Mark Essen, game designer and native Angeleno, holds a MFA from UCLA's Design and Media Arts program. His work has been exhibited at FILE in Sao Paulo, the New Museum in New York, MoCCA in Toronto, FACT, [DAM] Berlin, and Vice/Intel's international Creators Project.

Tracy Fullerton, experimental game designer, is professor and director of the Game Innovation Lab at the USC School of Cinematic Arts where she holds the Electronic Arts Endowed Chair in Interactive Entertainment. The Game Innovation Lab is a design research center that has produced several influential independent games, including Cloud, flOw, Darfur is Dying, The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom, and The Night Journey -- a collaboration with media artist Bill Viola. Tracy is also the author of Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games.

Sam Roberts has worked as a creative director in the entertainment industry for 10 years. He has directed, designed, written, and produced digital and live entertainment and events. For over five years, he has organized and directed the IndieCade Festival of Independent Games. He now also serves as the Assistant Director of the Interactive Media Division at USC, where he continues to work to promote the medium of games and the next generation of talented gamemakers.

After Chef Ludo Lefebvre trained in France for 13 years he moved to Los Angeles to work at L’Orangerie where, as head chef, L’Orangerie became one of the top-rated restaurants in California. Lefebvre released his first cookbook, CRAVE, a Feast of the Five Senses in 2005. His guerilla style “pop-up” restaurant events called LudoBites currently take place at different locations around Los Angeles. They have been included in Jonathan Gold’s "99 Most Essential Restaurants List for Los Angeles" and have been identified as a dining experience that “may fundamentally change the way we look at restaurants.”

Roy Choi is a classically trained chef from Los Angeles who cut his teeth in the kitchens of Le Bernardin, the Embassy Suites, and the Beverly Hilton before rediscovering his roots as an Angeleno and channeling his soul into a taco that tastes a lot like LA. After launching Kogi BBQ in 2008, Choi fused the flavors of the city with Hawaiian-style picnics and opened A-Frame; Venice's Sunny Spot followed in 2011. Choi currently is working on his first book, Spaghetti Junction: Riding Shotgun with an LA Chef, a memoir/cookbook that chronicles his rough and tumble journey through the streets of LA, with recipes for life along the way.

Lesley Bargar Suter is the dine editor for Los Angeles magazine where she covers and critiques the restaurant scene in one of the country’s most important culinary hubs. In May 2012, Suter took home a James Beard Award, the first ever awarded for food coverage in a general interest publication. She has lent her culinary know-how to national publications as well, including Saveur and Conde Nast Traveler, has appeared on a number of television and radio programs including Fox’s Hell’s Kitchen and Top Chef Masters, and is a regular guest on KCRW’s Good Food.

Joy Harjo is an internationally known performer and writer of the Mvskoke/Creek Nation. She has written seven books of poetry, including She Had Some Horses and How We Became Human, and lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Keren Taylor is the founder and Executive Director of WriteGirl, a creative writing and mentoring organization for teen girls, and has served as publisher and editor for all of WriteGirl's award-winning books. Keren is a Community Champion with the Annenberg Alchemy Program, co-facilitating seminars for nonprofit executives. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the President’s Volunteer Call to Service Award, Soroptomist International’s Woman of Distinction Award and others. Keren is a poet, singer/songwriter and mosaic artist.

Daniel Alarcón, co-founder of Radio Ambulante, is the author of War by Candlelight, a finalist for the 2005 PEN-Hemingway Award, and Lost City Radio, winner of the 2009 International Literature Prize. He is Associate Editor of Etiqueta Negra, an award-winning quarterly published in his native Lima, Peru, and Contributing Editor to Granta. He was recently named one of The New Yorker’s 20 under Forty. His fiction, journalism and translations have appeared in A Public Space, El País, McSweeney’s, n+1, and Harper’s. Alarcón is a Visiting Scholar at the UC Berkeley Center for Latin American Studies.

Adolfo Guzman-Lopez has been a reporter with Southern California Public Radio, KPCC 89.3FM since 2000. He’s reported on education, politics, culture, and the occasional fire. His work has been recognized with the regional Edward R. Murrow, L.A. Press Club Radio Journalist of the Year, and the Ruben Salazar awards. In 1994 he co-founded the performance group The Taco Shop Poets. Adolfo writes the Movie Miento blog every week for KCET.org.

Alison Bechdel is the author of the bestselling memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, which was named a Best Book of the Year by Time, New York Times, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, Village Voice, and the San Francisco Chronicle, among others. For twenty-five years, she wrote and drew the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, a visual chronicle of modern life--queer and otherwise. Bechdel is guest editor of Best American Comics, 2011, and has drawn comics for Slate, McSweeney's, Entertainment Weekly, Granta, and The New York Times Book Review.

Deborah Vankin is a journalist and graphic novelist. As a Los Angeles Times staff writer, she covers the spectrum of arts & culture, entertainment and nightlife -- including books and comics, the art gallery and street art scenes, alternative comedy, indie film and pop culture in general. Her 2011 graphic novel "Poseurs" follows three teenagers, from very different corners of L.A., into the underworld of L.A. clubs and Hollywood parties. She's now working on a second graphic novel.

Mark Salzman is an award-winning novelist and memoirist. The son of a social worker and a music teacher, Salzman grew up in Connecticut and studied Chinese language and philosophy at Yale University. After college he spent two years in China, learning martial arts from some of China's most renowned teachers, an experience he documented in his bestselling memoir Iron & Silk. His other books include The Laughing Sutra, Lost in Place, The Soloist and Lying Awake. He lives in Los Angeles.