Liana Aghajanian is a journalist whose reporting has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, BBC, Al Jazeera America, The Atlantic, and several other publications. In 2015, she became the winner of the Write A House residency, a unique program for writers that takes place in Detroit, Michigan. She is currently documenting the Armenian experience in America through food with her project, Dining in Diaspora, where she traces the intersection of cuisine and agriculture with genocide, immigration, identity and more.

Livia Alexander is a curator, writer, and Assistant Professor of Global Visual Cultures at Montclair State University. Her work is focused on examining the relationship between art infrastructure and artistic production, urbanity and placemaking, cultural politics of food and art, and contemporary art from the Middle East and Southeast Asia. She has curated and directed numerous art and film programs, exhibitions and events at renown worldwide venues. Her award-winning scholarly writing has appeared in the Journal of Visual Anthropology, Framework, MERIP, and as book chapters and catalog essays. She regularly contributes to Hyeprallergic, Harpers Bazaar Art Arabia, and Art Africa.

Betsy Andrews is the author of New Jersey, winner of the Brittingham Prize in Poetry, and The Bottom, recipient of the 42 Miles Press Prize in Poetry. A contributing editor at Food & Wine and Eating Well, Betsy writes about food, drink, travel, and the environment for various publications. She is co-curator along with Kerala-based poet VK Sreelesh, of Global Poemic, publishing international poems and art witnessing to Covid-19. Betsy has received numerous awards for her poetry, including the Astraea Award in Poetry, Philadelphia City Paper Prize in Poetry, two New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships and numerous residencies. Betsy's poetry and essays have been published widely, most recently in Fierce: Essays by and About Dauntless Women (Nauset Press, 2018), The Ilanot Review, POST, and Anti-Heroin Chic.

Mirna Bamieh an artist and chef from Jerusalem/Palestine. Her works attempts to understand the politics of disappearance in their relation to the ever-shifting politics, while equally questioning notions of land, geographies of in-between temporality. After obtaining a diploma in Professional Cooking, Bamieh began developing her works through mediums of storytelling and food. She creates socially engaged projects through her art practice, through which she aspires to create artworks where food, eating and sharing create an innovative way for people to experience themselves and their surroundings. For the past three years, her full focus has been on Palestine Hosting Society, a live art project that explores traditional food culture in Palestine especially those that are on the verge of disappearing. The project brings these dishes back to life over dinner tables, talks, walks, and various interventions.

Scott Alves Barton teaches Food Studies, Anthropology, Environmental and Africana Studies in New York City universities. As a chef-scholar, Scott’s research, photography and filmmaking are centered in northeastern Brazil at the intersection of sacred and profane African-Brazilian foodways. Scott has recently begun an embodied practice tied to issues of U.S. enslavement, Sierra Leone-Lowcountry rice agriculture and hospitality in an extended residency at Lynden Sculpture Garden, Milwaukee.

Andrew Bell is Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at New York University. His research uses surveys, experiments, and models to understand rural livelihoods decision-making, with an emphasis on trying to broaden rural option sets. Current research domains include irrigation governance in Pakistan, payments for ecosystems services in Malawi, ranching and rainfall in Brazil, and rural wellbeing in Cambodia.

Ramón Cruz was elected President of the Sierra Club in 2020 and has over 20 years of experience intersecting the fields of sustainability, environmental policy, urban planning, energy and climate change. He has worked in the public sector in his native Puerto Rico as the Deputy Director of the Environmental Quality Board, the state environmental regulatory agency and as Commissioner of the Puerto Rico Energy Commission. He has also worked in the non-governmental sector in senior positions at the Environmental Defense Fund, the Partnership for New York City and the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy. He has been a consultant for the World Bank, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Greenhouse Gas Management Institute and the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ). Ramón is a graduate of American University in Washington D.C. and Princeton University.

Keg de Souza lives and works in Sydney on unceded Gadigal land and uses mediums such as; temporary architecture, food, mapping and dialogical projects to explore the poetics and politics of space. This investigation of social and spatial environments is influenced by formal training in architecture and experiences of radical spaces through squatting and organising. Keg often creates site and situation specific projects with people, with an emphasis on knowledge exchange and building relationality. These often manifest as temporary architectures that become framing devices to host pedagogical platforms, centring voices that are often marginalised, for learning about place. Keg has made projects for; South London Gallery; Artspace, Sydney; 20th Biennale of Sydney; Setouchi Triennale; Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; Delfina Foundation, London; Atlas Arts, Isle of Skye; 5th Auckland Triennial and the 15th Jakarta Biennale.

