Sydney Barile is a poet and visual artist currently working toward a Master of Fine Art in Creative Writing at the California Institute of the Arts. She has a B.A. in English Literature from the University of Southern California—where she received the Beau J. Boudreaux Poetry Award. Sydney is in the process of completing her first book—a collection of autobiographical poems (confessional, narrative, and lyrical) that speak to the experience of growing up and navigating the space between adolescence and full adulthood. She lives in Los Angeles.

Justin Evans has or will very shortly publish fiction, satire, and/or essays in Bird's Thumb, Santa Monica Review, The Essay Daily, The Point Magazine, and Open Set. He is almost done writing Jerusalem/September, a novel about anarchists and arms manufacturers in Los Angeles. Spoiler alert: it doesn't end well for anyone. If the novel is okay, they might let him graduate from Otis College's MFA program this summer, and he will self-publish The Hate Journals of the Hobo Mawk: Volume I: Some Remarks as a chapbook and ebook.

Melissa Gutierrez is a second-year student in the Master of Professional Writing Program at USC, where she is currently studying poetry. Her work has appeared in The Oddity and Nameless Magazine.

Michael Mitchell is a second-year student in the Master of Professional Writing Program at USC, with an emphasis on writing for stage and screen. He is currently working on his thesis, a full-length feature screenplay, as well as a historical novel, and recently had his first short story published in FORTH Magazine.

Originally from Michigan, Nicole Olweean is a first-year poet in the University of California Riverside's MFA program. Her work has appeared in Fishladder, Menacing Hedge, and Bird's Thumb.

Niela Orr is an essayist and freelance writer. Her writing has appeared in The Baffler, The Hollywood Reporter, Salon, and KCET’s Artbound, among others. She is currently at work on her thesis project; There Is No Nineteenth Floor, a collection of creative nonfiction investigating liminal space and pop culture across sites as disparate as demolished housing projects in South Philadelphia and the on-stage void evident at a rap hologram performance. She lives in Los Angeles.

Sean Pessin earned an M.A. in English at California State University, Northridge, where he now teaches part-time. He is currently finishing his M.F.A. at Otis College of Art and Design. His work has appeared in Used Gravitrons, Interfictions Online, The Sigma Tau Delta Rectangle, The New Short Fiction Series, and in the Northridge Review. In general, Sean’s works feature the strange and the queer while being highly conscious of fabulist storytelling traditions.

Paula Tang is a writer from Walnut Creek, California, and is a fiction candidate at the University of California Riverside's MFA program. She is a world traveler and a voracious eater and is working on her first book, a novel in stories currently titled Big Baby Little China.

Julian Smith-Newman is a third-year MFA student in Fiction at UC Irvine. With Meriwether Clarke, he is the 2015 editor of Faultline, UCI’s journal of arts and letters. He is currently completing his first collection of stories.

Amanda Rusher Foushee is in her third year in the Graduate Program in Writing at UC Irvine. She will read from her thesis project, a novel currently titled East.

Ana Tijoux es una cantante dos veces nominada al GRAMMY, con tres álbumes de estudio: 1977, La Bala, y Vengo en 2014. Nacida en Francia -donde su padre y madre fueron exiliadxs durante la dictadura militar en su país natal, Chile, Tijoux regresó a Chile para producir sus álbumes, sonidos que abarcan desde la época dorada del hip-hop intelectual al jazz, funk y ritmos del folklore latinoamericano. Sus colaboraciones incluyen trabajo con Julieta Venegas y Jorge Dexter.

Ana Tijoux is a two-time Grammy-nominated musician with three studio albums: 1977, La Bala, and 2014's Vengo. Born in France—where her parents were exiled during the military dictatorship in their native Chile—Tijoux returned to Chile to produce her albums,  sounds spanning the golden age of intellectual hip hop to jazz, funk, and folkloric Latin rhythms. Her collaborations include work with Julieta Venegas and Jorge Drexler.

Jen Hofer es una poeta radicada en Los Ángeles, traduce del español, trabaja como intérprete de justicia social y maestra, teje, hace libros a mano, escribe cartas en la calle en su escritorio público, es ciclista urbana y co-fundadora de Antena, una colectiva para la justicia del lenguaje y la experimentación del lenguaje. Publica poemas y traducciones con numerosas editoriales pequeñas y en varias manifestaciones DIY/DIT. Enseña en CalArts y en el Colegio Otis, y trabaja localmente haciendo abogacía para la justicia del lenguaje con Antena Los Ángeles.

