The "Grandmother of Performance Art," Abramović has presented her work with performances, sound, photography, video, and sculpture in solo exhibitions at major institutions in the U.S. and Europe. She was also the subject of a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, "The Artist is Present," in 2010.

William Lee Adams is a Vietnamese-American broadcaster and journalist based in London, where he currently presents the BBC Minute — the flagship youth news program from the BBC World Service. He is best known as the founder and face of Wiwibloggs, the world’s most-followed independent Eurovision blog and YouTube channel. Wild Dances is his first book.

Keegan Allen is a star of the ensemble-cast show "Pretty Little Liars" on ABC Family, as well as multiple forthcoming films. An amateur photographer, poet, and musician, Allen resides in Los Angeles. Life.Love.Beauty is his first book.

Carl Sferrazza Anthony is a writer, screenwriter, and journalist, an expert on Presidents and their families, the former historian of the National First Ladies’ Library, and the author of over a dozen works of history and biography.

Author of the nationally-syndicated column "Ask a Mexican," Arellano is the editor of the OC Weekly. He has contributed to NPR’s Marketplace and The Los Angeles Times, and has appeared on The Today Show, Chelsea Lately, and The Colbert Report. He lectures widely and is represented by Verbatim.

Steven M. L. Aronson has written for Vanity Fair, Vogue, New York, and Esquire among other publications. His previous books are Hype and Savage Grace, which was adapted for a film starring Julianne Moore and Eddie Redmayne.

An illustrator from New York, Avillez has illustrated for clients such as Vogue, Vice, Bon Appetit, the New York Times, Vanity Fair, and New York magazine, among other publications. She also illustrated Lena Dunham’s 1 New York Times Bestseller, Not That Kind of Girl.

Michael Azerrad is an acclaimed music journalist and bestselling author who has written for such publications as TheNew Yorker, Rolling Stone (where he was contributing editor), Spin, The New York Times, Musician, The Wall Street Journal, Billboard and MTV News, among many others. Michael’s first book, the acclaimed Nirvana biography Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana (Doubleday/Main Street, 1993) as well as his next book, Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991 (Little, Brown, 2001), are considered to be two of the greatest music books of all time by most media outlets.

Internationally acclaimed poet, novelist, screenwriter and memoirist Jimmy Santiago Baca is the recipient of numerous literary awards including the Pushcart Prize, the American Book Award, and the International Hispanic Heritage Award. While serving a maximum security prison sentence for drug possession, Mr. Santiago Baca taught himself to read and write and discovered poetry, experiences documented in his brilliant memoir A Place to Stand (Grove Press), which went on to win the prestigious 2001 International Prize. His most recent poetry collection, Singing at the Gates, was also published by Grove Press.

A screenwriter, Bailey was nominated for an Emmy for the documentary series Pandemic: Facing AIDS.

With Superchunk bandmate Mac McCaughan, Laura Ballance founded the eminent independent label Merge Records, whose bands include Arcade Fire, Spoon, and Neutral Milk Hotel, among many others.

Platinum-selling singer-songwriter, Bareilles has been nominated for a Grammy Award five times. Her hit single “Love Song” reached number four on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2007. Bareilles also wrote the songs and music for the hit Broadway musical, Waitress.

A former editor for Travel and Leisure, Barr was also an editor and writer at Brill’s Content. Provence, 1970 was nominated for a James Beard Award in 2014.

Samara Bay coaches people to use their voice to communicate their thoughts in public, authentically and with great joy. She has coached clients for United Nations addresses, stump speeches on the campaign trail, award show telecasts, academic keynotes, product and creative pitches, all-hands, and media interviews. In Hollywood, she is an established speech coach for television and film, and she hosts a podcast, Permission to Speak, that is produced and distributed on the iHeartRadio network.

Elizabeth Beller is a writer and editor who has worked at Sotheby’s and Miramax, and whose work has appeared in The Guardian, Vogue, and Travel + Leisure.

Joshua Bennett is a poet, spoken word performer, and Assistant Professor of English at Dartmouth. His first collection of poetry, The Sobbing School (Penguin Books, 2016), was the winner of the 2015 National Poetry Series; his second collection, Owed (Penguin), and book of essays of literary criticism, Being Property Once Myself (Harvard University Press), were published in 2020.

