America. Her photographs are included in North American and international collections. In 1992 she was made a MacArthur Fellow, received a Guggenheim Fellowship (2015), and most recently the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize (2019) and the first Women in Motion Award from Kering and the Rencontres d’Arles. Mediations, a survey exhibition of her work from the 1970s to the present was recently exhibited at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Jeu de Paume, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Instituto Moreira Salles in São Paulo, Kunst Haus Wien, C/O Berlin, Kunstmuseum Magdeburg, and FOMU in Antwerp.

She has been the President of the Magnum Foundation since 2007, with a mission to expand diversity and creativity in documentary photography.

Camari Mick is the executive pastry chef at both The Musket Room, a Michelin-starred restaurant in Manhattan’s Nolita neighborhood, and Raf’s, a nearby French and Italian bakery and restaurant from the same ownership (of which she is also a partner). In 2022, she became a James Beard Award semi-finalist for Outstanding Pastry Chef. This year, she became a James Beard Award semi-finalist for Outstanding Pastry Chef for the second consecutive year. Mick, who Michelin refers to as “NYC’s Dessert Doyenne,” proudly incorporates her Jamaican heritage into her dishes. Prior to The Musket Room, Mick honed her pastry experience in some of New York’s finest kitchens, including Thomas Keller’s TAK Room, Eric Ripert’s Le Bernardin and Daniel Boulud’s db Bistro Moderne.

Sarah Milstein cohosts The Lean Startup Conference. She is co-author of The Twitter Book, and writes about race, gender, and bias. She has hosted influential conferences like Web 2.0 Expo and has contributed articles to The New York Times, among other outlets. Early in her career, she founded Just Food’s CSA program and helped children’s musician Laurie Berkner launch her record label. She blogs at DogsandShoes.com and splits her time between New York and San Francisco. She holds an MBA from the University of California at Berkeley and a BA from Rutgers University. Bonus fact: she was the 21st user on Twitter.

Marilyn Minter is a contemporary artist whose personal brand of Photorealist painting examines contemporary ideas of beauty. Marilyn’s works are in the collections of MoMA, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others. In 2017 she conceived Anger Management, a project in which more than 70 artists created art objects for a resistance-themed pop-up gift shop at the Brooklyn Museum.

Linda Montano is a seminal figure in contemporary feminist performance art, whose work since the mid 1960s has been critical in the development of performance and video by, for, and about women. Attempting to dissolve the boundaries between art and life, she continues to actively explore her art/life through shared experience, role adoption, and intricate life altering ceremonies. Her work has been featured at museums including The New Museum in New York, MOCA San Francisco, SITE Santa Fe and the ICA in London.

Carlos Motta is a multidisciplinary artist based in New York. He won the Future Generation Art Prize, Kiev, in 2014. His work has been presented internationally at Tate Modern, London; Jeu de Paume, Paris; New Museum, Guggenheim Museum, and MoMA PS1, in New York; Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA); X Gwangju Biennale; X Lyon Biennale; and International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR). Röda Sten Konsthall in Gothenburg presented a career survey exhibition of Motta’s work in 2015. He will also have solo exhibitions at Pinchuk ArtCentre, Kiev (2015); Mercer Union, Toronto; PPOW Gallery, New York; Hordaland Kunstsenter, Bergen; Perez Art Museum (PAMM), Miami; and MALBA-Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (all 2016).

Kevin Munger the Jeffrey L. Hyde and Sharon D. Hyde and Political Science Board of Visitors Early Career Professor of Political Science and Assistant Professor of Political Science and Social Data Analytics at Penn State University. He studies the communication of political information on the internet, and how to make digital social science make sense. he has published research on the subject using a variety of methodologies, including textual analysis, field experiments, longitudinal surveys and qualitative theory. Kevin’s research has appeared in leading journals like the American Journal of Political Science, Political Behavior, Political Communication, and Political Science Research & Methods. His present interests include cohort conflict in American politics and developing new methods for social science in a rapidly changing world.

Nimay Ndolo is an influencer, actress, and filmmaker.

Marion Nestle is the Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health, Emerita, at New York University, which she chaired from 1988-2003 and from which she officially retired in September 2017. Her research and writing examine scientific and socioeconomic influences on food choice and its consequences, emphasizing the role of food industry marketing. She is the author, co-author, or co-editor of fourteen books, most notably Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health (2002).

Damian Norfleet is an interdisciplinary performer-composer-improviser. Damian has performed at Lincoln Center, Roulette, National Sawdust, New York Society for Ethical Culture, Kaufman Music Center, The Times Center, and multiple Off-Broadway theaters.

Beth Noveck directs the Governance Lab (GovLab) and its MacArthur Research Network on Opening Governance. She is a Professor in Technology, Culture, and Society and affiliated faculty at the Center for Urban Science and Progress at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering and a Fellow at NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge. New Jersey governor Phil Murphy appointed her as the state’s first Chief Innovation Officer in 2018. She is also Visiting Senior Faculty Fellow at the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University. Previously, Beth served in the White House as the first United States Deputy Chief Technology Officer and director of the White House Open Government Initiative under President Obama. UK Prime Minister David Cameron appointed her senior advisor for Open Government.