Jen Hofer is a Los Angeles-based poet, translator, social justice interpreter, teacher, knitter, book-maker, public letter-writer, urban cyclist, and co-founder of the language justice and language experimentation collaborative Antena. She publishes poems and translations with numerous small presses and in various DIY/DIT incarnations. She teaches at CalArts and at Otis College and works locally doing language justice advocacy with Antena Los Ángeles.

Sandy Tolan is the author of Me & Hank and The Lemon Tree. As co-founder of Homelands Productions, Tolan has produced dozens of radio documentaries for NPR and PRI. He has also written for more than forty magazines and newspapers. His work has won numerous awards, and he was a 1993 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and an I. F. Stone Fellow at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. He is an associate professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

Kelly McEvers is a national correspondent based at NPR West. She previously ran NPR's Beirut bureau, where she earned many awards, including a George Foster Peabody award, for her 2012 coverage of the Syrian conflict. She recently made a radio documentary about being a war correspondent with renowned radio producer Jay Allison of Transom.org. In 2008 and 2009, McEvers was part of a team that produced the award-winning Working series for American Public Media's business and finance show Marketplace.

Bill T. Jones is the recipient of many awards, including the 2014 Doris Duke Award; the 2013 National Medal of Arts; the 2010 Kennedy Center Honors; a 2010 Tony Award for Best Choreography of the critically acclaimed musical FELA! and the 1994 MacArthur "Genius" Award. Mr. Jones choreographed and performed worldwide with his late partner, Arnie Zane, before forming the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company in 1982. Mr. Jones is the Artistic Director of New York Live Arts, an organization that strives to create a robust framework in support of the nation’s dance and movement-based artists through new approaches to producing, presenting, and educating.

An artist and curator, Kristy Edmunds is known for both innovation and depth in the presentation of interdisciplinary contemporary and performing arts. As director of UCLA’s public performing arts program, she has formed a creative habitat for supporting artists and presenting their work. Edmunds was the Founding Executive & Artistic Director of the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) and the TBA Festival (Time Based Art) in Portland, Oregon. She was Artistic Director for the Melbourne International Arts Festival from 2005-2008.

Scott McCloud is the award-winning author of Understanding Comics (a 215-page comic book about comics that explains the inner workings of the medium, translated into 16 languages); Making Comics; Zot!; and many other fiction and non-fiction comics spanning 30 years. An internationally-recognized authority on comics and visual communication, technology, and the power of storytelling, McCloud has lectured at Google, Pixar, Sony, and the Smithsonian Institution. The Sculptor is his most recent book.

Elvis Mitchell is the host of the pop culture radio show The Treatment on KCRW 89.9 FM and film curator of year-round programming for Film Independent. Previously, he hosted the TCM interview program Under the Influence and was also a chief film critic for Movieline. Prior to this, Mitchell served as the film critic at The New York Times and was the entertainment critic for NPR’s Weekend Edition. He produced and co-created The Black List, Volume One, the NAACP Image Award-winning documentary focusing on achievement in the African American community. He was also nominated by the WGA for his work on "The AFI Lifetime Achievement Award: Sidney Poitier."

Patton Oswalt is the author of the New York Times bestseller Zombie Spaceship Wasteland. He has released five TV specials, and five critically acclaimed comedy albums, including two Grammy-nominated releases, My Weakness Is Strong and Finest Hour. Oswalt has also appeared on many television shows and in more than twenty films, including Young Adult, Big Fan, and Ratatouille. Oswalt was the host of the 29th Independent Spirit Awards and the 18th Annual Webby Awards. He lives in Los Angeles.

Matt Oswalt is a writer and director who took his talents writing sketches for Nickelodeon and created the very NSFW and dark web series Puddin’ starring Eddie Pepitone. Having accompanied his brother Patton on numerous outings to the New Beverly over the years, from a double feature of Withnail and I/ Get Carter to a haunting screening of Salò that left them both shaken, he not only witnessed firsthand but got caught up in his brother's obsession with film.

