After a long and varied business career spanning 30 years of work in every medium from film to television to newspapers to the internet, Harry Brant Chandler now devotes most of his attentions to his photography and his civic work. His photographs have been shown at the California Museum in Sacramento and will be the focus of an upcoming show in September 2009 at the Autry National Center of the American West, in Los Angeles. A fifth generation Southern Californian, he has served on the boards of several public and private Internet companies, the New Media Council, the Internet Local Advertising Council, MOCA photography board, LACMA?s Tech Advisors and the Music Center's Center Theater Group.

Dr. Kevin Starr is the state librarian emeritus of California and University Professor and professor of history at USC. Starr has written ten books, six of which are part of his "Americans and the California Dream" series. He has also written Coast of Dreams: California on the Edge, 1990-2003 and California, A History, a Modern Library Chronicles book. His writing has won him a Guggenheim Fellowship, membership in the Society of American Historians, the Gold Medal of the Commonwealth Club of California, and the Lifetime Achievement Award, PEN USA, Western Center. In June 2006 he was given the Centennial Medal of the Graduate School of Arts and Science, Harvard University.

Mark Murphy, Executive Director of REDCAT, is an influential leader in the national and international field of contemporary performing arts, with 20 years of experience producing, presenting and developing new audiences for interdisciplinary performances. Murphy has served as Chairman of the Choreographer's Fellowship Panel for the National Endowment for the Arts, was a founding board member of the National Performance Network, an advisor to the National Dance Project, and a member of the Advisory Board for the Japan Foundation's Performing Arts Program. He is the winner of first place awards from the Society of Professional Journalists for Feature Writing and radio documentary production.

www.redcat.org

One of America's most admired and respected composers, John Adams was born and raised in New England and educated at Harvard. He taught for ten years at the San Francisco Conservatory and was composer-in-residence at the San Francisco Symphony.

Victoria Steele, until most recently, headed the UCLA Library's Department of Special Collections-one of the country's largest repositories of rare books, manuscripts, and historic photographs-and directed the University's Center for Primary Research and Training. Co-author of an award-winning book on library development, she has also written numerous articles about special collections. She holds a Ph.D. in Art History, and has been a Fulbright Fellow to the United Kingdom. Ms. Steele is now the Director of Collections Strategy for the New York Public Library.

Dion Neutra is principal of Richard and Dion Neutra, Architects and Associates of Los Angeles, the firm founded in 1926 by his father, Richard J. Neutra. Mr. Neutra graduated cum laude from USC in 1950. He passed the rigorous California state board license examination at the age of 24 and became a member of the AIA in that same year, one of the youngest corporate members. After reconstructing the VDL Research House, which had been destroyed by fire in 1963, Dion joined his father's firm as vice-president and partner. He became principal of the newly re-named firm, Richard and Dion Neutra, Architects and Associates, in 1965, which he continues to lead as President since the senior Neutra's death in 1970. Dion has authored numerous articles and books, lectured internationally and has curated several exhibitions of the firm's work.

Leo Marmol, FAIA, is the Managing Principal of Marmol Radziner and Associates (MRA), a Los Angeles-based firm established in 1989 with Ron Radziner, FAIA. MRA is an architecture practice uniquely complemented by its growing construction department, with a reputation for its innovative design, sustainable architecture, and prolific restoration work. In 2004, the American Institute of Architects California Council named MRA its 2004 Firm of the Year. In 1998, the firm completed restoration of the Kaufmann House in Palm Springs, originally designed in 1946 by Richard Neutra. In 2000, the firm completed the restoration of two other Neutra houses (the Lew and the Brown House), and restored Schindler's Elliot House. Most recently, MRA finished restoring two Cliff May houses and John Lautner's Garcia house. Mr. Marmol has lectured widely on the topic of architecture and restoration, and has participated in numerous conferences, symposia and panel discussions.

Actress Kelly Lynch ("Drugstore Cowboy," "Roadhouse," "The L Word"), is an acknowledged champion of mid-century architecture and preservation. Ms. Lynch and her husband, screenwriter/producer Mitch Glazer, have restored both Richard Neutra's Oyler House in Lone Pine, CA (1959), and John Lautner's Harvey House in Los Angeles (1950). The two were given House Beautiful's Giants of Design Award for Preservation in 2001, and were patrons of MoCA's Rudolf Schindler exhibit. Ms. Lynch, who serves on the Lautner Foundation, and is a founding member of the Neutra VDL Research Site Planning Committee, spoke at both the 2009 Palm Springs Art Museum's modernist architecture symposium as well as the Hammer Museum's symposium in conjunction with "Between Earth and Heaven: The architecture of John Lautner." Most recently, at the 34th Annual California Preservation Conference in April 2009, Ms. Lynch moderated the panel "Restoration and Programmatic Potentials of the Richard and Dion Neutra VDL Studios/Residences." Ms. Lynch is featured in recent documentaries on Julius Schulman, Pierre Koenig, and John Lautner. Visit www.neutra-vdl.org for information on the Neutra VDL House.

Ray Kappe is an internationally recognized archiect, urban planner, and educater. His much awarded and published work is considered to be an extension of the early Southern California master architects: Wright, Schindler, Neutra, and Harwell Hamilton Harris. After graduation from the University of California, Berkeley in 1951, Kappe worked for the San Francisco firm of Anshen+Allen and Los Angeles-based architect Carl Maston before opening his own practice in Southern California. Kappe has completed some 100 single-family houses, but his tour de force is his own house in Pacific Palisades, built in 1965-67, and designated a Cultural Heritage Monument by the City of Los Angeles in 1996. In 1972, Kappe left the California Polytechnic State University, Pomona, where he had served as professor and Founding Chairman of the Department of Architecture, to establish the Southern California Institute of Architecture SCI-ARC. Kappe has received innumerable design, education and life achievement awards including the Richard Neutra International Medal for Design Excellence, the California Council AIA Bernard Maybeck Award for Design, and the Topaz Medal, the highest award in architectural education.

A staff writer at the New Yorker for over twenty years, Lawrence Weschler is currently the director of the New York Institute for the Humanities and concurrently artistic director of the Chicago Humanities Festival. His last book, Everything that Rises: A Book of Convergences, was awarded the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. His newest publications include Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: Thirty Years of Conversations with Robert Irwin, along with True to Life: Twenty-Five Years of Conversations with David Hockney