Jean Oelwang is CEO of Virgin Unite, the independent charitable arm of the Virgin Group. Prior to joining Virgin Unite, Jean lived and worked on five continents while helping to lead successful mobile-phone start-ups around the world. Jean has long explored the overlap of the business and social sectors, having worked for the Foundation for National Parks and Wildlife in Australia, and in numerous volunteer roles, including a stint as a VISTA volunteer where she worked with—and learned from—homeless teens in Chicago.

Sarah Oppenheimer is an architectural manipulator. Oppenheimer creates circulatory pathways that establish unexpected kinesthetic and visual relays between bodies and buildings. Rhythms and timescales of living systems flow from body to building and back again. The viewer is transformed into an agent of spatial change.

Larisa Ortiz serves as a Mayoral Appointee to the NYC Planning Commission and is the Managing Director at Streetsense. She has led hundreds of comprehensive retail planning efforts across communities large and small, both nationally and internationally. Larisa is the author of “Improving Tenant Mix,” published by the International Council of Shopping Centers, and is a frequent instructor and guest speaker for the International Economic Development Corporation, the International Downtown Association, and the International Council of Shopping Centers.

Director and Professor of Historic Preservation at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, Jorge Otero-Pailos is an architect, artist, and theorist specializing in experimental forms of preservation. He is the founder and editor of the journal Future Anterior, co-editor of Experimental Preservation (2016) author of Architecture’s Historical Turn (2010) as well as a contributor to scholarly journals and books including the Oxford Encyclopedia of Aesthetics and Rem Koolhaas’ Preservation Is Overtaking Us (2014). Jorge Otero-Pailos is a member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences of Puerto Rico, and has received awards from major art, architecture, and preservation organizations, including the Kress Foundation, the Graham Foundation, the Fitch Foundation, the Canadian Center for Architecture, UNESCO, and the American Institute of Architects. He studied architecture at Cornell University and earned a doctorate in architecture at M.I.T. Jorge Otero-Pailos’s work as an artist has been commissioned by and exhibited at major heritage sites, museums, foundations, and biennials, including Artangel’s public art commission at the UK Parliament, the Venice Art Biennial, Victoria and Albert Museum, Louis Vuitton Galerie Museum, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, SFMoMA, Hong Kong’s Tai Kwun Centre for Heritage and Arts, Frieze London, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. He is the recipient of a 2021-22 American Academy in Rome Residency in the visual arts.

Neri Oxman is an architect, designer, and the Sony Corporation Career Development Professor and associate professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT Media Lab, where she founded and directs the Mediated Matter design research group. Her goal is to enhance the relationship between built and natural environments by employing design principles inspired by nature and implementing them in the invention of novel digital design technologies.

Trevor Paglen is an artist whose work spans image-making, sculpture, investigative journalism, writing, engineering, and numerous other disciplines.Paglen’s work has had one-person exhibitions at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington D.C.; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Fondazione Prada, Milan; the Barbican Centre, London; Vienna Secession, Vienna; and Protocinema Istanbul, and participated in group exhibitions the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern, and numerous other venues. Paglen has launched an artwork into distant orbit around Earth in collaboration with Creative Time and MIT, contributed research and cinematography to the Academy Award-winning film Citizenfour, and created a radioactive public sculpture for the exclusion zone in Fukushima, Japan.

Emily Parker is currently digital diplomacy advisor and Future Tense fellow at New America. She is the author of Now I Know Who My Comrades Are: Voices From the Internet Underground, which tells the stories of Internet activists in China, Cuba, and Russia. Previously, Parker was a member of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s policy planning staff at the US Department of State, where she covered 21st-century statecraft, innovation, and technology. She was also a staff writer and editor for The Wall Street Journal and an editor at The New York Times.

Anne Pasternak is President and artistic director of Creative Time, the New York City arts organization that creates unconventional opportunities for artists to activate and engage urban spaces. Under Anne’s leadership, Creative Time has produced such renowned projects as Tribute in Light, the twin beacons of light that illuminated the former World Trade Center site six months after 9/11; and Waiting for Godot in New Orleans, a restaging of Samuel Beckett’s play in the streets of post-Katrina New Orleans.

Glaucio H. Paulino is the Margareta Engman Augustine Professor of Engineering, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Professor of the Princeton Materials Institute at Princeton University. His research group’s contributions in the area of computational mechanics spans development of methodologies to characterize deformation and fracture behavior of existing and emerging materials and structural systems, topology optimization for large-scale and multiscale/multiphysics problems, and origami.

Yana Peel is CEO of Intelligence Squared Group, the world’s leading forum for live debate. A cofounder of Outset Contemporary Art Foundation, she maintains board and advisory positions across the arts, including Tate, British Fashion Council, The Serpentine Gallery, V&A, V-A-C Foundation Moscow, Lincoln Center, Para/Site Art Space, and Asia Art Archive. As a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum, she speaks regularly at the Davos Annual Meeting, especially in the areas of technology and art. Peel was born in Saint Petersburg, Russia, and attended McGill University and The London School of Economics before starting her career at Goldman Sachs.

