Julie Mehretu, (b. 1970, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia) lives and works in New York City. She received a B.A. from Kalamazoo College, Michigan, studied at the University Cheik Anta Diop, Dakar Senegal, and received a Master’s of Fine Art with honors from The Rhode Island School of Design in 1997. In exploring palimpsests of history, from geological time to a modern day phenomenology of the social, Julie Mehretu's works engage us in a dynamic visual articulation of contemporary experience, a depiction of social behavior and the psychogeography of space. She has received many prestigious awards including the Officer of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture in 2025. Her work has been exhibited extensively in museums and biennials internationally.

Rujeko Hockley is a curator, writer, and cultural strategist. She is currently completing an Executive MBA at IMD Business School in Lausanne, Switzerland. Formerly, she was the Arnhold Associate Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where she co-curated the critically acclaimed 2019 Whitney Biennial. Additional projects at the Whitney include Coumba Samba: Stars and Stripes (forthcoming 2026), Amy Sherald: American Sublime (2025), Inheritance (2023), 2 Lizards (2022), Jennifer Packer: The Eye Is Not Satisfied With Seeing (2021), Julie Mehretu (2021), among others. She is co-curator of the landmark exhibition We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85 (2017), which originated at the Brooklyn Museum and travelled to three U.S. venues in 2017-18.