Esra Durukan has been interested in the topics of food, dining table rituals, restaurant, and kitchens. Both food and architecture and the ways in which they intersect and interact with culture, taste and composition consistently drive her practice. Esra's focus area is architectural cake m(b)aking, learning through a variety of baking techniques and recipes. She creates her own tools and language to explore and tell architectural stories in a playful way. Esra has worked for Jordan Kahn, the owner and executive chef at the restaurants Destroyer and Vespertine in Culver City, CA and collaborated with artists on special dinners, cultivating stories within spaces in tandem with specially prepared dishes. Her work was exhibited as part of LA Design Week and at SCI-Arc. Esra’s writing has been published in Off-Topic Student Magazine, Underscore Student Magazine, and International Education Magazine. Esra graduated with a master’s degree in Architecture at Princeton University in Princeton and she is currently practicing in New York.

Gillian Goddard is an activist, organic farmer and chocolate maker based in Trinidad but collaborating globally to radically change the cacao sector. She has worked extensively on agricultural systems and farmed organically across multiple latitudes. She is co-founder and co-director of the Alliance of Rural Communities, an organization made up of the only Caribbean chocolate companies owned and run by cacao farming communities, and founder of Destination Chocolate Trinidad and Tobago, a cacao initiative that rapidly accelerated the expansion of the national processed cacao industry. She moves between a small urban homestead and an 11-acre organic forest farm.

Cynthia R. Greenlee holds a master's degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina and a PhD in history from Duke, where she specialized in the late 19th century, African-Americans, gender, and the law. Greenlee is a contributing editor at Scalawag, one of the most dynamic publications about the dynamic South, and also at Catapult. In former professional lives, Greenlee was the deputy editor at the Southern Foodways Alliance and the senior editor with Rewire.News, the leading online publication about reproductive health, rights, and justice. She is currently at work on a book about African-Americans and abortion from 1860 to the present. Greenlee is a lifelong Southerner by birth, residence, and culture.

Yoko Inoue is a Brooklyn based Japanese artist who uses research-based creative methodologies to explore the complex intersection of object making, documentation and public intervention performance art, which often involves community based cultural work, in the field of visual arts combined with civic engagement and food studies. As a member of the academic consortium, Humanity Across the Borders (HaB), of the International Institute of Asian Studies, The Netherlands, Inoue’s practice and research includes food sovereignty and cultural identity issues in the theoretical framework of decolonization. Inoue is interested in reclaiming embodied special knowledge, such as cooking and craft skills, and in creating spaces where community care can be resumed by substantiating the social value of food. Faculty of Bennington College in Vermont.

Omotara James is a writer, editor and visual artist. She is the author of the chapbook, “Daughter Tongue,” selected by African Poetry Book Fund, in collaboration with Akashic Books for the 2018 New Generation African Poets Box Set. Her work has been supported by the New York Foundation of the Arts, the Academy of American Poets, the 92Y Unterberg Poetry Center, among others. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review, the Poem-a-Day series for The Academy of American Poets and elsewhere. Born in Britain, she is the daughter of Nigerian and Trinidadian immigrants. James currently lives and teaches in New York.

Defne Koryürek has worked as a cook and a butcher in the restaurant business and led the innovation in İstanbul's food culture for ten years. She left the commercial world in the mid-2000s and turned to the public cause. She founded and led the pivotal Slow Food convivium in Turkey and was the Slow Food International Councillor from Turkey till 2016. Koryürek had a weekly column in a national newspaper, hosted two television programs on cooking and one on food ethics, served on the board of Open Society Turkey and presently is on the advisory board of WWF Turkey. While she continues to write and lecture, Koryürek, alongside her partner Vasıf Kortun, is directing a residency program designed to embrace those who work on agriculture, gastronomy, and ecology.

Siri Lee is an interdisciplinary visual storyteller who constructs image-based narratives that move through the personal, historical, and fictional. A potluck of research, mixed media, and speculative writing, Lee’s practice is inspired by her upbringing in China and the U.S. and an academic background that crosses literary studies, digital media studies, and the social sciences. In visualizing analogies between material culture and ideology, her work addresses trauma, ideology, biopower, and memory while employing a potpourri of visual and literary strategies — pedagogy, parody, lyricism, puns, graphic arts, photomontage. A recent graduate from the University of Chicago, Lee has been selected for inclusion in Project Anywhere’s 2020 Global Exhibition Program and has exhibited in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. Lee currently lives and works in New York.