Claudia Perlich is Chief Scientist at Dstillery, as well as an adjunct professor in the NYU Stern MBA program. She uses her computer science background towards her current research on the application of machine learning and predictive modeling to real-world problems. Claudia was recently selected as member of the annual Crain’s NY 40 Under 40 list, Wired’s Smart List, and Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People. Previously, Claudia worked at the IBM Watson research lab, where she won numerous data-mining competitions, and she is still actively involved in local NGOs with a focus on data for social good.

Latoya Peterson was one of Forbes magazine’s 30 Under 30 rising stars in media for 2013. While she is best known for the award-winning blog Racialicious.com, she is currently an editor-at-large at Fusion working on a documentary about women and video games. Previously, she was the senior digital producer for The Stream, a social media–driven news show on Al Jazeera America; and a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University. Her work has been published in ESPN magazine, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Essence, Spin, Vibe, Marie Claire, The Guardian, and Jezebel.com. Her essay “The Not Rape Epidemic” was published in the anthology Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World without Rape.

David Platzker is Curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints at The Museum of Modern Art. Previously, David was the director of Specific Object, an innovative gallery, bookshop, and storehouse for a range of items, from artists’ publications, multiples, and unique works of art to literature, music, and counterculture. Before founding Specific Object, David was the Executive Director of Printed Matter, a nonprofit institution dedicated to the promotion of artists’ books and publications.

Maria Popova is a Bulgarian-born Brooklynite, writer, blogger, and critic. A self-professed “hunter-gatherer of interestingness,” Maria founded the highly influential online emporium of ideas Brain Pickings. Included in The Library of Congress archive of culturally valuable materials, Brain Pickings is “your LEGO treasure chest, full of pieces across art, design, science, technology, philosophy, history, politics, psychology, sociology, ecology, anthropology, you-name-itology,” according to Maria.She has written for The New York Times, Wired UK, and The Atlantic, among others. She is on Twitter at @brainpicker.

Derecka Purnell is a lawyer, writer, organizer, and author of Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom. She works to end police and prison violence by providing legal assistance, research, and trainings in community-based organizations through an abolitionist framework. She is currently a columnist at The Guardian, a Margaret Burroughs Fellow for the Social Justice Initiative’s Portal Project at the University of Illinois-Chicago, and a Scholar-in-Residence at Columbia Law School.

Will Rawls is a choreographer, performance artist, curator and writer. Rawl’s work explores the relationship between dance and language through the prisms of blackness, abstraction, and opacity. Recent publications include Dog Years (2014), Leap of Fake: Speculations on a Dance as Doubting (Scores 4, Tanzquartier Wien), and Mirror Mirrored: A Contemporary Artist’s Edition of 25 Grimm’s Tales.

Annette Yoshiko Reed is an Associate Professor in the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies and Program in Religious Studies at New York University. Her research spans Second Temple Judaism, early Christianity, and Jewish/Christian relations in Late Antiquity. Publications include Fallen Angels and the History of Judaism and Christianity (Cambridge 2005), Heavenly Realms and Earthly Realities in Late Antique Religions (ed. with R. Boustan; Cambridge 2004), The Ways that Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (ed. with A.H. Becker; Mohr Siebeck 2003; Fortress 2007), and Jews, Christians, and the Roman Empire (ed. with N. Dohrmann; UPenn Press, 2013). She is currently working on two monographs: one on the origins of Jewish angelology and demonology, and the other on the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies and the history of “Jewish-Christianity.”

David Rockefeller, Jr. is Board Chair of The Rockefeller Foundation, and a longstanding MoMA trustee. His paternal grandmother, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, was one of the three founding “ladies” of The Museum of Modern Art. David has also served on the board of the National Endowment for the Arts and National Public Radio. He is the founder and president of Sailors for the Sea, a nonprofit organization that encourages boaters to preserve and protect the sea. He holds a law degree from Harvard University.

Fiona Romeo is the Inaugural Director of Digital Content and Strategy, The Museum of Modern Art. Fiona has over a decade of experience in creatively developing digital content and services for brands like the BBC, Disney, and most recently, the Royal Museums Greenwich, London. She is particularly interested in new ways to visualize museum data and invite the public to respond to collections.

Frank Rose is a digital anthropologist. Frank’s most recent book, The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation Is Remaking Hollywood, explicates how technology is changing the venerable art of storytelling. He is also the editor and writer of Deep Media blog, which offers a discerning narrative of the digital age.

Martha Rosler is a Brooklyn-born artist that works in photography and photo text, video, installation, sculpture, and performance, as well as writing about art and culture. Solo exhibitions of Rosler’s work have been organized by the Whitney (1977), Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston (1987), Museum of Modern Art in Oxford (1990), The New Museum in collaboration with the International Center of Photography in New York, (1998–2000), Sprengel Hannover Museum (2005), and Institute of Contemporary Arts in London (2006). Her work has also been included in major group exhibitions such as Whitney Biennial (1979, 1983, 1987, and 1990), Documenta 7 and 12 (1982 and 2007), Havana Biennale (1986), Venice Biennale (2003), Liverpool Biennial (2004), Taipei Biennial (2004) and Skulptur Projekte (2007).

