Sapphire is the author of American Dreams, a collection of poetry which was cited by Publishers Weekly as, "One of the strongest debut collections of the nineties." Push, her novel, won the Book-of-the-Month Club Stephen Crane award for First Fiction, the Black Caucus of the American Library Association's First Novelist Award, and, in Great Britain, the Mind Book of the Year Award, and named by the Village Voice and Time Out New York as one of the top ten books of 1996. Sapphire's work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Black Scholar, Spin, and Bomb. Precious, the film adaption of her novel, recently won the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Awards in the U.S. dramatic competition at Sundance (2009).

Brighde Mullins' plays have been produced in New York, London, and San Francisco. Titles include: Monkey in the Middle, Fire Eater, Topographical Eden; Pathological Venus. She has received a Whiting Foundation Award; an NEA Fellowship and others. She has taught at Harvard University and at Brown University, and for fifteen years she curated the Reading Series at Dia Art Foundation in New York. She is currently the Director of the Master of Professional Writing Program at USC.

Toby Miller is Professor of Media & Cultural Studies at the University of California, Riverside. His teaching and research cover the media, sport, labor, gender, race, citizenship, politics, and cultural policy. Toby is the author and editor of over 30 volumes, and has published essays in well over 100 journals and books. His work has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Swedish, Spanish, and German. He has made many appearances in the print and electronic media and previously worked in broadcasting, banking, and politics, and at NYU. His latest books are Cultural Citizenship: Cosmopolitanism, Consumerism, and Television in a Neoliberal Age, 2007<; Makeover Nation: The United States of Reinvention, 2008; The Contemporary Hollywood Reader, 2009; and Television Studies: The Basics, 2010. http://greencitizenship.blogspot.com/

A Member of the Outdoor Advertising Association of America (OAAA) Hall of Fame, Rick Robinson is a long time OOH Media advocate, creative consultant, public speaker, fine artist, teacher and writer. His 23 years in the business have included stints as a local salesperson for Ackerley Airport Advertising SF, Business Development Manager for Gannett Outdoor SF & LA, and National Creative Director at Outdoor Systems & Infinity Outdoor for several years until he opened up MacDonald Media's LA office in July of 2001. New York based MacDonald Media plans and buys OOH for Nike, Converse, EA Games, ESPN, J&J, AEG/Goldenvoice, and many others. Rick's industry achievements include helping launch the now renowned Tall Walls on The Sunset Strip, serving as a 2 time Obie Judge, Founding Chairman of the OAAA Creative Committee, and as Creative Director for the award winning "Big Boy" Power 106 Radio campaign.

Award-winning journalist Christine Pelisek covers government and crime for LA Weekly, where her in-depth investigations of topics ranging from the city's billboard wars to the use of DNA to track serial killers have won her acclaim. Last year, Pelisek won a Los Angeles Press Club Award for her powerful 2008 cover story "Billboards Gone Wild." Her story delved into the back room deal brokered by Los Angeles City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo and billboard giants CBS Outdoor, Clear Channel and Regency - a lucrative settlement deal that gave the billboard giants the right to "digitally modernize" more than 800 traditional billboards in Los Angeles without a single public hearing or zoning debate. Last year, a Superior Court judge ruled the settlement deal invalid. Pelisek has been covering the billboard wars in Los Angeles since 2008 and has written countless stories and blog posts on the subject.

John Tehranian is an attorney, academic and author. He is a partner at One LLP, an entertainment and intellectual property litigation firm in Southern California, and is a tenured Professor of Law at Chapman University, School of Law, where he also serves as Director of the Entertainment Law Center. He has previously served as Professor of Law at the University of Utah, S.J. Quinney College of Law, and as Visiting Professor of Law at Loyola Law School. A graduate of Harvard University and Yale Law School, he is the author of numerous works on the interface between law and culture, with a particular focus on issues of intellectual property, entertainment, civil rights and race. He is the author of the book Whitewashed, an analysis of the social and legal construction of race, and the forthcoming book Infringement Nation, an examination of copyright law in the digital age.

Anne Bray has been working at the intersection of public art and media art since the mid '70s as an artist, art teacher and curator. She is an artist, teacher and Director of Freewaves, a media arts organization and festival in Los Angeles. She developed the concept of the multicultural network of media artists and venues in 1989 and has continued to see the organization through the technological, social and aesthetic changes of the 1990s to now. As an artist she exhibits her work as temporary installations in public sites and art venues combining personal and social positions via video, audio, stills and 3-d screens at gas stations, malls, movie theaters, on TV, in department stores, and on billboards. She teaches public art and multimedia at Claremont Graduate University and USC.

