Nancy Adajania is a Bombay-based cultural theorist and curator. She has curated a number of research-based exhibitions including the Nelly Sethna retrospective The Unpaved, Crusty, Earthy Road, Chatterjee & Lal with Cymroza Art Gallery, Bombay (2021); Zigzag Afterlives: Film Experiments from the 1960s and 1970s in India, Camden Art Centre, London (2020); the Sudhir Patwardhan retrospective Walking Through Soul City, NGMA, Bombay with The Guild Art Gallery (2019); and Counter-Canon, Counter-Culture: Alternative Histories of Indian Art, Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa (2019). Adajania has proposed several new theoretical models through her writing on subaltern art, media art, public art, transcultural art, and biennale culture from the Global South. She conceptualized and led an online curatorial workshop “Once Upon a Cultural Famine: A Curatorial Thought Experiment” for the Kochi Biennale Foundation (2021), and served as the juror for the Video/Film/New Media fellowship cycle of the Akademie Schloss Solitude between 2015–17.

Akinbode Akinbiyi lives and works in Berlin. He has been a freelance photographer since 1977 and cofounded UMZANZSI, a cultural center in Clermont Township in Durban, South Africa in 1993. Akinbiyi’s primary focus is large and sprawling megacities, in which he wanders and meanders the highways and byways in an attempt to understand and deeply engage with the modern metropolis. His work has primarily concerned the African cities of Lagos, Cairo, Kinshasa, and Johannesburg, but also reflects the cities of Khartoum, Addis Ababa, Dakar, Bamako, São Paulo, and Chicago, among others. Recent exhibitions have been staged at documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel (2017), FotoFest Biennial, Houston (2020), Steirischer Herbst, Graz (2020), Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin (2020), and Västerås Konstmuseum, Västerås (2020–21). 

A theorist, film essayist, and curator, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay is Professor of Modern Culture and Media and Comparative Literature at Brown University. Her books include Potential History – Unlearning Imperialism (Verso, 2019), Civil Imagination: The Political Ontology of Photography (Verso, 2012), The Civil Contract of Photography (Zone Books, 2008), and From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947-1950 (Pluto Press, 2011). She has made several films, including Un-documented: Imperial Plunder(2019) and Civil Alliances, Palestine, 47-48 (2012), and her exhibitions include Errata (Tapiès Foundation, 2019 and HKW, Berlin, 2020) and Enough! The Natural Violence of New World Order (F/Stop photography festival, Leipzig, 2016).

Natalia Brizuela is Class of 1930 Chair of the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is a Professor of Film & Media and Spanish & Portuguese. She specializes in modern and contemporary visual culture, art, film, media, literature, and critical theory from Latin America, with a particular focus on experimental practices that bridge aesthetics and politics. She is the author of Fotografia e Imperio (2012), Depois da fotografia (2014), The Matter of Photography in the Americas (2018), and La cámara como método (2021), among others. She has curated No sé. (El templo del sol) (2014), Photography at its limits (2019), and is currently preparing How to Change Everything (2022). With Victoria Collis-Buthelezi and Leticia Sabsay she co-edits Critical South at Polity and participates in other collective editorial practices in the Global South. She is currently completing a book on the refusal of time.

Antawan I. Byrd is a Weinberg Fellow in Art History at Northwestern University and an associate curator of Photography & Media at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he curated Mimi Cherono Ng’ok: Closer to the Earth, Closer to My Own Body (2021), and co-edited The People Shall Govern! Medu Art Ensemble and the Anti-Apartheid Poster based on an exhibition that he co-curated in 2019. Byrd co-curated the 2nd Lagos Biennial of Contemporary Art (2019) and Kader Attia: Reflecting Memory at Northwestern’s Block Museum of Art (2017), and was an associate curator for the 10th Bamako Encounters, Biennale of African Photography (2015). From 2009 to 2011, he was a Fulbright fellow and curatorial assistant at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos. His writing has appeared in Sanlé Sory: Volta Photo (2018) and Recent Histories: Contemporary African Photography and Video Art (2017), as well as recent issues of Aperture and FOAM.