Jeff Chang has written extensively on culture, politics, the arts, and music. He is the author of the award-winning Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, and co-founder of ColorLines, the SoleSides hip-hop crew, and CultureStr/ke. His latest book is Who We Be: The Colorization of America. Named by the Utne Reader as one of the "50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World," Chang has been a USA Ford Fellow in Literature and currently serves as the executive director of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts at Stanford University.

Justin Simien, one of Variety magazine’s "10 Directors to Watch", is the writer and director of the critically acclaimed film Dear White People, which won the Special Jury Award for "Breakthrough Talent" at Sundance 2014. In addition to producing and directing online companion pieces for The Help, Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, and Middle of Nowhere campaigns, he has also written, produced and directed for Take Part TV and the Streamy-nominated web series INST MSGS.

Erin Aubry Kaplan is a journalist, columnist, author, blogger, and teacher who has been writing about black issues since 1992. She has been a staff writer for the LA Weekly and an opinion columnist for the L.A. Times, the first African American to hold the position. She has contributed to many publications and nonfiction anthologies. Her collection of essays and reportage, Black Talk, Blue Thoughts and Walking the Color Line: Dispatches From a Black Journalista, was published in 2011 by Northeastern University Press. Her second book, about the cultural legacy of Barack Obama, is due out in 2015.

Scott Timberg is a Los Angeles-based culture writer, contributing writer for Salon, and one-time LA Times arts reporter who has contributed to The New York Times, GQ, and The Hollywood Reporter. His book Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class will be published by Yale University Press in January. He also co-edited, with Dana Gioia, the anthology The Misread City: New Literary Los Angeles. Scott runs ArtsJournal’s CultureCrash blog.

Barbara Bestor, AIA, is the Principal of Bestor Architecture and is the executive director of Woodbury University’s Julius Shulman Institute. Bestor Architecture was founded in 1995; work includes the new headquarters for Beats By Dre and Nasty Gal, an innovative small lot housing complex in Echo Park, and a variety of custom residences and commercial entities. Barbara Bestor is the author of Bohemian Modern, Living in Silver Lake and is a partner in Sisters of Los Angeles (SoLA), which creates design-based gifts and housewares for Los Angeles and California.

John McCrea is a founding member of the band CAKE, which originated in Sacramento, California. McCrea is the lead vocalist, primary writer, and lyricist, in addition to playing rhythm acoustic guitar, piano, and Vibraslap. He and the rest of the band have produced all of their albums. McCrea is a vocal activist for various causes, notably artists' rights, environmental and clean water initiatives, and world poverty. Additionally, John is a founding member of the Content Creator Coalition organization, an artist-run non-profit advocacy group representing all creators in the digital landscape.

Sasha Anawalt is director of USC Annenberg Arts Journalism Programs, including the Master's degree in Specialized Journalism (The Arts) program. She also directs the USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Program and the NEA Arts Journalism Institute in Theater and Musical Theater. In October 2009, she co-directed and co-produced with Douglas McLennan the first-ever National Summit on Arts Journalism. Anawalt wrote the best-selling cultural biography The Joffrey Ballet: Robert Joffrey and the Making of an American Dance Company. She was chief dance critic for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, LA Weekly , and on KCRW, 89.9 FM. Her reviews and features have been published widely.

For more than four decades—from Santana's earliest days as a groundbreaking Afro-Latin-blues-rock fusion outfit in San Francisco— Carlos Santana has been the visionary force behind artistry that transcends musical genres and generational, cultural, and geographical boundaries. To date, Santana has won 10 Grammy® Awards, including a record-tying nine for a single project, 1999’s Supernatural, as well as three Latin Grammys. Santana’s new album, Corazón, was released in May 2014 and is his first Latin music album of his career. The arc of Santana’s performing and recording career is complemented by a lifelong devotion to social activism and humanitarian causes.

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 the 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.

Sarah Thornton is a non-fiction writer and sociologist of art. 33 Artists in 3 Acts, her long-awaited follow-up to Seven Days in the Art World, a witty account of the machinations of the art world, which was an international hit. Thornton has written regularly for The Economist and many other publications. She lives in London but travels widely.

Allison Agsten has served as Curator of Public Engagement at the Hammer Museum since 2010, where she directs an innovative new curatorial program focused on creating an exchange between visitors and the museum through works of art. Agsten previously worked at LACMA, where she developed a number of pioneering digital projects, and prior to that, at CNN, where she was a producer regularly covering the arts.