Eliasson grew up in Iceland and Denmark and studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. In 1995, he moved to Berlin and founded Studio Olafur Eliasson. Eliasson lives and works in Copenhagen and Berlin. His art is driven by his interests in perception, movement, embodied experience, and feelings of self. He strives to make the concerns of art relevant to society at large. Art, for him, is a crucial means for turning thinking into doing in the world. Eliasson’s works span sculpture, painting, photography, film, and installation. Not limited to the confines of the museum and gallery, his practice engages the broader public sphere through architectural projects, interventions in civic space, arts education, policy-making, and issues of sustainability and climate change.

Julie Reiss is an independent art historian and critic with a focus on contemporary art that addresses the climate crisis and the role artists play in social change. She is the editor of Art, Theory and Practice in the Anthropocene. She is also the author of From Margin to Center: The Spaces of Installation Art. Julie teaches courses on Art and Sustainability at Columbia University where she is also a Visiting Critic to the MFA department. She is Consulting Editor to the Harpo Foundation, working on an anthology of essays about its founder, artist and arts advocate Ed Levine.

Art historian, curator, and critic Douglas Dreishpoon is currently Director of the Catalogue Raisonné project at the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation in New York City and Chief Curator Emeritus at the AKG Art Museum, Buffalo. In 2022, his anthology of sculptors’ writings, Modern Sculpture: Artists in Their Own Words, was published by University of California Press and his contributions to Helen Frankenthaler: Late Works, 1988–2009 were published by Radius Books. A Consulting Editor at the Rail, Dreishpoon holds a PhD from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.