Nicole Caruth is the recipient of the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, has served as artistic director at The Union for Contemporary Art. Prior to joining the Center, Nicole held positions at McColl Center for Art + Innovation, Art21, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, and the Brooklyn Museum. Nicole’s curatorial projects include, most recently, The Grace Jones Project at the Museum of the African Diaspora; Crossroad: A Social Sculpture by the artist Derrick Adams; and Power of People, Power of Place by Fallen Fruit Collective. Her writing has appeared in ARTnews, C Magazine, Gastronomica, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Public Art Review, Walker Art Center Magazine, the Phaidon Press volumes Vitamin Green and Vitamin D2, and exhibition catalogues published by Joan Mitchell Foundation and The Studio Museum in Harlem. She is founding editor of Art21 Magazine (est. 2013), an online space for insightful writing on contemporary art and artists. In 2012, Nicole founded With Food in Mind, a nomadic nonprofit developing art-based approaches to childhood obesity and nutrition disparities in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color. Her extensive writing about food in contemporary has earned her recognition as a leading voice on the subject. She is currently collaborating with the artist Elia Alba on her book, The Supper Club.

Heba Farid is the co-founder of TINTERA in Cairo. She is a multidisciplinary artist and cultural manager based in Cairo since 2000, with a background in architecture and fine arts. Her work has been exhibited and published internationally and she has been active in institutional development and cultural research with a focus on photography as a founder of the Contemporary Image Collective (CiC), based in Cairo, an art center dedicated to the visual image, as the coordinator and initiator of the multidisciplinary art/research project about Na’ima al-Misriyya, an early 20th century performer, and as coordinator of the photographic heritage program at CULTNAT, the Center for Documentation of Cultural and Natural Heritage (Bibliotheca Alexandrina). She has participated in and published articles for several regional symposiums on archiving and photographic heritage and curated exhibitions based on the historic photograph collections. She has received several professional training in the preservation and management of photograph collections, and is a MEPPI alumni. She is currently adjunct professor of practice in photography at the Department of the Arts, American University in Cairo (AUC), and is embarking on an entrepreneurial startup venture dedicated to the preservation and activation of photograph collections and visual heritage.

Lyra Kilston is a writer, critic, and editor in Los Angeles. Her writing on art, architecture, and urbanism has been published in books, magazines and websites, and produced as documentary shorts for public television. She has worked for such institutions as the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (Colorado), the Performa Biennial (New York), California Institute of the Arts, and the Getty Research Institute and J. Paul Getty Museum (California).

Steven Matijcio is the Executive Director of the Knoxville Museum of Art (KMA). Previously he served as director and chief curator of the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston, curator at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati,  and the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA) in Winston-Salem, NC. Matijcio is a graduate of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and has held positions in a number of galleries and museums including the Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art, the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the National Gallery of Canada. Matijcio was honored in 2010 with a prestigious Tremaine Exhibition Award for the project paperless.