Andrew Ross is Professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. Much of his writing focuses on labor, the urban environment, and the organization of work, from the Western world of business and high technology to conditions of offshore labor in the Global South. Author of Creditocracy and the Case for Debt Refusal, The Exorcist and the Machines, and Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World’s Least Sustainable City.

Karla Rothstein is a practicing architect and has been an associate professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation for the past 20 years. She is the founder and director of Columbia’s trans-disciplinary DeathLAB and a member of the Columbia University Seminar on Death. Rothstein’s area of inquiry weaves intimate spaces of urban life, death, and memory with intersections of social justice, the environment, and civic infrastructure. Rothstein is also design director at LATENT Productions, the architecture, research, and development firm she cofounded with Salvatore Perry. In 2016, LATENT Productions and DeathLAB were awarded first place in the international Future Cemetery competition, and DeathLAB’s initiative was recognized as one of New York Magazine’s 47 “Reasons to Love New York.”

Rafaël Rozendaal is a Dutch-Brazilian visual artist who uses the internet as his canvas. Since 2001, he has been making website-as-art objects. Rozendaal’s artistic practice comprises animations, websites, installations, tapestries, prints and writing. His work takes shape through a range of transformations – from movement into abstraction, from virtual into physical space, and from website to print – with all of them informing each other. All of his works stem from a fascination with moving images and interactivity in its most basic form. Although Rozendaal is best known for his artworks in the form of websites, he sees no hierarchy between his websites and physical works, also creating installations, tapestries, lenticulars, books, and lectures. Rozendaal is also the founder of the exhibition concept Bring Your Own Beamer, an evening where artists bring their own projectors to display their digital work.

Cameron Russell has spent the last twenty years working as a model for clients including Prada, Calvin Klein, Victoria’s Secret, H&M, Vogue, and Elle. With over forty million views, her TED talk on the power of image is one of the most popular of all time. She is the co-founder of Model Mafia, a collective of hundreds of fashion models striving for a more equitable, just, and sustainable industry. She continues to organize, consult, and speak to transform extractive supply chains and center climate justice. She lives in New York with her family.

Neela Saldanha is the executive director at the Yale Research Initiative on Innovation and Scale (Y-RISE) at Yale University, which focuses on developing the science around scaling policy interventions. Neela is a behavioral scientist by training with phenomenal experience in multiple areas such as consulting, teaching, researching, and writing. Prior to joining Yale, among her many roles, she helped set up the Centre for Social and Behaviour Change (CSBC) at Ashoka University, where she also served as a director for a few years. Neela holds a PhD in marketing from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta.

Jacolby Satterwhite is a visual artist whose work weaves together video, 3D animation, printmaking, performance, and dance. Drawing upon the fantastic environments of the video games he played as a child, he incorporates personal ephemera and the drawings of his late schizophrenic mother to fashion his own Bosch-ian dreamscape. His recent developments into 3D animation are a culmination of his background in performance, dance, and more specifically voguing, in conjunction with his training as a painter and his religious upbringing in a home brimming with black magic. His virtual worlds act as entry ways into demonic (and angelic) post-human universes. His work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally and is in the public collections at Studio Museum in Harlem, Seattle Art Museum, and Whitney Museum of American Art.

Steve Schapiro is a photographer who has earned international acclaim for his photos of key moments of the Civil Rights Movement, such as the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom or the Selma to Montgomery marches. He is also known for his portraits of celebrities and movie stills, most importantly from The Godfather and Taxi Driver.

Richard Sennett currently serves as Senior Advisor to the United Nations on its Program on Climate Change and Cities. He is Senior Fellow at the Center on Capitalism and Society at Columbia University and Visiting Professor of Urban Studies at MIT. Previously, he founded the New York Institute for the Humanities, taught at New York University and at the London School of Economics, and served as President of the American Council on Work. Over the course of the last five decades, he has written about social life in cities, changes in labour, and social theory. His books include The Hidden Injuries of Class, The Fall of Public Man, The Corrosion of Character, The Culture of the New Capitalism, The Craftsman, and Building and Dwelling. Among other awards, he has received the Hegel Prize, the Spinoza Prize, an honorary doctorate from Cambridge University, and the Centennial Medal from Harvard University. Richard Sennett grew up in the Cabrini Green housing project in Chicago. He attended the Julliard School in New York, where he worked with Claus Adam, cellist of the Julliard Quartet. He then studied social relations at Harvard, working with David Riesman, and independently with Hannah Arendt.

Palak Shah is a social entrepreneur, a leader in the social movement for workers’ rights in the new economy, and a speaker and thought leader on the future of work. As Social Innovations Director of NDWA, she leads national strategy on raising market norms and standards, partnering with the private sector, and building sustainable business ventures. She founded NDWA Labs (formerly known as Fair Care Labs), the innovations arm of NDWA, which experiments with using technology to improve job access and quality for domestic workers, and builds worker-centric technology to ensure an equitable future for workers as labor markets shift online.

