Gabeba Baderoon is a South-African poet, editor, academic, memoirist, and performer. She took her first class in writing poetry at the age of thirty and still describes herself as a student of the writing arts today, a quarter of a century later. Baderoon is the author of the collections The Dream in the Next Body (Kwela Books, 2005), A hundred silences (Kwela Books, 2006), and The Museum of Ordinary Life (DaimlerChrysler, 2005), as well as the monograph Regarding Muslims: From Slavery to Post-Apartheid. Her work has been honored with the University of Johannesburg Prize, the Elisabeth Eybers Poetry Prize, the Daimler Award, and a best book award from the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Greg Fox is a multi-instrumentalist, interdisciplinary artist, and teacher born and based in New York City. A versatile and prolific creative, he moves through musical stages as both listener and player, a transformative rather than performative force. As a drummer with hundreds of credits on obscure records, Fox is well-known in the lesser-known. He has toured, recorded, and released numerous records with Liturgy, Guardian Alien, ZS, Ex Eye, Skeletons, Teeth Mountain, Dan Deacon, Colin Stetson, Ben Frost, and many more. His reputation is that of the elevated beast, the one who plays fast and loud and expresses himself at the extremes and in the extremes. That’s not wrong. Yet Fox is also a slow theorist, a musician aware of those who came before him, and a teacher of drumming, with students all over the world.

Roee Rosen is an Israeli-American artist, filmmaker, and writer. He is known for his multilayered and provocative work, which often challenges the divides between history and the present, documentary and fiction, politics and erotics. Rosen dedicated years to crafting his fictive feminine persona, the Jewish-Belgian Surrealist painter and pornographer Justine Frank, a project that entailed fabricating her entire oeuvre as well as a book and a short film, Two Women and a Man (2005). In 2010 Rosen created two films, Hilarious and Out, in which a BDSM session becomes a political exorcism. Out premiered at the Venice film festival, where it won the Orizzonti award for best medium-length film. Rosen’s film The Dust Channel was coproduced by documenta 14, where it was exhibited along with two historical text and image installations: The Blind Merchant (1989–1991), an artist book retelling Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice focusing on the figure of Shylock; and Live and Die as Eva Braun (1995-1997), a work that stirred a political scandal when first exhibited at the Israel Museum.

Japanese performer, director, and choreographer Yuya Tsukahara is a cofounder, together with dancer Masaru Kakio, of the improvisational performance collective contact Gonzo. Formed in 2006 in Osaka, contact Gonzo developed an improvisational style of physical practice in which fluid movements are accompanied by blows and slaps that resemble physical altercations, thereby blurring the boundaries between violence and trust. Tsukahara and Kakio describe their approach as “Philosophy of pain, technique of contact,” radically deconstructing the idea of conventional performances. The collective, which currently consists of five members, performs in public space, nature, galleries, museums, theaters, dance festivals, and also stages urban interventions in cities around the world.

Irakli Rusadze is the creative director of the Tbilisi-based fashion brand SITUATIONIST, which he co-founded in 2015 at the age of seventeen. A self-trained designer, Rusadze’s distinctive pattern-cutting and tailoring form the basis of his designs, alongside a desire to challenge “post-Soviet” stereotypes and reflect on contemporary social issues in Georgia. Only two years after its launch, SITUATIONIST was featured as a guest brand at Milan Fashion Week in 2017. The brand began presenting its collections at Paris Fashion Week the following year, and in 2022, Rusadze, who is committed to working sustainably, unveiled a zero-waste collection there.

Mila Teshaieva is a Ukrainian artist, photographer, and filmmaker whose work is focused on constructed identities. Connecting public and private histories in interwoven visual storytelling, she seeks to understand and communicate the ways in which history is integral to shaping futures. Teshaieva has exhibited extensively in institutions across Europe and the United States with solo shows, among others, at MIT Museum, Boston (2018); Museum of European Cultures, Berlin (2022 and 2018); Museum Kunst der Westküste, Alkersum (2016 and 2014); and Haggerty Museum of Art, Milwaukee (2015). Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including at Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; Akademie der Künste, Berlin; Deutsche Börse, Frankfurt am Main; and Noorderlicht, Gronigen. She is the author of two monographs: Promising Waters (Kehrer Verlag, 2013) and InselWesen (Kehrer Verlag, 2016).