Tina Campt is Owen F. Walker Professor of Humanities and Modern Culture and Media. Campt is a black feminist theorist of visual culture and contemporary art. She leads the Black Visualities Initiative at the Cogut Institute for Humanities and is the founding convenor of the Practicing Refusal Collective. Campt is the author of four books: Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender and Memory in the Third Reich (University of Michigan Press, 2004), Image Matters: Archive, Photography and the African Diaspora in Europe (Duke University Press, 2012), Listening to Images (Duke University Press, 2017), and most recently, A Black Gaze (MIT Press, 2021).

Biljana Ciric is an interdependent curator. Ciric was the co-curator of the 3rd Ural Industrial Biennale for Contemporary Art, Yekaterinburg (2015), curator in residency at Kadist Art Foundation, Paris, (2015), and a research fellow at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Høvikodden (2016). She was nominated for the ICI Independent Vision Curatorial Award in 2012. In 2018, she founded the educational platform What Could/Should Curating Do and edited From History of Exhibitions Towards Future of Exhibition Making: China and Southeast Asia (Sternberg Press) in 2019. She is currently developing two projects: Repetition as a Gesture Towards Deep Listening for the first Trans-Southeast Asian Triennial in Guangzhou, and the long-term project As you go . . . the roads under your feet, which reflects on China’s Silk and Road Initiative while looking towards its future and changes to local living rituals, aesthetics, and connectivity. Ciric is also undertaking a practice-based PhD in Curatorial Practice at Monash University, Melbourne.

Robin Coste Lewis was the poet laureate of Los Angeles from 2017 to 2020. In 2015, her debut poetry collection, Voyage of the Sable Venus (Knopf) won the National Book Award in poetry––the first time a poetry debut by an African-American had ever won the prize in the National Book Foundation’s history, and the first time any debut had won the award since 1974. In 2018, MoMA commissioned both Lewis and Kevin Young to write a series of poems to accompany Robert Rauschenberg’s drawings in Thirty-Four Illustrations of Dante’s Inferno (MoMA, 2018). Lewis is currently at work on two new collections, To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness and Prosthetic, both of which are forthcoming from Knopf. Lewis’s current research focuses on the intersecting production histories of early African American poetry and photography, for which she also received the Anne Friedberg Memorial Grant from USC’s Visual Studies Research Institute.

Frieda Ekotto is Lorna Goodison Collegiate Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies, Comparative Literature, and Francophone Studies at the University of Michigan. Her early work involves an interdisciplinary exploration of the interactions among philosophy, law, literature, and African cinema. She is the author of eleven books, and numerous book chapters as well as articles in various literary journals. She is currently working on LGBTQ+ issues, with an emphasis on West African cultures within Africa as well as in Europe and the Americas. She received the Nicolàs Guillèn Prize for Philosophical Literature in 2014 and in 2015 she was awarded the Benezet Award for excellence in her field. In 2016, she was awarded the John H. D'Arms Faculty for Distinguished Graduate Mentoring in the Humanities at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. In 2018, she was awarded an Honorary Degree at Colorado College.

Ariel Goldberg’s publications include The Estrangement Principle (Nightboat Books, 2016) and The Photographer (Roof Books, 2015). They are a 2020 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant recipient for their book in progress Just Captions: Ethics of Trans and Queer Image Cultures. Goldberg’s writing has most recently appeared in Afterimage, e-flux, Artforum, and Art in America. Their research and writing has been supported by the New York Public Library, the Franklin Furnace Fund, SOMA in Mexico City, and Smith College. Goldberg has been a curator at The Poetry Project and the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art. They teach across multiple colleges and universities in the New York area.