Ahmed Shihab-Eldin is an Emmy-nominated journalist and a correspondent/producer for VICE on HBO. In 2015, he was featured on the Arabian Business power list of the planet’s 100 most influential young Arabs, and in 2012 he was featured on Forbes’ “30 Under 30” list of “young disruptors, innovators and media entrepreneurs impatient to change the world.” Shihab-Eldin joined VICE from HuffPost Live, an award-winning online network he helped launch in 2012. There, he produced and hosted World Brief, a 30-minute interactive global news show averaging one million views a day. In 2010, Ahmed created, produced, and cohosted Al Jazeera English’s The Stream, an award-winning interactive talk show that earned him an Emmy nomination for Most Innovative Program in 2012.

Marci Shore is an associate professor of modern European intellectual and cultural history at Yale University. Her research focuses on the intellectual history of twentieth and twenty-first century Central and Eastern Europe. Shore is the author of three books, among them The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution (2017), where she explores the 2014 Ukrainian Revolution and subsequent war in Donbas through the lens of interviews and first-hand accounts with participants.

Kevin Slavin is an entrepreneur integrating digital media, technology, and design. He currently serves as Creative Director and CMO at Poppy, where he studies the composition and interaction of indoor air, a topic on which little data exists. Kevin was also the founding Chief Science and Technology Officer for The Shed, and the founder of the Playful Systems group at the MIT Media Lab, where he performed the early-stage of research mapping microscopic organisms that informs his current work.

Collette V. Smith is the NFL’s first black female coach as well as the NY Jets’ first female coach. She formerly played football professionally for the NY Sharks. She has since founded Believe N You, Inc., which strives to empower young African American women across the country. Collette V Smith is an Ambassador for the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence. Collette, a survivor herself, is a pioneer in the movement on empowering women and how we can change the world if we continue to use our voices to make positive change.

Pamela Sneed is a poet, writer, visual artist, and performer. The author of the books Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom than Slavery (1998) and Kong and Other Works (2009), as well as the chapbooks Lincoln (2014), Gift (2015), and Sweet Dreams (2018), her poetry has appeared in 100 Best African American Poems (edited by Nikki Giovanni, 2010), Best Monologues from Best American Short Plays (edited by William Demastes, 2013), and Zoe Leonard’s Transcript of a Rally (2016).

Robyn C. Spencer is a historian that focuses on Black social protest after World War II, urban and working-class radicalism, and gender. She is an Associate Professor of History at Lehman College, City University of New York, where she teaches survey and seminar courses on African American heritage, civil rights and Black Power and Black women’s history. Her first book, The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland, was published in 2016.

Emily Spivack is creator and writer of Threaded, the Smithsonian’s fashion history blog. Editor of Worn Stories, a collection of stories about clothing and memory; and Sentimental Value, a blog comprised of noteworthy stories about clothing found on eBay. Former executive director of Shop Well with You, a not-for-profit organization that helps women with cancer improve their body image and quality of life by using their clothing as a wellness tool.

Justin Stanwix is a co-founder of Wonder Unit, a new model of movie studio revolutionizing how movies are developed and produced. He has a background in the technology sector, working at Nanotronics, eBay, and Gust. Justin is currently an ambassador for the non-profit art space Pioneer Works, co-chairs the Creative Time ambassadors and is a member of the ProjectART Advisory Council.

Bruce Sterling is a futurist, prolific science fiction writer, and Internet of Things curator. Bruce is one of the founding fathers of the cyberpunk genre, most notably authoring Mirrorshades: A Cyberpunk Anthology. Bruce is currently curating Casa Jasmina, an Internet of Things bed-and-breakfast apartment housed in a half-abandoned Fiat plant in Turin. The apartment will serve as a testing ground for open-source manufacturing of electronic home automation.

Yancey Strickler is cofounder and CEO of Kickstarter, a global crowdfunding platform that was dubbed “the people’s NEA” by The New York Times. Prior to Kickstarter, Yancey was the editor-in-chief of eMusic, and his writing appeared in The Village Voice, New York magazine, Pitchfork, and other publications. In 2007 Yancey cofounded the eMusic Selects record label.

Insoo Suh is the director of minimally invasive endocrine surgery at NYU Langone with a focus on innovative surgical techniques and alternative treatment technologies. His major research interests focus on innovative surgical techniques and alternative treatment technologies. As director of minimally invasive endocrine surgery, he leads an active clinical and research program in scarless endoscopic thyroidectomy—he was among the pioneers of this procedure in the United States—as well as in minimally invasive parathyroidectomy and adrenalectomy. He also lead the Department of Surgery program that supports the development of surgical innovations.

Jane Fulton Suri has a background in architecture and psychology. In her role as a partner and chief creative officer at IDEO, she has pursued a “human-centered” approach to design, seeking innovation by looking at problems from the perspective of social science. With techniques such as “empathic observation” and “experience prototyping,” she has brought the methods of design beyond the physical object to services and the environmental. Suri’s talk will focus on a crucial part of this process: how to build community among designers in order to create an atmosphere that is conducive to collaboration.

Tsige Tafesse is one of the five founders of By Us For Us (BUFU), a Brooklyn-based collective focusing on the discourse of Black and Asian cultural and political relationships. The founders of this project are a collective of queer, femme, Black, and East Asian artists and organizers who emphasize building solidarity, de-centering whiteness, and resurfacing our deeply interconnected and complicated histories. Representing BUFU, she has been invited to speak by various museums and institutions, including most recently the Brooklyn Museum and the Rubin Museum.

