Diego Luna is a renowned film, television, and stage actor who has participated in over 30 films, including the award-winning Y Tu Mamá También. Luna has been a professional actor since he was seven years old and recently made his directorial debut with the documentary J.C. Chávez, followed by the fictional film Abel. His latest feature as a director is Chavez, based on the life of legendary farm worker and union leader, Cesar E. Chavez.

NPR correspondent Mandalit del Barco has reported and produced radio stories and photographed everything from street gangs to Hollywood, police and prisons, marijuana, immigration, natural disasters, arts, and urban street culture (including hip hop dance, music, and art). Every year, she covers the Oscars and the Grammy awards for NPR. Her news reports, feature stories, and photos filed from Los Angeles and abroad can be heard on All Things Considered, Morning Edition, Weekend Edition, alt.latino and npr.org

Born to Scottish and Israeli parents of Eastern-European descent, chef/owner Ilan Hall was exposed to international food from an early age. At seventeen, Ilan studied at the Lorenzo de Medici School’s Apicius program and cooked at the Al Lume di Candela restaurant. He graduated from the Culinary Institute of America and subsequently got his certification in Baking and Pastry Arts. In New York, Ilan cooked for Tom Collicchio at Craft, then for Mario Batali at Casa Mono under chef/co-owner Andy Nusser, originally of Batali’s acclaimed Babbo. At 24, he won Bravo TV’s reality competition, Top Chef. Ilan has been traveling the world all his life; his restless nature and tradition-shattering style have now spawned his indefinable first restaurant – The Gorbals Los Angeles.

Like many great chefs, Judy Han’s earliest memory is helping her parents in the kitchen of their family restaurant in Chicago. She moved to Los Angeles to become classically trained at culinary school; her first job was at Lucques, under Suzanne Goin, a protégé of the legendary Alice Waters of Chez Panisse. There she learned the virtues of working with local farmers who produced organically grown sustainable foods. Her culinary education continued in the kitchens of Sona, Grace and Koi, before becoming Sous Chef of Literati II. At Literati II, Chef Judy established herself as one of the largest proponents of the eating local movement, cooking almost entirely local seasonal ingredients at the boutique restaurant. At Mendocino Farms, Chef Judy is dedicated to applying her culinary philosophy to this “Fine Fast” concept by working with the best local farmers. She is also Chef Partner at one of downtown’s newest restaurants, Blue Cow.

A native of New Mexico, John Rivera Sedlar gained a following as a chef in the South Bay region of Southern California—which led him to further his culinary education through an apprenticeship to legendary French chef Jean Bertranou of L'Ermitage in Los Angeles. He opened St. Estephe restaurant in Manhattan Beach, where he won renown as the Father of Modern Southwest Cuisine—also the title of his acclaimed first cookbook. Sedlar's awards and recognitions include selection among the Top Ten Chefs in America and the First Annual Culinary Arts Hall of Fame Awards. Having traveled extensively throughout Mexico, Latin America, and Spain to study Latin food traditions first-hand, he is also the creator and founder of the first Latino food museum in the United States, Museo 26. Sedlar opened downtown’s Rivera and is executive chef at Beverly Hills’ Playa.

Mexican-born Patricia Zarate left her homeland at the age of twenty-three and within little time found herself involved in fighting for justice within marginalized communities of Los Angeles, particularly that of Boyle Heights in the Dolores Mission community. She worked as the Secretary for Father Greg Boyle when he was pastor of Dolores Mission and when Homeboy Industries began to bloom. She began catering events out of her own small kitchen before opening El Zarape in Boyle Heights. In 2005, in collaboration with Father Boyle Patricia employed and worked with a dozen young women teaching them the basics of the food service industry through Homegirl Café. A new state of the art facility was completed in October 2007, and specializes in the serving of light, healthy Mexican food with thirty homegirls undergoing training at a given time.

Evan Kleiman has been the host of Good Food on KCRW for 15 years. The show reflects her wide-ranging interest in food and how humans interact with it. Evan’s food policy interest is expressed through her participation on the Los Angeles Food Policy Council and as a member of the Stewardship Council of the statewide organization Roots of Change. Evan Kleiman was chef-owner of Angeli Caffe on Melrose for 27 years. A cookbook author of six titles, she teaches and gives food tours of her native Los Angeles. Her latest project is Easy As Pie an app for the iphone/ipad.

Rubén Martínez, an Emmy-winning journalist and poet, is the author of several books, including Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail and The New Americans. His new book is Desert America: Boom and Bust in the New Old West. He lives in Los Angeles, where he holds the Fletcher Jones Chair in Literature and Writing at Loyola Marymount University.