The artists and filmmakers Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige investigate the fabrication of images and representations, the construction of imaginaries, and the writing of contemporary history. Their work builds thematic and formal links between photography, video, performance, installation, sculpture, and documentary and fiction film. Films such as Memory Box (2021), The Lebanese Rocket Society (2012), Je Veux Voir (2008), and A Perfect Day (2005) trace stories of the invisible and absent, from the missing people of the Lebanese Civil War to forgotten space projects and geological and archaeological cores. These works have been shown and awarded in major international festivals, and in 2017, they received the Marcel Duchamp Prize for their project Unconformities. Exhibitions of their work have been staged at Centre Pompidou and Jeu de Paume, Paris; Haus der Kunst, Munich; the V&A, British Museum, and Whitechapel Gallery, London; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Sharjah Art Foundation; and Home Works Forum, Beirut, among others. They have had numerous film retrospectives presented at the Flaherty Seminar, New York; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; the International Film Festival of Gijon; Harvard Film Archive, Cambridge; Lincoln Center, New York; Locarno International Film Festival; and MoMA, New York, among others. 

Tala Hadid is a photographer and filmmaker. Her films have been screened at festivals around the world, including Berlin and Venice, as well as at MoMA and Lincoln Center, New York; the Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis; La Cinémathèque Française, Paris; and the Smithsonian Museum and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C. Her films have received numerous awards, including an Oscar for her short film Your Dark Hair Ihsan. Hadid's last project, House in the Fields, was chosen for Official Selection at the 67th Berlin Film Festival and nominated for the Glashütte Documentary Award. Her work is part of the Ruben/Bentson Moving Image Collection at Walker Art Center, and Hadid is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Saidiya Hartman is the author of Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford, 1997), Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007), and Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (Norton, 2019), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award, PEN John Galbraith Award for Nonfiction, The Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction, the Mary Nickliss Prize for Women and Gender History, the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize, the John Hope Franklin Prize, and the Lionel Trilling Prize. She is a MacArthur Fellow and University Professor at Columbia University.  

Kapwani Kiwanga is a Franco-Canadian artist who lives and works in Paris. Kiwanga studied Anthropology and Comparative Religion at McGill University in Montreal and art at l’école des Beaux-Arts de Paris. In 2020, Kiwanga received the Marcel Duchamp Prize. She was also the winner of the Frieze Artist Award and the annual Sobey Art Award in 2018. She is represented by Galerie Jérôme Poggi, Paris; Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, Cape Town, and London; and Galerie Tanja Wagner, Berlin. Kiwanga’s work traces the pervasive impact of power asymmetries by placing historic narratives in dialogue with contemporary realities, the archive, and tomorrow’s possibilities. Her work is research-driven, instigated by marginalized or forgotten histories, and articulated across a range of materials and mediums including sculpture, installation, photography, video, and performance. Kiwanga co-opts the canon; she turns systems of power back on themselves, in art and in parsing broader histories.

Léopold Lambert is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Funambulist, a bimestrial print+online magazine, dedicated to the politics of space and bodies. He is the author of four books, Weaponized Architecture: The Impossibility of Innocence (dpr-barcelona, 2012), Topie Impitoyable: The Corporeal Politics of the Cloth, the Wall, and the Street (punctum books, 2015), La politique du bulldozer: La ruine palestinienne comme projet israélien (Bulldozer Politics: The Palestinian Ruin as an Israeli Architectural Project, B2 Éditions, 2016), and Etats d’urgence: Une histoire spatiale du continuum colonial francais (States of Emergency: A Spatial History of the French Colonial Continuum, Premiers matins de novembre, 2021).