A veteran journalist and author, Bennetts has been a reporter for Vanity Fair, the New York Times and Newsweek/Daily Beast. She is the author of the bestselling book The Feminine Mistake.

Michael Benson is a writer, photographer, filmmaker, and exhibitions producer. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, Smithsonian, ArtForum, and other publications. In the last decade he staged a series of increasingly large-scale shows of planetary landscape photography in the US and internationally, appearing in museums from London, to Brisbane, to Barcelona and beyond. In 2008-10, Benson worked with director Terrence Malick to help produce space and cosmology sequences for Malick’s film Tree of Life, which drew in part from Benson’s book and exhibition projects; the film won the Palm d’Or at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival.

Laura Bliss is a reporter at Bloomberg CityLab, where she advances the national conversation on the politics and policies that shape cities. Her writing and reporting have appeared in places like the New York Times, The Atlantic, Mother Jones, Pacific Standard, Los Angeles Review of Books,Sierra, and beyond.

A journalist, screenwriter, and film producer, Boal won two Academy Awards, Best Original Screenplay and Best Picture, for his film The Hurt Locker. His 2013 film, Zero Dark Thirty, was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Screenplay.

Patricia Bosworth is the New York Times-bestselling author of four biographies and two memoirs: Montgomery Clift (Harcourt Brace, 1978); Diane Arbus (Knopf, 1984); Marlon Brando (Viking, 2001); Jane Fonda (HMH, 2011); Anything Your Little Heart Desires (S&S, 1997); and The Men in My Life (HarperCollins, 2017). As a journalist, she has contributed regularly to Vanity Fair, the New York Times, and The Nation, among other publications.

A bartender to the Hollywood elite, for whom he set up intimate social liaisons, Bowers was the author of Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywoodand The Secret Sex Lives of the Stars. Full Service, co-authored with Lionel Friedberg, was a New York Times Bestseller and a Los Angeles Times Bestseller.

Vogue’s International Editor-at-Large, Bowles was previously Vogue’s European Editor-at-Large and a creative consultant for The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Ruth Brandon was a trainee producer for the BBC, working in radio and television after reading French and Spanish at Girton College, Cambridge. But she found she preferred writing, and moved to freelance journalism, and eventually to books. Ruth is primarily a non-fiction writer, using biography to look at social and cultural history through individual lives. Ruth lives in London. She is married, with one daughter.

Critically acclaimed author Mark Braude is a former postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, where he was also a lecturer in the departments of Art History, History, and French. He

will be the Spring 2020 Visiting Fellow at the American Library in Paris and was named a 2017-2018 Public Scholar by the National Endowment for the Humanities. His writing has appeared in The Globe and Mail, The Los

Angeles Times, and The New Republic.

Michael Brodeur is classical music editor at The Washington Post, and is a former cultural critic at the Boston Globe. Michael’s written on the gym and the body for Thrillist, the Boston Globe Magazine, and Medium; Swole is his first book.

Holly Brubach is a writer on culture specializing in dance and fashion. She has worked as a staff writer and editor at The New Yorker, the New York Times and the New York Times Magazine, and The Atlantic, where she won a National Magazine Award in Essays & Criticism, and her freelance work has appeared in W Magazine, Vanity Fair, The Gentlewoman, Travel & Leisure, Departures, Mirabella, O, House & Garden, Architectural Digest, and others.

Maggie Bullock is a journalist and former Condé Nast editor who covers the worlds of fashion, retail, and celebrity for The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Elle, and Vogue among many other national publications.

Ash Carter is a writer and the articles editor at Air Mail. His writing has appeared in Esquire, Air Mail, Vanity Fair, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Medium, WIRED, Town & Country, USA Today, and more. He lives in Brooklyn.

Adam Chandler is a journalist whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Texas Monthly, and beyond, while appearing across television, radio, and digital platforms like CBS Sunday Morning, Hardball with Chris Matthews, The History Channel’s The Food That Built America and Modern Marvels, National Geographic’s The ‘80s, NPR’s On Point, Planet Money, and Morning Shift, PRI’s The Takeaway, and more. He is the author of Drive-Thru Dreams: A Journey Through the Heart of America's Fast-Food Kingdom (Flatiron Books).

