Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly were both Van Lier Fellows of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and later each received an Interdisciplinary Studio MFA at UCLA. Gerard & Kelly began collaborating in 2003 and employ multiple disciplines—performance, video, and installation—to examine questions of collective and individual memory, gender and sexuality, queer subjectivity, and the relationship between dance and visual art. Recent solo exhibitions and performances of their work have also been held at Carré d’Art, Nîmes (2022), MAMCO Genève (2020), MOCA, Los Angeles (2020), Festival d’Automne, Paris (2017 and 2019), and elsewhere. Recent group exhibitions include FRAC Franche-Comté, Besancon (2022) and Chicago Architecture Biennial (2017), among others.

Editor-at-large for the Brooklyn Rail, Charles Shafaieh’s writing on theatre, visual art, literature, film, and music has appeared in numerous international publications including The New Yorker, Artforum, The Irish Times, and The Weekend Australian Review. Originally from Montana and now based in New York City, he writes regularly on opera for Opera News and on architecture and design for Harvard Design Magazine. His essays have also appeared in multiple books, such as The Touch: Spaces Designed for the Senses (gestalten 2019). With the Brooklyn Public Library, he co-curates Litfilm, an annual film festival focused on writers.