Alison Hawthorne Deming is author for four books of poetry and four books of nonfiction with Zoologies: On Animals and the Human Spirit forthcoming. Her work has been widely anthologized including in The Norton Book of Nature Writing and Best American Science and Nature Writing. Long dedicated to conversations between art and science, between environmentalism and social justice, she is coeditor with Lauret E. Savoy of The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity and the Natural World. Former director at the University of Arizona Poetry Center, Alison is currently a professor at UA.

Dana Spiotta’s most recent novel is Stone Arabia, a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her previous novels are Eat the Document, which was a National Book Award Finalist, and Lighting Field, which was a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the West. Spiotta is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and she received the 2008 Rome Prize from The American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Janet Fitch is the author of the Los Angeles novels Paint It Black and White Oleander. Her short stories have appeared in such anthologies and journals as Black Clock, Room of One's Own, and Los Angeles Noir. She teaches creative writing in the Master of Professional Writing program at USC, and at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. A contributing editor to the Los Angeles Review of Books, Fitch is currently working on a novel set during the Russian Revolution.

Carolyn Kellogg is an award-winning staff writer at the Los Angeles Times, where she writes book reviews and covers the publishing world. Her writing has appeared in Black Clock, the anthology The Devil’s Punchbowl and Skateboarding Magazine. She recently wrote the Poets & Writers guide to literary Los Angeles and is the former editor of LAist.com. Carolyn is a board member of the National Book Critics Circle.

David Kipen is author of The Schreiber Theory: A Radical Rewrite of American Film History, and translator of Cervantes' The Dialogue of the Dogs. Until January 2010, he was the Literature Director of the National Endowment of the Arts. He also served from 1998 to 2005 as book critic for the San Francisco Chronicle. His introductions to the WPA Guides to Los Angeles and San Francisco were recently published. In July of 2010 he opened Libros Schmibros, a lending library/used bookstore in the once majority-Jewish, now majority-Latino neighborhood of Boyle Heights -- now in its new home above the Mariachi Plaza Gold Line station.

Dr. Gray Brechin is a visiting scholar at the U.C. Berkeley Department of Geography from which he received his Ph.D. in 1998. He is the founder of the Living New Deal, an effort to inventory and map the legacy of New Deal public works in the United States. He received an M.A. in Art History in 1976 from the U.C. Berkeley Department of Art History in 1976 with a special interest in architecture. He is the author of Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin.

L.A. native Richard Montoya is an actor, director, and member of the Latino/Chicano comedy troupe, Culture Clash. Culture Clash was founded in Los Angeles in 1984 and is still an active troupe. Montoya‘s work is often a reflection on issues of race and cultural identity; he is interested in the “multicultural experiment.”

Myriam Gurba is the author of the Edmund White Award-winning novella and short story collection Dahlia Season and the chapbook Wish You Were Me. Gurba's writing appears in anthologies published by City Lights, Seal, and other fine presses. In 2011, Gurba toured with the lezzendary (legendarily lesbian) literary roadshow Sister Spit. She is not above striking Faustian deals as long as they firmly place her in the same tax bracket as Warren Buffett. She teaches remedial high school classes in Long Beach and is the kind of teacher kids trust enough to ask for a tampon.

Erin Aubry Kaplan is a journalist and essayist who was born and raised in Los Angeles. She has been a staff writer at the LA Weekly and a weekly opinion columnist for the L.A. Times, the first African American opinion columnist in the paper's history. She has contributed to many publications, including Salon.com, Essence, Oxford American and Ms. Magazine. A collection of her journalism and essays, Black Talk, Blue Thoughts and Walking the Color Line: Dispatches from a Black Journalista, was published in 2011. She teaches nonfiction in the M.F.A. Creative Writing Program at Antioch University Los Angeles.

Philip Littell has written a lot of words that have been set to music, collaborating with a veritable roll-call of classical composers: Previn, Susa, Kernis, Tork, and many more. Meanwhile he has been producing work for the less legitimate musical theater with collaborator Eliot Douglass (No Miracle: A Consolation, The Night Market, The Wandering Whore), and Libby Larsen (Billy The Kid And What He Did), has translated Moliere and Feydeau, and clowned in cabaret and sung in clubs, while continuing to work as an actor. He has two epic/historical travesty plays in hand and ready to go.