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Ted Chapin is the president and executive director of Rodgers and Hammerstein: An Imagem Company, the chairman of the board of directors for the American Theater Wing and a member of the Tony Administration Committee. His theater credits include Neil Simon’s The Sunshine Boys, the CBS telecast of Twigs, starring Carol Burnett, and Neil Cuthbert’s The Soft Touch, among other shows. He has been involved with the Encores! series at City Center since its inception and sits on several arts boards. He lives in New York City.

Windy Chien makes art that activates space and crafts objects that elevate the daily rituals of life. She is best known for her 2016 project, The Year Of Knots, in which she learned a new knot every day for a year. Following long careers at Apple/iTunes and in the music industry, she launched her studio in 2015. Her work has been covered by Wired, The New York Times, Martha Stewart and more.

Anne Soon Choi is a historian and a gerontologist who specializes in immigration history at the California State University, Dominquez Hills. She has also held postdoctoral fellowships at Swarthmore College and UCLA. She earned her Ph.D. in History from the University of Southern California and her MPH and MSW from the University of California, Los Angeles.

According to a recent profile in The New Yorker, Robert Christgau is “not just the Dean of American Rock Critics…but one of America’s sharper public intellectuals of the past half century, and certainly one of its most influential.” A rock critic since 1967, he was a senior editor and the chief music critic at The Village Voice for over three decades. His Is It Still Good to Ya?: Fifty Years of Rock Criticism, 1967-2017 was a finalist for the 2018 National Book Critics Circle award in the category of criticism; he currently writes a music column for Vice.

Bloomberg CityLab reports on the world's cities, communities, and neighborhoods: How they work, the challenges they face, and the solutions they need.

An iconic model of the 60s and 70s, Cleveland served as a muse to designers such as Halston, Stephen Burrows, and Yves Saint Laurent. She has participated in landmark fashion shows including the Battle of Versailles and has appeared in several documentaries.

Michael Collier is the author of six collections of poems, most recently My Bishop and Other Poems. His collection The Ledge was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He has received numerous awards for his poetry, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He was the Poet Laureate of Maryland from 2001-2004 and the Director of the Bread Loaf Writers Conference from 1993-2017.

A travel, documentary, and portrait photographer, Cooper pursues images that reflect local cultures and people. Since 2015, his work has been exhibited in more than 25 juried group shows in the U.S. and Europe receiving Best in Show, Best Portrait, Director's Choice, Artistic Excellence and Honorable Mention awards.

Culture reporter at the New York Times, Coscarelli’s focus is on pop music and how emerging artists are discovered, made and marketed. He’s a regular co-host of the Times’ Popcast, a podcast about music news, and has worked at New York magazine and The Village Voice.

The New York Times bestselling author behind Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain, Room Full of Mirrors: A Biography of Jimi Hendrix, and more, Charles R. Cross has written for hundreds of newspapers and magazines, from Rolling Stone to TheTimes of London. As the editor of Seattle’s The Rocket from 1986 through 2000, Cross chronicled the rise of the Northwest music scene during the heyday of grunge; he now lectures at colleges about journalism and pop culture, and often appears on radio and television as an expert.

Cathy Curtis, a former writer for The Los Angeles Times, is the author of Restless Ambition: Grace Hartigan, Painter (Oxford University Press). She majored in philosophy at Smith College and holds a master’s degree in art history from the University of California, Berkeley. She was elected vice president of Biographers International Organization in 2014.

An Emmy-winning actor best known for his role as Sam Malone on the television series "Cheers," Danson appears regularly on HBO’s "Curb Your Enthusiasm" and currently stars in "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation." He is on the board of Oceana, the world’s largest non-profit devoted to marine issues.

Matthew Davis is the founder and Executive Director of the Alan Cheuse International Writers Center at George Mason University. He is the author of the memoir When Things Get Dark: A Mongolian Winter's Tale. And his work has appeared, among other places, in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the LA Review of Books, and Guernica.

