Sharon Helgason Gallagher is the President and Executive Director of ARTBOOK and D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, Inc., which she co-founded in 1990. Over the last thirty years, the company has selected, cataloged, publicized, and distributed more than 25,000 different titles on art, photography, architecture, design, and visual culture from the world’s most respected museums and international publishers, as well as various small presses. Sharon has lectured at museum publishing and artists’ book conferences. Her 2021 BOOKLIVE Symposium keynote, “What Shall We Want to Have Called a Book,” is widely used in book and artist book classes around the world. Sharon is a graduate of Yale University and holds a Master’s in Philosophy from Columbia, where she was a University Fellow.

Skuta Helgason, was born 1953 on a sheep farm in Iceland. He studied time-based media from Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester NY (1979 - 1983), where books became his chosen medium. Helgason managed WPA Bookworks, Washington, D.C. (1983 - 1988), served as Publishing Associate at Rainer Verlag, Berlin (1988 - 1991), freelanced as a book sales rep (1989 - 1993), and is Founder and Director of Stop Over Press, Berlin (1991 - ongoing). At D.A.P. | Distributed Art Publishers, Helgason was previously a Creative Consultant (1995 - 2004) and now is Director of Artbook Retail since 2004. As an artist, Helgason focuses on the exploration of different modes and truth values of diaristic documentation in a variety of media, with books being the conclusive form.

Eleanor Heartney has been writing about art since 1981. She is a longtime contributor to Art in America, Contributing Editor to Artpress, Editor at Large for the Brooklyn Rail, and has written extensively on contemporary art issues for Artnews, Artnet, Art and Auction, the Washington Post and the New York Times. Heartney was the 1992 recipient of the College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award for distinction in art criticism and was honored in 2008 by the French government as a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Her most recent book is the co-authored Mothers of Invention: the Feminist Roots of Contemporary Art.