Barbara Tannenbaum helps to transform the lives and careers of her students who develop their skills in public speaking and persuasive communication. Her students master the art of using visual and vocal communication that is audience-centered and goal-focused.Tannenbaum has designed and delivered communication programs for global corporations and senior political leaders on six continents. Her clients include the Council of Chief Judges of the Appellate Courts of the United States, California and Florida Supreme Courts, International Monetary Fund, Boston Museum of Fine Art, Museum of Modern Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At Brown, Tannenbaum leads the popular course, Persuasive Communication, and provides annual communication workshops for senior administrators, graduate students, administrative professionals, academic centers, and student organizations. At the university for 40 years, she has received the John Rowe Workman Award for excellence in teaching in the humanities, and been recognized eleven times with the Senior Citation/Hazeltine Citation for excellence in teaching. She regularly leads communication workshops at the Madeleine Albright Institute for Global Affairs at Wellesley College, Athena Institute at Barnard College, Tuck School at Dartmouth College.

Emma Tarlo is a Professor of Anthropology and Director of Research at Goldsmiths, University of London. She has conducted long term anthropological fieldwork in India and Britain as well as shorter multi-cited fieldwork in China, Myanmar and the USA. She specializes in the anthropology of material culture with reference to dress, fashion, textiles, the body and hair in trans-cultural contexts. Her work engages with issues of colonialism, nationalism, diasporic identities, aesthetics, memory, religious revivalism, stigma, creativity and questions of representation and materiality.

Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art.

Marco Tempest is a cyber-illusionist and Director’s Fellow at the MIT Media Lab. Marco’s work blends video, digital technology, and social media to concoct a new form of contemporary illusion. A keen advocate of the open-source community, Marco works with artists, writers, and technologists to create new experiences, and researches the practical uses of the technology of illusion.

Jane Thompson is a multidisciplinary modernist whose career was launched in MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design. She introduced the pioneering journal for all design professionals, ID: Industrial Design, which explores multidisciplinary fields of “design in everyday life.” With Kaufman Foundation sponsorship, she undertook lifelong research on the Bauhaus origins of modernism in Germany. She partnered with TAC architect Ben Thompson to develop original lifestyle design shops, the colorful and sensuous Design Research, and also collaborated with Finland’s Marimekko, helping to transform design in America’s new home boom after 1970. She now celebrates two decades leading Thompson Design Group, Boston, offering innovative urban planning for cities such as Houston, Denver, and Long Branch on the Jersey Coast. Thompson has been honored with three lifetime achievement awards, most recently with the 2008 Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum Award for Lifetime Achievement.

Jer Thorp is cofounder of the Office for Creative Outreach, and adjunct professor at New York University’s ITP program. Between 2010 and 2012, Jer was the Data Artist in Residence at the New York Times R&D Group. More recently, he collaborated with NASA and visualized 138 years of Popular Science. Jer also sits on the World Economic Forum’s Council on Design Innovation.

Christiaan Triebert is a journalist with The New York Times’ Visual Investigations team, which combines traditional reporting with digital sleuthing and open source methods, and a Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University. Prior to joining The Times, he was a senior investigator and lead trainer at the investigative group Bellingcat and gave workshops on open source investigation throughout Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America. Triebert has shared two Pulitzer Prizes for investigations that revealed basic flaws in the U.S. military’s dismissal of civilian casualty claims, and that exposed Russian bombing of hospitals in Syria.

Since 1977, when Mierle Laderman Ukeles became the official, unsalaried Artist-in-Residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation—a position she still holds—she has created art that deals with the endless maintenance and service work that “keeps the city alive,” urban waste flows, recycling, ecology, urban sustainability and our power to transform degraded land and water into healthy inhabitable public places. Ukeles asks whether we can design modes of survival – for a thriving planet, not an entropic one – that don’t crush our personal and civic freedom and silence the individual’s voice.

Gina Athena Ulysse is a feminist anthropologist, artist and activist, and self-described post-Zora interventionist. She is Professor of Anthropology at Wesleyan University. Her research interests focus on Black diasporic conditions. Her ethnographic work has appeared in several journals and collections. Her creative projects include spoken word, performance art, and installation pieces. Her latest award winning book Because When God Is Too Busy: Haiti, me & THE WORLD (2017) is a collection of poetry, performance texts and photographs. She was awarded the 2018 Anthropology in the Media Award by the AAA. She is a also the recipient of Wesleyan’s Binswanger Prize for Excellence in Teaching and the Haitian Studies Association award for Excellence in Scholarship in 2015. Her presentation acknowledges the work of Anténor Firmin, Jamaica Kincaid, Ian F Lopez, Toni Morrison, Arlene Torres and Michel-Rolph Trouillot.

Kasia Urbaniak is the founder and CEO of The Academy, a school that teaches women the foundations of power and influence. Kasia’s perspective on power is unique. She made her living as one of the world’s most successful dominatrixes while studying power dynamics with teachers all over the world. During that time, she practiced Taoist alchemy in one of the oldest female-led monasteries in China and obtained dozens of certifications in different disciplines, including Medical Qi Gong and Systemic Constellations. Since founding The Academy in 2013, Kasia has taught hundreds of women practical tools to step into leadership positions in their relationships, families, workplaces, and wider communities. She has spoken at corporations and conferences worldwide.