Miguel A. López is a Peruvian writer and researcher. His work investigates collaborative dynamics and transformations in the understanding of and engagement with Latin American politics, and feminist re-articulations of art and culture in recent decades. He has curated Cecilia Vicuña, a retrospective exhibition, Witte de With, Rotterdam (2019); Social Energies/Vital Forces. Natalia Iguiñiz: Art, Activism, Feminism (1994-2018), ICPNA, Lima (2018); and Teresa Burga: Structures of Air (with Agustín Pérez Rubio), MALBA, Buenos Aires (2015); among others. His publications include Ficciones disidentes en la tierra de la misoginia (Dissident Fictions in the Land of Misogyny, Pesopluma, 2019) and The Words of Others: León Ferrari and Rhetoric in Times of War (with Ruth Estévez and Agustín Diez Fischer, REDCAT and JRP-Ringier, 2017). He was the editor of Giuseppe Campuzano. Saturday Night Thriller y otros escritos, 1998-2013, a collection of writings by drag queen Giuseppe Campuzano published by Estruendomudo in 2013. Until 2020, he was co-director and chief curator of TEOR/éTica, a center for exhibitions, research, and publications on Central American and Caribbean contemporary art in San José, Costa Rica.

Doreen Mende is a curator, theorist, and exhibition-maker. She is professor of the Curatorial/Politics seminar, head of the CCC Research Master and PhD-Forum of the Visual Arts Department at HEAD–Genève, and co-director of the Harun Farocki Institut in Berlin. In her independent curatorial work, she has been conceptualizing the need for archival metabolism, geopolitics of exhibiting, navigational practices and vocabularies for decolonizing socialism through various collaborations, essayistic texts, and peer-reviewed articles. Funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, she initiated the research constellation entangledinternationalism.org (2019–24) in collaboration with dasch.swiss, Exit Frame Collective, Vanabbe Museum, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), and Kunstverein Leipzig, among others. Recent texts have been published with Sternberg Press, Archive Books, e-flux journal, Akademie der Künste Berlin, and the Oxford Handbook of Visual Communist Cultures. 

Maaza Mengiste is the author of The Shadow King, shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, and a recipient of the American Academy of Arts & Letters Award in Literature, as well as a LA Times Books Prize finalist. It was named a Best Book of 2019 by New York Times, NPR, Time, Elle, and other publications. Beneath the Lion's Gaze, her debut, was selected by the Guardian as one of the 10 best contemporary African books.

Dr Samaneh Moafi is senior researcher at Forensic Architecture (FA), a research agency at Goldsmiths, University of London that investigates human rights violations with and on behalf of communities and individuals affected by police brutality, border regimes, and environmental violence. Moafi provides conceptual oversight across projects and in particular oversees the Centre for Contemporary Nature where FA develops new evidentiary techniques for bringing accountability to environmental destructions. She earned her PhD from the Architectural Association (AA) School of Architecture with a thesis on the contemporary history of state-initiated mass housing in Iran and the gender roles and class identities it informed.

Dr Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung is an independent curator, author, and biotechnologist. He is founder and artistic director of SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin, the artistic director of sonsbeek20–24, and the 13th Bamako Encounters 2022. Ndikung was the curator-at-large for Adam Szymczyk's documenta 14 in Athens, Greece and Kassel in 2017; a guest curator of the Dak'Art biennale in Dakar, Senegal in 2018; as well as artistic director of the 12th Bamako Encounters in 2019. Together with the Miracle Workers Collective, he curated the Finland Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2019. He is currently a professor in the Spatial Strategies MA program at the Weissensee Academy of Art, Berlin. In 2023 he will take on the role of Director at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin.

Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s practice explores strategies of political resistance enacted through counter-memory and post-memory. Extracting and re-working narratives via history and supernaturalisms is an essential part of Nguyen’s video works and sculptures where fact and fiction are both held accountable. Nguyen co-founded The Propeller Group in 2006, a platform for collectivity that situates itself between an art collective and an advertising company. Accolades for the group include the grand prize at the 2015 Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur and a Creative Capital award for their video project Television Commercial for Communism. Besides a major traveling retrospective that began at the MCA Chicago, the collective has participated in international exhibitions including The Ungovernables, New Museum Triennial, New York (2012), Made in L.A., Los Angeles (2012), Prospect.3, New Orleans (2014), and the Venice Biennale (2015).

