Claudia Rankine is the author of six collections of poetry, including Just Us: An American Conversation, Citizen: An American Lyric and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely; three plays including HELP, which premiered in March of 2020 at The Shed, NYC, The White Card, which premiered in February 2018 (ArtsEmerson/ American Repertory Theater) and was published by Graywolf Press in 2019, and Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue; as well as numerous video collaborations. She is also the co-editor of several anthologies including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind (FENCE, 2015). In 2016, she co-founded The Racial Imaginary Institute (TRII).
Nuar Alsadir is the author of a book of nonfiction, Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation, and two poetry collections, including Fourth Person Singular, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Forward Prize for Best Collection. She works as a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York.
Sara'o Bery works on Artist and Talent Strategy at A24 Films.
Dr. LeRonn P. Brooks is the associate curator for modern and contemporary collections at the Getty Research Institute and the first African American curator for Getty. In this position his job entails helping to found Getty’s collections of African American artist archives. In this capacity Dr. Brooks is the curator and co-curator of a number of archives at Getty: the Johnson Publishing Company (with the National Museum of African American History and Culture), Paul R. Williams, EJ Montgomery, Dr. Robert Farris Thompson, and Maren Hassinger, among others.
Bruno Ceschel is the founder and director of Self Publish, Be Happy and a visiting lecturer at École cantonale d’art de Lausanne (ECAL). He founded Self Publish, Be Happy in 2010, and has since organised events at leading arts institutions including Tate Modern (Britain), Kunsthal Charlottenborg (Denmark), MoMA PS1 (United States) and the National Gallery of Victoria (Australia), and published books by Lucas Blalock, Carmen Winant, Lorenzo Vitturi and many more.
Cyraina Johnson-Roullier is associate professor of Modern Literature and Literature of the Americas at the University of Notre Dame. A Senior Ford Fellow, she is the author of Reading on the Edge: Exiles, Modernities, and Cultural Transformation in Proust, Joyce and Baldwin (2000). Her work, both published and forthcoming, has appeared in Modernism/modernity, Angelaki, Modern Fiction Studies and Review of International American Studies, among others, where she has written on modernism, cultural, feminist and critical race theories, the Americas, and 19th and 20th century American and African American literature. Between 2007 and 2017, she served as Editor-in-Chief of the Review of International Studies, where she also edited or co-edited several special issues. Several op eds placed in Ms. Magazine and the Chicago Tribune (as well as other venues) represent her more public-facing work. She is currently working on a monograph examining the idea of human through the lenses of law, utopia and AI .
John Lucas is a photographer and filmmaker. In 2014, he completed his first feature-length documentary film, The Cooler Bandits, awarded best documentary at the 2014 Harlem International Film Festival. His work has been exhibited in museums and galleries both nationally and internationally, including the Brooklyn Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art, REDCAT, OK Harris Works of Art, MSU Broad, KADIST, The James Gallery, Pioneer Works, CC: World, La Panaderia, Aeroplastics Contemporary, Fieldgate Gallery, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Pulitzer Arts Foundation. His work has appeared in Vogue, BOMB, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and Art Forum.
Jackie Murray is an Associate Professor of Classics at the State University at Buffalo. Her research areas and publications are in Hellenistic and Latin Poetry, Race and Ethnicity in Antiquity, and Black Classicisms, especially the reception of Classics in African American and Afro-Caribbean literature. Her monograph, Neikos: Apollonius’ Argonautica and the Poetics of Controversy, is under contract with Harvard University Press, she has another book project with Yale University Press, Race in Greek and Roman Epic. With Rebecca Futo Kennedy, Jackie is writing a textbook, “Understanding Race in Antiquity,” and with David Kaufman, “The Idea and Image of Slavery in Plato’s Dialogues.” She is editing the Cambridge Companion to Race and Classics with Elena Giusti and Rosa Andújar.
Samantha Ozer is a curator and writer based between Mexico City and New York. She is the founder and artistic director of TONO, a new festival for video and performance art. She has organized projects independently in Athens, Mexico City, Milan, and Los Angeles. She has held curatorial roles at the Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1 in New York. She was recently a researcher and editor for Ekene Ijeoma’s courses "Art & Climate Change" and "Black Mobility & Safety in the US" at the Poetic Justice Group at the MIT Media Lab. She was the video curator for Material (2022) and the cinema curator for Zonamaco 2023. You can find her writing in Artforum, CFA, Cultured, Cura, Frieze, Materia, PIN-UP, Purple, and Texte zur Kunst, amongst other publications. She works with the curatorial team at The Racial Imaginary Institute to organize exhibitions.
Jess Row’s most recent books are the novel Your Face in Mine and the essay collection White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination. His second novel, The New Earth, is forthcoming in 2023. He’s received awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim and Whiting Foundations, among others, and his work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Granta, The New Republic, Bookforum, and many other venues. He teaches at NYU and is an ordained senior dharma teacher in the Kwan Um School of Zen.