Fernanda Viégas & Martin Wattenberg are pioneers in data visualization and analytics. They co-lead Google’s Big Picture data visualization research group (part of Google Brain team), and have co-founded the People+AI Research Google initiative, which is devoted to advancing the research and design of people-centric AI systems. They are world-known for their groundbreaking visualizations of culturally significant data, which have been exhibited in venues such as the MoMA, the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Artie Vierkant is a post-internet artist. Artie’s work concerns the role of image production and dissemination in contemporary networked society. His ongoing work Image Objects explores issues of materiality and the reification of digital entities. Artie’s latest work, Exploits, is an exploration of intellectual property and how issues of authorship and ownership have changed since the transition to a digital society.

Miroslav Volf is the Henry B. Wright Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School and is the Founder and Director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. He was educated in his native Croatia, the United States, and Germany, earning doctoral and post-doctoral degrees (with highest honors) from the University of Tübingen, Germany. He has written or edited more than 20 books, over 100 scholarly articles, and his work has been featured in the Washington Post, Christianity Today, Christian Century, Sojourners, and several other outlets, including NPR’s Speaking of Faith (now On Being with Krista Tippett) and Public Television’s Religion and Ethics Newsweekly. Some of his most significant books include: ‍Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (1996; revised edition, 2019), Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace (2006), Allah: A Christian Response (2011), After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity (1998), A Public Faith: How Followers of Christ Should Serve the Common Good (2011), The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World (2006; revised edition, 2020), Flourishing: Why We Need Religion in a Globalized World (2016), For the Life of the World: Theology that Makes a Difference (2019), and Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most (2023).

Dr. Nora D. Volkow, M.D., is the Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) at the National Institutes of Health. As a research psychiatrist and scientist, Dr. Volkow has been instrumental in demonstrating that drug addiction is a disease of the human brain. She has been the recipient of multiple awards, including the Carnegie Prize in Mind and Brain Sciences and has been named one of Time magazine’s “Top 100 People Who Shape Our World”, “One of the 20 People to Watch” by Newsweek magazine, Washingtonian magazine’s “100 Most Powerful Women” in both 2015 and 2017, “Innovator of the Year” by U.S. News & World Report, and one of “34 Leaders Who Are Changing Health Care” by Fortune magazine.

Alexandria Wailes is an actress and director. Her theatre credits include the Mark Taper Forum/Deaf West’s Pippin, Australia Theatre of the Deaf’s The Wild Boys, Kirk Douglas Theatre’s Sleeping Beauty Wakes, the Public Theatre’s Mother Courage and Her Children. On television, she has appeared in Nurse Jackie, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, and Conviction. She received an LA Ovation Award Nomination as Best Lead Female in a Musical for Sleeping Beauty Wakes and was a Tony honoree recipient for Ensemble in the Broadway revival of Big River.

David Wallace-Wells is a journalist and author. He serves as the deputy editor at New York Magazine, where he writes frequently about climate and the near future of science and technology. His 2017 New York Magazine essay “The Uninhabitable Earth” was expanded into a book in 2019 and remains a crucial text on the impending impacts of the climate crisis.

Ari Wallach is the founder and CEO of Synthesis Corp., a New York City–based strategic consultancy that lives at the intersection of innovation, technology, and purpose-driven culture. He is also the host of Fast Company Futures with Ari Wallach. Wallach is the co-founder of The Great Schlep, whose eponymous video had over 25 million views and 350 million global media impressions and started a national conversation about race, faith, and democracy during the 2008 presidential campaign. Wallach is the founder of INFORUM, one of the nation’s largest nonpartisan public affairs forums for young people. He currently sits on the boards of several nonprofits, as well as the Data and Democracy Initiative at UC Berkeley.

Nanfu Wang is a documentary filmmaker who examines the impact of authoritarian governance, corruption, and lack of accountability on the lives of individuals and the well-being of communities. Wang interrogates notions of responsibility and freedom, particularly amid the repressive state mandates in her native China. Her 2019 film, One Child Nation, earned the Grand Jury Prize for Documentary Feature at the Sundance Film Festival, and in 2020, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. Her most recent film, In the Same Breath, premiered at MoMA in 2021.

Tricia Wang is a tech ethnographer obsessed with designing equity into systems and the co-founder of CRADL, The Crypto Research and Design Lab, Tricia Wang. Prior to CRADL, she co-founded Constellate Data, a data consultancy helping organizations get the most out of their data by integrating data science and social science. With more than 15 years of experience working with designers, engineers, and scientists, she has a particular interest in designing human-centered systems. She advises corporations and startups on using “thick data"—data brought to light using digital-age ethnographic research methods that uncover stories and meaning—to improve strategy, policy, products, and services.

