Primarily known as an actor, a director, and a performer, Cheech Marin is also an avid art collector. His collection of Chicano art is lent to art institutions worldwide, and he has authored numerous books inspired by his collection. In addition to art books, Marin is also an author of three children’s books. His work on behalf of Latinos has been recognized with the 2000 Creative Achievement Award from the Imagen Foundation and the 1999 ALMA Community Service Award from the National Council of La Raza and Kraft Foods.

Marisol "La Marisoul" Hernandez was born and raised in Los Angeles, California and she is the lead singer in the Mexican-American band "La Santa Cecilia." The band brings inspiration from all over the world, using Pan-American rythms like rumba, bolero, cumbia, tango, jazz, rock and klezmer music, to sing about love, social justice, loss and life . For their full-length studio album, Treinta Dias, the band won a GRAMMY for Best Latin Rock, Urban or Alternative Album in 2014. They recently released Buenaventura, also nominated for a GRAMMY in 2017.

James Shapiro is the Larry Miller Professor of English at Columbia University, where he has taught since 1985.  His books include Shakespeare and the Jews (1996), recently republished in a 20th anniversary edition; 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (2005), Contested Will (2010), the anthology Shakespeare in America (2014), and The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606 (2015). He has also co-authored and presented two BBC documentaries: Shakespeare: The King’s Man and The Mysterious Mr. Webster. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Board of Governors of the Folger Shakespeare Library is Shakespeare Scholar in Residence at New York’s Public Theater, and has been inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Lisa Wolpe is an actress, director, teacher & playwright, and is the Artistic Director of Los Angeles Women’s Shakespeare Company, which she founded in 1993. Honors include the Shakespeare Theater Association’s “Sidney Berger Award”, “Sustained Excellence” awards from the L.A. Drama Critic and from Playwrights Arena, the Key to Harlem, a Congressional Certificate of Merit; NBC News’ “Local Hero”, Jacob Bronowski Award for Theater Excellence, Whittier College’s Distinguished Artist Award, Colorado Shakespeare “First Scholar” and UC Boulder’s “Roe Green Distinguished Scholar”. Acting credits include Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Shakespeare & Company, Orlando Shakespeare Festival, and San Diego Repertory Theater.

Peter Sellars has gained international renown for his groundbreaking and transformative interpretations of artistic masterpieces and for collaborative projects with an extraordinary range of creative artists. Past projects include The Merchant of Venice and Othello with John Ortiz and Philip Seymour Hoffman; Desdemona, a collaboration with Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison and Malian composer and singer Rokia Traoré, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream: A Chamber Play at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario. Upcoming projects in 2017 include productions of Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito at the Salzburg Festival and the premiere of John Adams’ new opera Girls of the Golden West at the San Francisco Opera. Peter Sellars is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance and Director of the new Boethius Initiative at UCLA.

Ayanna Thompson is Professor of English at George Washington University, and she specializes in Renaissance drama and issues of race in/as performance. She is the author of Teaching Shakespeare with Purpose: A Student-Centred Approach (2016), Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America (2011), and Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage (2008). She wrote the new introduction for the revised Arden3 Othello, and is the editor of Weyward Macbeth: Intersections of Race and Performance (2010) and Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance (2006). Professor Thompson has served as a Trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America and a member of the Board of Directors for the Association of Marshall Scholars.

Tisa Bryant is the author of Unexplained Presence, a collection of essays on myth-making and black presences in film, literature, and visual art, and co-editor of The Encyclopedia Project. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Viz. InterArts: Interventions, Body Forms: On Queerness and the Essay the Reanimation Library’s Word Processor series and in Letters to the Future: An Anthology of Experimental Writing by Black Women, among others. She is currently working on a novel, The Curator. Bryant teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the California Institute of the Arts.

DJ Lynnée Denise is a DJ, writer, and scholar who creates work informed and inspired by underground cultural movements, the 1980s, migration studies, theories of escape, and electronic music of the African Diaspora. Denise has received support from the Jerome Foundation, The Astrae Lesbian Foundation for Justice, Idea Capital, Residency BiljmAIR (Netherlands) and The Rauschenberg Artists as Activists Grant. 

Ernest Hardy’s criticism has appeared in the New York Times, the Village Voice, Vibe, Rolling Stone, the LA Times, and the LA Weekly. He’s a contributor to the reference books 1,001 Movies You Must See Before You Die and Classic Material: the Hip-Hop Album Guide. His collection of criticism, Blood Beats Vol. 1: Demos, Remixes and Extended Versions was a recipient of the 2007 PEN / Beyond Margins Award. His forthcoming collection of poetry and short will be published by Writ Large Press.

Greg Tate is a writer, cultural producer and musician who has lived in Harlem since 1984. He was a Staff Writer at The Village Voice from 1987–2004. His books include Flyboy in The Buttermilk, Everything But The Burden—What White People Are Taking From Black Culture and Midnight Lightning: Jimi Hendrix And The Black Experience. In 1985 Tate helped co-found the Black Rock Coalition with Vernon Reid and other firebrands of the era. Since 1999 he has led the Conducted Improv ensemble Burnt Sugar The Arkestra Chamber, who’ve released 16 albums on their own AvantGroidd imprint. The group also recently launched the band Rebellum, which they call ”our avant-pop splinter-cell unit.” Tate has taught seminar classes for Yale’s Graduate Art Program, Columbia University’s Jazz Studies module, Williams College, and Brown University, where he taught courses on the History of AfroFuturism and Black Science Fiction. In 2016 Duke University Press published Flyboy 2: The Greg Tate Reader.