Russell Salmon is Director of Public Programs, and lead on The Performance Project at the gallery Hauser & Wirth, where he continues to push boundaries within the gallery model to galvanize, gather and foster community within Los Angeles and New York City. Artist collaborations include Okwui Okpokwasili, EJ Hill, Morgan Bassichis, Wu Tsang, Jeremy O. Harris, Charles Gaines, Zoe Leonard, David Hammons, Gary Simmons, Savion Glover, Davóne Tines, Saint Heron, The House of AWT Project, WordsUncaged, among many others.
Emily Skillings was born in Brunswick, Maine and received degrees from The New School (B.A. in Dance and Writing, 2010) and Columbia University School of the Arts (M.F.A. in Poetry, 2017) where she was appointed as a Creative Writing Teaching Fellow. Her first full-length collection, Fort Not, was published by The Song Cave in 2017, and was a finalist for the 2018 Believer Poetry Award. She is also the author of two chapbooks: Backchannel (Poor Claudia) and Linnaeus: The 26 Sexual Practices of Plants (No, Dear/ Small Anchor Press). Recent poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Granta, Poetry, Harper’s, Boston Review, Brooklyn Rail, BOMB, jubilat, Hyperallergic and elsewhere. Her work has been included in both the Pushcart Prize Anthology (2017) and the Brooklyn Poets Anthology (2017). She has taught creative writing and interdisciplinary studio courses at Poets House, Columbia University, The New School, and through Brooklyn Poets.
Since 2009, Skillings has been an active member of Belladonna* Collaborative, a feminist literary collective, event series, and nonprofit publisher in Brooklyn that promotes the work of experimental women writers.
Rune Steenberg is an anthropologist working on Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region and the Uyghurs. He has conducted extensive fieldwork in XUAR, Central Asia, China and Indonesia and published widely on topics ranging from kinship to cross border trade, informality, corruption, narrative and mass incarceration. Rune received his PhD from Freie Universität Berlin in 2014 and is currently a researcher at Palacky University Olomouc. Since 2018 Rune has also been working as an Uyghur interpreter for asylum seekers, activists, journalists and human rights organisations and has participated in several documentary films on the tragedies in XUAR.
Dr. David Sterling Brown—a Shakespeare and premodern critical race studies scholar—is Associate Professor of English at Trinity College (CT). His antiracist research, which centers on pedagogy and on how racial ideologies circulate in and beyond the early modern period, is published or forthcoming in numerous peer-reviewed and public venues such as Shakespeare Bulletin, Literature Compass, Radical Teacher, Shakespeare Studies, Hamlet: The State of Play, White People in Shakespeare, Public Books and Los Angeles Review of Books. His forthcoming book projects, one of which is under contract with Cambridge University Press, examine how whiteness operates in Shakespearean drama. Through a Mellon/ACLS Scholars and Society Fellowship, Dr. Brown had a 2021-2022 residency with The Racial Imaginary Institute. A member of Phi Beta Kappa, Brown sits on the editorial boards of Shakespeare Bulletin and Shakespeare Survey; and he is an executive board member of the Race Before Race conference series and a member of the Cambridge Shakespeare Editions Panel.
Website: www.DavidSterlingBrown.com
Stephen Wilson is a writer, educator, and curator whose research addresses precarious identities housed within gender, disability, race, and convalescence in art and illness currently titled: What you do for us, without us, is against us. Since completing a doctorate at the Royal College of Art, edited publications include: Memories of the Future: On Countervision (Peter Lang 2017), The Persistence of Taste: Art, Museums and Everyday Life After Bourdieu (Routledge 2018), among others. Wilson is a member of AICA-UK and has held positions at Columbia University, New York, University of the Philippines, Jorge B. Vargas Museum and at Exeter College, University of Oxford. Wilson is a coordinator of postgraduate theory at University of the Arts London and also teaches at The Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford. In 2023, he was appointed an Adjunct Professor at Woxsen University, Hyderabad, India.
Simon Wu is an artist and writer involved in collaborative art production and research. Since 2017, he has served as a Curator and the sole Program Coordinator for Claudia Rankine’s Racial Imaginary Institute. He has held curatorial positions at MoMA, the Brooklyn Museum, the Whitney Museum, and the New Museum and he has organized exhibitions and programs at David Zwirner, The Kitchen, and CUE Art Foundation, among other places. In 2021 his art writing was awarded an Andy Warhol Foundation Art Writers Grant and he was featured in Cultured magazine's 2021 Young Curators series. He writes for Artforum, Bookforum, BOMB, frieze, and The Drift. In 2018 he was named the Van Lier Fellow in Curation by the Asian American Arts Alliance and in 2018-2019 he was a Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. He will start a PhD in History of Art in Fall 2022 at Yale University and his debut collection of essays Dancing On My Own will be out with Harper Collins in 2024.
Monica Youn is the author of Blackacre (Graywolf Press 2016), which won the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America. It was also shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kingsley Tufts Award, longlisted for the National Book Award, and named one of the best poetry books of 2016 by the New York Times, the Washington Post, and BuzzFeed. Her previous book Ignatz (Four Way Books 2010) was a finalist for the National Book Award. She has been awarded the Levinson Prize from the Poetry Foundation, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Witter Bytter Fellowship from the Library of Congress, and a Stegner Fellowship. A former constitutional lawyer and the daughter of Korean immigrants, she is an associate professor of English at UC Irvine. Her fourth book FROM FROM is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in March 2023.