Amy Webb is the founder and CEO of the Future Today Institute, which advises Fortune 500 companies, major institutions and governments. Her future-forecasting work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review and many others. Webb is an adjunct professor at the New York University Stern School of Business and a summer lecturer at Columbia University. She was a delegate on the US-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission, focusing on the future of AI and diplomacy. Webb’s new book, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today’s Fringe Is Tomorrow’s Mainstream, explains the tools of a futurist and how everyone can forecast the future of technology, society, and business.

Lance Weiler is a storyteller and filmmaker. Dubbed “one of 25 people helping to re-invent entertainment and change the face of Hollywood” by WIRED magazine. Lance sits on two World Economic Forum steering committees; one focused on the Future of Content Creation, and the other examines the role of Digital Media in Shaping Culture and Governance. In addition, Lance teaches at Columbia University on the art, craft, and business of storytelling in the 21st century.

Claire Weisz is a founding principal of WXY architecture + urban design, a practice globally recognized for its place-based approach to architecture, urban design, and planning. WXY works closely with local communities to create and reimagine public spaces and structures such as the redesign of Astor Place and the Rockaway Boardwalks. In 1995, Weisz co-founded The Design Trust for Public Space and in 2018 was awarded the Medal of Honor from the American Institute of Architects.

Henrik Werdelin is an entrepreneur, author and the co-founder of BARK, America’s fastest growing pet company. BARK specializes in designing toys and accessories, creating products and experiences that satisfy each individual dog’s distinct personality and preferences. Using education, technology, and volunteerism, they pledge to serve as the voice for dogs in a human-led world.

Ytasha L. Womack is an author, filmmaker, dancer, and futurist. Her book Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci Fi and Fantasy - a 2014 Locus Award Finalist in the nonfiction category - explores black sci-fi culture, bleeks, black comix, and the legacy of futurism. Womack is also author of the critically acclaimed book Post Black: How a New Generation Is Redefining African American Identity, and is coeditor of the hip-hop anthology Beats Rhymes & Life: What We Love and Hate About Hip-Hop. Her films include Couples Night (as screenwriter), Love Shorts (as writer/producer), and The Engagement (as director). She’s also writer and director of the upcoming Afrofuturist film Bar Star City.

Young Woo is a real estate developer, designer, founder and principal of Youngwoo & Associates. Based in New York City since 1979, Young Woo & Associates, are known for developments such as the Sky Garage and Pier 57 in Manhattan. Woo is currently designing a complex of dog friendly apartments in Chelsea, New York City.

Wendy Woon is Deputy Director of Education at The Museum of Modern Art. Wendy oversees all areas of education at MoMA and has been instrumental in transforming museum education practice for the 21st century. Prior to joining MoMA, Wendy was Director of Education at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

Bill Yosses is an American chef of international renown. He held the prestigious title of the White House Executive Pastry Chef from 2007 to 2014. In those years, Bill got first-hand experience of culinary diplomacy representing the US State Department as part of their Culinary Diplomacy Corps. As pastry chef of the White House, he was also closely involved with Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move initiative with the goal of reducing childhood health problems related to diet and conducted bi-weekly tours of the White House vegetable garden for school groups.

Kaydrianne Young is a justice advocate. While earning her Bachelor of Arts Degree in Sociology at the University of Florida, she worked with grassroots public education groups and her university to recruit, train, and mentor youth for leadership in environmental entrepreneurship and renewable energy advocacy. She currently works as Operations Coordinator at Million Hoodies

LinYee Yuan is founder and editor of MOLD, an editorial platform about designing the future of food. LinYee was previously the entrepreneur in residence for QZ.com and an editor for Core77, T: The New York Times Style Magazine and Theme Magazine. She has written about design and art for Food52, Design Observer, Cool Hunting, Elle Decor and Wilder Quarterly. LinYee also contributed the foreword to Food Futures: Sensory Explorations in Food Design and Cooking Up Trouble.

Alex Zhang is the Mayor of Friends with Benefits DAO, a community-owned organization that utilizes Web3 to help cultural creators and maintainers gain agency over their cultural production. Previously, he was the president of Summit, an ecosystem that connects and nourishes global creatives, entrepreneurs, innovators and leaders. He aspires to be the Jane Jacobs of DAOs.

Marina Zurkow is a media artist focused on near-impossible nature and culture intersections, researching “wicked problems” like invasive species, superfund sites, and petroleum interdependence. She has used life science, bio materials, animation, dinners, and software technologies to foster intimate connections between people and non-human agents. Her work spans gallery installations and unconventional public participatory projects. Her collaborative initiatives include Climoji, Dear Climate, More&More Unlimited, and Floating Studio for Dark Ecologies. Currently, she is working on visualizing future oceans, and connecting eaters to food opportunities in changing climates.

Calder Zwicky is an Assistant Director in the Education Department at the Museum of Modern Art, overseeing Teen and Community Partnerships. Over the last decade he has been working to create programming for a wide-range of underserved and historically-overlooked audiences including incarcerated youth, post-incarcerated adults, HIV/AIDS service organizations, and homelessness initiatives, among others. He also oversees MoMA’s free programming for teens, including the long-running In the Making workshops and the MoMA + MoMA PS1 Cross-Museum Collective. In addition to his own studio practice, he has been involved with a variety of museums including the Walker Art Center, the Queens Museum, and the Bronx Museum of the Arts.