Nayland Blake is an artist, writer, educator and curator. Born in New York City in 1960, they attended Bard College and then California Institute of the Arts. After receiving their MFA, they moved to San Francisco in 1984, returning to New York in 1996. They have had solo exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; University Art Museum; Contemporary Arts Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, and the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College. Their Retrospective No Wrong Holes - 30 years of Nayland Blake opened in 2019 at the ICALA and closed in 2021 at the MIT List Center. They are currently the co-director of the studio art program at Bard College. Their collected writings, My Studio Is A Dungeon Is The Studio were published by Duke University Press in 2025.

Lynne Tillman’s novels include Haunted Houses; Motion Sickness; No Lease on Life, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; American Genius, A Comedy, and Men and Apparitions. Other books include The Velvet Years: Warhol’s Factory 1965–1967, photographs by Stephen Shore: What Would Lynne Tillman Do?, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and Someday This Will Be Funny. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, and the Katherine Anne Porter award. Her most recent work, MOTHERCARE, is an autobiographical book-length essay on caring for a sick parent for 11 years.