Rosa Lowinger is a Cuban-born American writer and art conservator. The award-winning author of Tropicana Nights: The Life and Times of the Legendary Cuban Nightclub (Harcourt, 2005) and Promising Paradise: Cuban Allure American Seduction (Wolfsonian Museum, 2016), she is the founder and current Vice-President of RLA Conservation, LLC, one of the U.S.’s largest woman-owned art and architectural conservation firms. A Fellow of the American Institute for Conservation, the Association for Preservation Technology, and the American Academy in Rome, Rosa regularly writes about conservation, historic preservation, the visual arts, and Cuba for popular and academic media.

Carolina A. Miranda is a Los Angeles Times columnist focused on art and design, who also makes regular forays into other areas of culture, including performance, books, and digital life. In her years at The Times, she has covered how communities are rethinking the nature of monuments, how architecture is shifting to accommodate a denser Los Angeles, the significance of political graphics in the post-Roe world and how narco-culture has permeated TV and the internet. She was a winner of the 2017 Rabkin Prize in Visual Arts Journalism and the 2021 Sigma Delta Chi Award presented by the Society of Professional Journalists.

D. J. Waldie is the author of Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir and Real City: Downtown Los Angeles Inside/Out. His narratives about life in Los Angeles have appeared in Buzz magazine, Kenyon Review, the Massachusetts Review, the Georgetown Review, Salon and Dwell magazine. His book reviews and opinion pieces appear in the Los Angeles Times. He is a contributing writer for Los Angeles magazine. D.J. Waldie lives a not-quite-middle-class life in Lakewood, in the house his parents bought in 1946.

Carolina A. Miranda is a staff writer at the Los Angeles Times where she reports on art and culture. She has also been a reporter for Time magazine and worked as an independent journalist, contributing to outlets such as NPR, ARTnews and Architect. She is a regular contributor for KCRW’s “Press Play” and was the founding co-chair of the Los Angeles Times Guild employee union.

David Kipen was born and raised in Los Angeles. He founded the nonprofit Boyle Heights lending library Libros Schmibros in 2010. Former literature director of the National Endowment for the Arts, book editor/critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, and contributor to multiple volumes of California cultural history, Kipen teaches full-time in the UCLA writing program. A familiar voice on public radio, he also serves as book critic for Los Angeles magazine and is critic-at-large for the Los Angeles Times.