Alexi Pappas is a professional track athlete and an award-winning writer and filmmaker. She is a graduate of Dartmouth College and the University of Oregon. A Greek­-American, she holds the Greek National Record in the 10,000-meter run and will compete for Greece at the 2016 Olympic Games. She was recently profiled in the New York Times, New York Magazine, NPR, and Rolling Stone. She is also the co-founder of the Portland chapter of the Film Fatales, a nationwide group of female directors. As a filmmaker, Alexi co-wrote, co-directed, and stars in the feature film Tracktown which was produced with support from the Sundance Institute and premiered at the 2016 Los Angeles Film Festival. She contributes poetry regularly to Women’s Running Magazine, and most recently, she and her partner Jeremy Teicher created a 5-episode short film series entitled “Speed Goggles” in partnership with Kodak that is being published by the New York Times.

Sharon Ann Lee is a culture and trends analyst, writer, and entrepreneur who has been at the forefront of global trends and youth culture for over 15 years. Sharon studies the big ideas that shape our changing tastes, opinions, and values. Sharon is the founder of CultureBrain, a culture think tank and creative studio. She is also the co-host of the Bruce Lee Podcast, a podcast about the life and philosophies of Bruce Lee. Her work has been featured on PBS, MTV, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Time, and CNN. Her work can be followed on Twitter and Instagram at @CultureBrain.

Ben Ehrenreich is the author of one book of journalism, The Way to the Spring; two novels, Ether and The Suitors; and many articles, stories, and essays. He lives in Los Angeles.

Amy Wilentz is the author of Farewell Fred Voodoo: A Letter From Haiti, The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier, Martyrs’ Crossing, and I Feel Earthquakes More Often Than They Happen: Coming to California in the Age of Schwarzenegger. She is the winner of the Whiting Writers Award, the PEN Martha Albrand Non-Fiction Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award, and also was a 1990 nominee for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2014, she won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Farewell, Fred Voodoo. She has written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Politico, Thompson-Reuters magazine, The New Republic, The Village Voice, and many other publications. She teaches in the Literary Journalism program at the University of California at Irvine, and lives in Los Angeles.

Rosanne Cash is one of the country’s pre-eminent singer/songwriters and author of four books, including her best-selling memoir Composed. She has released 15 albums that have earned four GRAMMY Awards and 11 nominations, as well as 21 top-40 hits, including 11 No. 1 singles. Cash’s landmark 2009 album, The List, won the Americana Music Album of the Year award. She was also the recipient of the SAG/AFTRA Lifetime Achievement award for Sound Recordings in 2012 and received the 2014 Smithsonian Ingenuity Award in the Performing Arts. She was chosen as a Perspective Series artist at Carnegie Hall and hosted four concerts during their 2015/16 season. She was recently inducted into the Nashville Songwriters’ Hall of Fame. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, the Oxford-American, the Nation, and many more print and online publications. In addition to continual touring, Cash has partnered in programming collaborations with the Minnesota Orchestra, Lincoln Center, and San Francisco Jazz.

Joe Henry is a songwriter, artist, and storyteller who has left an indelible and unique imprint on American popular music during his 30-year career. Henry is celebrated for his exploration of the human experience and for working across a broad swath of American musical styles — rock, jazz, and blues—rendering genre modifiers useless. In 2013, Algonquin Press published Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World that Made Him, a book co-written with his brother, and in 2014, Henry released his thirteenth album Invisible Hour on his own label, Work Song. As a solo artist and producer, Henry has collaborated with many notable American artists, from T Bone Burnett, Daniel Lanois, and Van Dyke Parks on one side of the spectrum to Don Cherry, Ornette Coleman, Brad Mehldau, and Bill Frisell on the other. A three-time-GRAMMY-winning producer, Henry has made records for Bonnie Raitt, Hugh Laurie, Lisa Hannigan, Elvis Costello, Solomon Burke, and many others. In October 2015, Henry helmed a session for the late Allen Toussaint. That album is due out June 10 on Nonesuch Records.

Judith Freeman is the author of four novels—Red Water, The Chinchilla Farm, Set for Life, and A Desert of Pure Feeling—and of Family Attractions, a collection of stories, and The Long Embrace, a biography of Raymond Chandler. She lives in California and Idaho.

Michelle Huneven is the author of four novels including Round Rock, and Jamesland, both New York Times Notable Books and finalists for the LA Times Book Award. Her third novel, Blame, was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the LA Times Book Award; and her fourth novel, Off Course, was a New York Times Editor’s Choice. She was the recipient of a GE Younger Writers Award, a Whiting Award for Fiction, and a James Beard award for her work reviewing restaurants for the LA Times, the LA Weekly, and other publications. She has taught at the Iowa Writers Workshop and been a senior fiction editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books. A short story, "Too Good to Be True," was recently published in Harpers. Michelle teaches creative writing at UCLA and lives in Altadena, California, with her husband, dog, cat, and talkative African Gray parrot.

Eddie Huang is the proprietor of Baohaus, a restaurant in New York City. He’s the author of the bestselling memoir Fresh Off the Boat, host of Huang’s World on ViceTV, and executive producer of the ABC sitcom Fresh Off the Boat, based on his memoir.

Constance Wu was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia. She is best known for her role as Jessica Huang in the ABC comedy series, Fresh Off the Boat, now in its second season. She currently lives in Los Angeles with her pet bunny Lida Rose.

Chip Kidd was born in Reading, PA in 1964. He lives in New York City and Stonington, CT.