Héctor Tobar has worked as a journalist for the Los Angeles Times for nearly twenty years. He shared a Pulitzer Prize for the paper’s coverage of the 1992 riots, and then served as the national Latino Affairs correspondent, the Buenos Aires bureau chief, and the Mexico City bureau chief. He currently writes a weekly column for the paper and is the author of three books, Translation Nation, The Tattooed Soldier, and most recently, The Barbarian Nurseries. The son of Guatemalan immigrants, he is a native of the city of Los Angeles.

Besides teaching writing and theatre, Brenda Varda is the founder of Wordspace in Los Angeles, a cultural hub for writers in all genres. Wordspace creates workshops and development opportunities that allow writers to experiment and connect with new audiences. In creating her own works for the theatre (Unknown, The Met, Sacred Fools, UCIRA), Varda looks to create narratives that reframe contemporary identities while still providing reference to common cultural experiences. Her MFA thesis work, Fables du Theatre, a fantasy of three theatrical fables produced in collaboration with a fictional theatre company (Immanence Theatre Ensemble), was produced at Unknown Theatre in 2008 and nominated for an LA Weekly Award.

Alie Ward is a former writer for the LA Times and columnist for the LA Weekly, and now covers cocktails for KCET and CookingChanneltv.com. She's the co-creator and co-host for Cooking Channel's Classy Ladies with Alie & Georgia as well as an on-camera contributor to Cooking Channel's Unique Sweets. She tells stories around town at Upright Citizens Brigade, The Meltdown and Public School and after 13 years in Los Angeles she knows to wear SPF 70 -- and take Fountain.

Kathleen Dean Moore is an essayist and activist who writes about cultural and spiritual connections to wet wild places. Her award-winning books include Riverwalking, Holdfast, The Pine Island Paradox, and Wild Comfort. Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril, her newest book, gathers calls from the world's moral leaders to honor our obligations to future generations. Moore, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Oregon State University, publishes in both environmental ethics and popular journals such as Audubon, Discover, and Orion, where she serves on the Board of Directors.

Craig Childs is a writer who focuses on natural sciences, archaeology, and remarkable journeys into the wilderness. He has published more than a dozen critically acclaimed books on nature, science, and adventure. He is a commentator for NPR's Morning Edition, and his work has appeared in many publications, including The New York Times, Outside, and Orion. His subjects range from pre-Columbian archaeology to U.S. border issues to the last free-flowing rivers of Tibet and Patagonia. He has won several awards for his writing.

William Deverell is a professor of history at USC, where he specializes in the history of California and the American West and directs a scholarly institute that collaborates with the Huntington Library in Pasadena. He is the author of Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past and Railroad Crossing: Californians and the Railroad, 1850-1910. With Greg Hise, he is co-author of Eden by Design: The 1930 Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan for the Los Angeles Region. William is a Fellow of the Los Angeles Institute for Humanities at USC.

Maynard L. Parker (1900-1976) built a career making residential spaces look their alluring best. Based in Los Angeles, Parker was one of postwar America’s most prolific commercial photographers, his sun-kissed style of photography offering a seductive domestic vision to a new consumer age. Parker’s work appeared in House Beautiful, Architectural Digest, Better Homes and Gardens, Sunset, and other popular home and design magazines of the 1930s through the 1960s. His lens revealed the homes and lifestyles of socialites and movie stars, the masterworks of internationally acclaimed architects and designers, and the modest ranch houses, tidy gardens, and new interiors which embodied the American dream.

Jennifer A. Watts is curator of photographs at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, where her exhibitions, research, and writing has primarily focused on the photography of California and the American West. She has coauthored several books, including This Side of Paradise: Body and Landscape in Los Angeles Photographs; Edward Weston: A Legacy; and The Great Wide Open: Panoramic Photographs of the American West. Watts is the curator of the recent exhibition, “A Strange and Fearful Interest: Death, Mourning, and Memory in the American Civil War.”

Christopher Hawthorne is architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times. Before coming to the Times he was architecture critic for Slate and a frequent contributor to the New York Times. His work has also appeared in The New Yorker, the Washington Post, Metropolis, Architect, Domus, I.D., Print, Landscape Architecture Magazine, and Architectural Record, among many other publications. He is the author, with Alanna Stang, of The Green House: New Directions in Sustainable Architecture, published by Princeton Architectural Press.

D. J. Waldie is the author of books, essays and blogs about Los Angeles and Southern California. He is a contributing writer at Los Angeles Magazine and a contributing editor for the Los Angeles Times. His commentary and reviews have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times. He is widely known for his award-winning memoir, Holy Land. His most recent book is House, in collaboration with Diane Keaton. He blogs at KCET.org.