Uzma Z. Rizvi is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Urban Studies at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York. Rizvi’s work intentionally interweaves archaeology with cultural criticism, philosophy, critical theory, art, and design. She is the curator (with Murtaza Vali) for the National Pavilion for KSA for the Venice Architecture Biennale and has been a lead tutor (with Murtaza Vali) of Art Dubai’s seminar program, Campus Art Dubai (CAD) since 2014. In 2016, she directed (with Amal Khalaf) Art Dubai’s Global Art Forum (GAF 10), The Future Was__.  In 2018, Rizvi was on the curatorial team as the Head of the Department of Mapping Margins for the Fikra Graphic Design Biennial 01: Ministry of Graphic Design, Sharjah. With nearly two decades of work on decolonizing methodologies, intersectional and feminist strategies, and transdisciplinary approaches, Rizvi's work has intentionally pushed disciplinary limits, and demanded ethical decolonial praxis at all levels of engagement, from teaching to research.

Esther Ruelfs has been the Head of the Photography and New Media Department at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg since 2012. She studied art history and philosophy, writing her doctoral thesis on the photographer Herbert List. Ruelfs is interested in the connections between historical and cultural contexts and contemporary issues of social relevance. Recent publications and exhibition catalogues include Amateur Photography. From Bauhaus to Instagram (2019), Machen Sie mich schön, Madame d’Ora (Make Me beautiful, Madame d'Ora, 2018), When we share more than ever (2015), Den Körper aktivieren. Mortifikation und Verlebendigung bei Herber List (Activate the Body: Mortification and Vitalization in Herbert List, 2015), ReVision: The photography collection at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (2016), and Fette Beute. Reichtum zeigen (Rich Pickings: Photography and wealth, 2014). She is currently at work on the project Mining Photography. On the Ecological Footprint of Photography.

Elias Sanbar is a writer. Born in Palestine, he studied in Lebanon and France before teaching at universities in Paris and Princeton. Founder and editor of the Revue d'études palestiniennes (Éditions de Minuit, 1981–2005) and negotiator in the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, he has also collaborated with several filmmakers including Simone Bitton and Jean-Luc Godard, among others, and published numerous works on the photographic image. He has translated the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish to French (Actes Sud). From 2005 to 2021, Sanbar served as the Ambassador of Palestine to UNESCO.

Andreas Schlaegel is a critic and artist, based in Berlin. Since the late nineties, he has written on contemporary art for international art magazines such as Flash Art International, Frieze, and Kunstkritikk, as well as for publications for the UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; MUSAC, Leon; Aspen Museum, Colorado; Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt/M; Kunsthalle Düsseldorf; TBA21, Vienna, and the Julia Stoschek Collection, Berlin/Düsseldorf. His artistic practice centers on the development of collaborative formats, which includes collaborations with artists, such as Keren Cytter, John Bock, Gelitin, Paolo Chiasera, Nine Budde, and Melou Vanggaard. His longstanding musical projects include Art Critics Orchestra with Raimar Stange and Micz Flor, and Die!Landschaft with Manfred Peckl. He teaches the history and theory of photography at HfG Offenbach.

Nicholas Tammens is assistant curator at Kunstverein Hamburg. He is founder of 1856, a curated program of exhibitions and events at a workers’ union parliament in Melbourne, Australia which focuses on conditions of labour and cultural production. He has produced exhibitions with artists such as Jef Geys, Yale Union (2018), Patricia L. Boyd, 1856 (2018), Fred Lonidier, 1856 (2017), and B. Wurtz (2015), and presented talks at WIELS, Brussels (2019) and Kunsthalle Zurich (2019). Tammens’s writing has appeared in Mousse Magazine and May Revue.

Françoise Vergès is a feminist theorist, educator, curator, and the cofounder of the collective Decolonize the Arts and of the free and open university Decolonizing the Arts. She has produced documentary films on Maryse Condé and Aimé Césaire, and served as project advisor for the Triennale de Paris (2011) and documenta 11 (2002). Vergès’s books include The Wombs of Women (2020) and Monsters and Revolutionaries (1999), amongst others.