biographies
Barry Anderson
Born in Greenville, Texas, Barry Anderson’s work addresses our cultural need to escape the onslaught of media input through isolated fantasy worlds. By slowing or re-interpreting space and time, he strives to identify the existence of introspective spaces within the everyday, proposing that we don’t need to retreat, but to re-envision, re-think what is already around us.
Howard Bond
Howard Bond’s photographs—many of which are black and white and are imbued with texture and fine detail—are in the collections of more than 30 museums in the United States and Europe. He received a Creative Artists Grant (1985) from the Michigan Council and is a regular contributor to Photo Techniques magazine. More than 2,000 photographers have attended Bond’s photography workshops.
George Crabtree
George Crabtree is a Senior Scientist, Distinguished Fellow and associate Division director in the Materials Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory, Illinois. A pioneer in the development of magnetic flux imaging systems, Crabtree has won numerous awards for his research. He is the second recipient of the prestigious Kammerlingh Onnes Prize (2003), awarded once every three years, for his work on the physics of vortices in high temperature superconductors.
Edwidge Danticatn
Edwidge Danticat’s work focuses on the lives of women and their relationships, and addresses issues of power, injustice, and poverty. Danticat has published nine books, including Krik? Krak! (Vintage, 1996), a finalist for the National Book Award; Breath, Eyes, Memory (Vintage, 1998), an Oprah’s Book Club pick; and Brother, I’m Dying (Vintage, 2008), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Richard Dyer
Richard Dyer is a renowned film studies professor at King’s College London. Much of his research involves the relationships between entertainment and representation, and between music and film. Specifically, he is interested in popular Italian cinema, the film music of Nino Rota, and the depiction of serial killers in European cinema.
Marian Wright Edelman
Marian Wright Edelman, founder of the Children’s Defense Fund, has been an advocate for disadvantaged Americans for her entire professional life. Under her leadership, the Children’s Defense Fund has become the nation’s strongest voice for children and families. The Leave No Child Behind® mission of the Children’s Defense Fund is to ensure every child a Healthy Start, a Head Start, a Fair Start, a Safe Start, and a Moral Start in life and successful passage to adulthood with the help of caring families and communities.
Ira Glass
Ira Glass’s This American Life premiered on Chicago’s public radio station WBEZ in late 1995 and is now broadcast over more than 500 public radio stations each week to more than 1.7 million listeners. Glass began his career in 1978 as an intern at National Public Radio’s network headquarters in Washington, D.C. Over the years, he worked on nearly every NPR network news program and held virtually every production job.
Lily Kong
Lily Kong is vice president of university and global relations at the National University of Singapore (NUS), where she also serves as professor of geography and as director of the Asia Research Institute. Her research interests include the geographies of religion, cultural economy and cultural policy, constructions of nation and national identity, and constructions of nature and environment.
Janna Levin
Janna Levin is a professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard College of Columbia University. Her scientific research concerns the early universe, chaos theory, and black holes. Her first novel, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines (Knopf, 2006), won the PEN/Bingham Fellowship for Writers and was a runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway award. She is the author of the popular science book, How the Universe Got Its Spots: Diary of a Finite Time in a Finite Space (Phoenix, 2003).
Lynn Manning
Lynn Manning is an award winning poet, playwright, actor, and former Blind Judo World Champion, all of which was accomplished after he was shot and blinded in a bar fight at age 23. He is the author of several critically recognized plays, including Weights (One Blind Man’s Journey), Shoot, Up From the Downs, Private Battle, The Last Outpost, and Central Ave. Chalk Circle.
W.J.T. Mitchell
W. J. T. Mitchell is the Gaylor Donnelley distinguished Service Professor of Media, Visual Art, and Literature at The University of Chicago. He is editor of the interdisciplinary journal, Critical Inquiry, devoted to critical theory in the arts and human sciences. A scholar and theorist of media, visual art, and literature, he is associated with the emergent fields of visual culture and iconology (the study of images across the media).
James Schmidt
Allan Wallach is the Ralph H. Wark Professor of Art and Art History and professor of American Studies at The College of William and Mary in Virginia. His research focuses on the history of American art and the history of art institutions in the United States. Wallach is nationally renowned for his expertise on “The Course of Empire,” a five-part series of paintings by Thomas Cole; the Hudson River School art movement; the “Luminism” style of American landscape painting; and the corporatization of museums.
Shen Wei
Choreographer, director, dancer, painter and designer, Shen Wei is widely recognized for his defining vision of an intercultural, interdisciplinary, utterly original mode of movement-based performance. In 1991, he became a founding member—dancer and choreographer—of the Guangdong Modern Dance Company, the first such company in China. Upon receiving a scholarship from the Nikolais/Louis Dance Lab, Wei moved to New York City in 1995 and formed the Shen Wei Dance Arts in 2000 with performances of Near the Terrace at the American Dance Festival. Wei choreographed part of the Opening Ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
Deborah Willis
For more than thirty years, Deborah Willis has pursued a dual career as a fine art photographer and as one of the nation’s leading historians of African American photography and curator of African American culture. As an essayist and scholar, she has explored the role of photography and its impact on our culture—in particular the role of the black image—and the extensive contributions made by African Americans photographers throughout the history of the medium.