Dorothy Lamb Crawford has lived and worked in music throughout her career, teaching and lecturing, performing as a singer, directing opera, and hosting broadcast interviews with musicians. She is author of Evenings On and Off the Roof: Pioneering Concerts in Los Angeles, 1939-1971 and(with John C. Crawford) Expressionism in Twentieth-Century Music.

Eleanor Coppola, after graduating in Applied Design from UCLA, met her future husband, Francis Ford Coppola, while filming 'Dementia 13' in 1962 for which she was an assistant art director. They married in Las Vegas in 1963; their three children, Sofia, Roman and Gian-Carlo have followed them into the film industry. While her husband was working on 'Apocalypse Now,' Eleanor kept extensive notes, which were published in 1979 as Notes on the Making of Apocalypse Now, as well as filming behind the scenes which ended up as 'Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse,' for which she was awarded an Emmy for "Outstanding Individual Achievement - Informational Programming -Directing". Among other things, Eleanor Coppola manages the family winery in California, and designs for a dance company in San Francisco.

Tom Sellar is editor of Theater magazine and associate professor of dramaturgy and dramatic criticism at Yale University. His criticism and reporting have appeared in the New York Times, The International Herald Tribune, American Theatre and other national publications. Sellar received his doctorate from Yale in 2003 and is currently writing a book about theater in Eastern Europe since 1989.

For Theater, Yale's journal of criticism, reportage, and plays, Sellar has researched, written for, and edited special editions about new Polish theater (including Grzegorz Jarzyna and TR Warszawa) and devoted to the playwright/novelist Witold Gombrowicz. He is currently preparing a volume on the ideas of influential Polish director Krystian Lupa, Since Sellar became editor in 2003, Theater has also published issues on contemporary performance in Russia, Hungary, Romania, and Serbia, with support from the Trust for Mutual Understanding.

http://www.theathermagazine.org

Richard Schechner is University Professor and Professor of Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. He is editor of "TDR: The Journal of Performance Studies," general editor of the Worlds of Performance and co-editor with Carol Martin of Enactments (Seagull). His books include Environmental Theater, Between Theater and Anthropology, The End of Humanism, Performance Theory, The Future of Ritual, and Performance Studies-An Introduction. He founded The Performance Group and East Coast Artists, with whom he directed many productions that have been seen around the world. He has directed plays in India, South Africa, and China. Among his numerous fellowships and awards is a Lifetime Achievement Award from Performance Studies International, a Career Achievement Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, and an Honorary Doctorate from the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts. Schechner is an honorary professor at the Institute of Fine Arts, Havana, and at the Shanghai Theatre Academy where in 2005 the "Schechner Center for Performance Studies" was inaugurated. He is the Curator of the 2009 Year of Grotowski in New York.

Julius Shulman was born in Brooklyn on October 10, 1910 and moved to Los Angeles with his family at the age of ten. Photography went from a hobby to a professional occupation for Shulman in 1936, when he was exposed to modern architecture for the first time on a visit to Richard Neutra's Kun House in the Hollywood Hills. Neutra was so impressed with his photos of the home that he immediately hired Shulman to photograph additional projects, thereby launching an unanticipated, prolific career.

Christos H. Papadimitriou was born and grew up in Greece. He studied electrical engineering at the National Technical University, Athens, and then was awarded a Ph.D. in computer science, from Princeton. After teaching at Harvard, MIT and Stanford, he now holds the Lester C. Hogan Chair at the University of California at Berkeley. Christos's research work is in the theory of algorithms, computational complexity and game theory, fields in which he is one of the leading international experts. He has published over three hundred original articles in leading scientific journals, which have received, to date, over twenty-five thousand citations. His books, Elements of the Theory of Computation, Computational Complexity and Combinatorial Optimization: Algorithms and Complexity, are the standard textbooks in their fields, while his first novel, Turing, was published in 2003 by MIT Press. Christos is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering of the USA, and has been awarded numerous honorary doctorates and other distinctions, among them the prestigious Charles Babbage Prize. He also plays the keyboards in a rock band.

Steven Ehrlich, FAIA, RIBA, learned early on, the significance of how architecture responds to culture and environment. Six years in Africa (including two years with the Peace Corps as their first architect in Marrakech, Morocco, and teaching at Ahmadu BelloUniversity in Nigeria) taught Ehrlich the sustainable wisdom of indigenous architecture.

Selected in 2003 as the California AIA Firm of the Year, Ehrlich Architects has won seven National AIA Awards. Current projects include the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and the School of Earth and Space Exploration both for Arizona State University, the Art Building at the University of California, Irvine, five residential towers in Taipei, Taiwan, and a large villa in Dubai.