Anthony DeCurtis is a contributing editor to Rolling Stone, where his work has appeared for more than thirty years. A Grammy Award recipient, he has three times been recognized with the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for excellence in writing about music. A former on-air correspondent and editorial director at VH1, he has contributed to a myriad of television specials and programs; he teaches in the writing program at the University of Pennsylvania.

A decorative artist who lives in New York City, Derian is America’s leading practitioner of decoupage. Derian’s works have been sold at more than 700 high-end boutiques and department stores around the world, and his artistry has been featured in the New York Times, House and Garden, Country Living, and the Wall Street Journal, among other publications. His John Derian Picture Book was a New York Times bestseller.

William Deverell is a historian specializing in the 19th and 20th century American West and environmental history. He has written numerous books on the history of California and the American West, including Shaped By the West: A History of North America (University of California Press, 2018), and serves as director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, a collaborative research and teaching entity between USC's Dornslife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences and the Huntington Library.

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Ani DiFranco is a Grammy Award-winning singer, multi-instrumentalist, poet, songwriter, activist, businesswoman, and New York Times bestselling author. She has released more than 20 albums, and is one of the first independent musicians to create her own label, Righteous Babe Records (based in Buffalo, NY). She is widely known as an activist and feminist icon, and the Righteous Babe Foundation supports causes ranging from abortion rights to gay visibility.

Jared Diamond is the national baseball reporter for the Wall Street Journal, where in the past he has covered the Mets and the Yankees. He appears regularly on the MLB Network and is the co-creator of the journalism newsletter “The -30-.”

A stand-up comedian and humor lecturer, Diffee is a cartoonist for The New Yorker.

Sarah Ditum is a columnist, critic and feature writer with bylines at the New Statesman, the Guardian, the Spectator, the Independent, Eurogamer, Stylist, Grazia, Elle and more.

Maggie Doherty is a literary scholar, historian, and critic based at Harvard University, where she teaches writing, literature, and history. Receiving her BA from Yale University and PhD in English from Harvard, Doherty has written for publications like BookForum, Dissent, n+1, The New Republic, the Times Literary Supplement, and The New Yorker.

Madeleine Dore is a freelance writer, interviewer, and “day artist” exploring how we can broaden our definitions of creativity and productivity as the marker of a day well spent. She is the founder of the blog Extraordinary Routines and the podcast Routines & Ruts. Through hundreds of interviews with creative people, Madeleine has collected insights that help readers navigate uncertainty, perfectionism, and productivity guilt.

Marc J. Dunkelman is a fellow in International and Public Affairs at the Brown University Watson Institute. His work focuses on the architecture of American community and the progressive movement's evolving view of power. During more than a dozen years working in Washington, Dunkelman served as a senior fellow at the Clinton Foundation, on the staff of the Senate Judiciary Committee, as legislative director and chief of staff to a member of the House of Representatives, and as the vice president for strategy and communications at the Democratic Leadership Council. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Atlantic, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Harvard Business Review, Chronicle of Higher Education, Daily Beast, and National Affairs, among other publications. He is the author of The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community (W.W. Norton, 2014).

Senior editor of and frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, Eakin has written for the New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications.

Geoff Edgers is TheWashington Post’s national arts reporter, covering everything from fine arts to popular culture. In the last year he’s profiled Bill Murray, the Eagles and told the story of making Run-DMC’s version of Walk This Way.

Mark Ellison has worked as a carpenter, mostly in and around New York City, for nearly four decades. His work has won numerous awards, and he is widely considered one of the top carpenters in New York.

Banning Eyre is a respected broadcaster, journalist, musician and radio/film producer, and author of the highly acclaimed In Griot Time, An American Guitarist in Mali (Temple University Press 2000). Over 25 years, Eyre has researched music and culture in Mali, Congo, Morocco, Egypt and beyond. He is based in Connecticut.

Morgan Falconer is a Program Director at Sotheby's Institute of Art in New York. He previously worked as a journalist and critic for newspapers and magazines including The Times, The Economist, Art in America and Frieze. His most recent book is Painting Beyond Pollock.

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