William Mazza uses chance, duration and accumulation to reinterpret landscape as the relationship of people to their mediated environments, through the practices of live-painting performance, studio painting, animation, and collaboration. At its most practical, this project manifests as long-term volunteer engagement with arts organizations that share both the goals of presenting voices of traditionally under-represented communities and a commitment to social change, such as Arts for Art (AFA) and the Belladonna* Collaborative. At its least practical, it results in visual ephemera and artifacts from durational paintings or collaborative and/or performative events, as with the interdisciplinary, improvisational movement, music, and visual art company Revolution Resurrection R&R.

Melissa Metrick is a professor of Urban Agriculture at New York University, where she is also the manager of Urban Food Lab, and is a co-producer of FIELDS, a podcast on the future of farming.

Asunción Molinos Gordo is a research-based artist strongly influenced by disciplines such as anthropology, sociology and cultural studies. The main focus of her work is contemporary peasantry. She employs installation, photography, video, sound and other media to delve into the rural realm driven by a strong desire to understand the complexity of its cultural production. Gordo won the Sharjah Biennial Prize 2015 with her project WAM (World Agriculture Museum) and represented Spain in the official section at the 13th Havana Biennial 2019. Her work has been exhibited at venues including V&A Museum (London), Delfina Foundation (London), ARNOLFINI (Bristol) among others. She is represented by Travesía Cuatro gallery and currently lives between Spain and Egypt.

Carolyn Monastra is an artist and eco-activist whose work is exhibited in venues across the United States, China, Ireland, and England. She has received awards from The Puffin Foundation, English Speaking Union, BRIC Arts, and The Adirondack Art Fund. Artist residencies include Ucross, Caldera, The Djerassi Foundation, Blue Mountain Center, and Saltonstall Foundation. A 2009 residency at Skaftfell Cultural Center in Iceland inspired her to begin “The Witness Tree,” a project documenting the impacts of global climate change. “Divergence of Birds,” her current climate project, addresses the threat of species extinction. A native of Cleveland, Ohio, Monastra received her MFA in photography from The Yale School of Art.

Rosa Nussbaum is a visual artist who works at the intersection of performance and sculpture with an emphasis on interactivity and digital technologies. Rosa’s work explores the place where the body touches the institution through the issues of gender and immigration. The institution attempts to normalize the way it touches the body. Nothing to see here, it says, this is the normal unchangeable way of the world. Using narrative and humor, her work seeks to undermine that normality. She has exhibited internationally including a commission for Glasgow International 2018, Glasgow, Scotland and screening of her piece Horizonland at the Hiroshima MOCA. Rosa has recently completed a residency at International Studio Program at the ACC Gallery, Weimar, Germany and a residency with Paradise Air in Matsudo, Japan. She holds a BFA in Print and Time Based Media from Wimbledon College of Arts, University of the Arts London and an MFA in Transmedia from the University of Texas at Austin.

Isin Önol is a curator and educator who focuses on interconnecting archival information with oral histories to create platforms for collective memory through collaborative art practices. She is a research scholar at the Center for the Study of Social Difference, Columbia University, and teaches at Montclair State University, Department of Art & Design. She was visiting faculty at the Social Design MA Program at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna (2016-17). Önol founded the Nesin Art Village, an independent art school in Turkey. She has produced more than 50 exhibitions internationally, and published on the intersection of social justice and art. Önol holds an MFA from Sabanci University, Istanbul, an MAS from Zürich University of the Arts, and is a PhD candidate at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna. She is a member of directors at Roberto Cimetta Fund.

Sabiyha Prince is an urban anthropologist and artist who researches and writes about African American life and culture. A native of Washington, DC, her books include Constructing Belonging, African Americans and Gentrification in Washington, DC and Capital Dilemma (co-edited with Derek Hyra). A digital artist, photographer and painter, her work has been exhibited at The Anacostia Arts Center, The Hill Center, Zenith Gallery, and through The Petworth Artist’s Collaborative. The online arts magazine Open Color.com will feature her work in December 2020.

Lily is an Industrial Designer and Ecofuturist currently based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work addresses emerging climates and conditions of cities through design interventions. Using video, food, curriculum, material exploration, products, and installation, she transforms daunting subjects such as water scarcity or temperature rise into approachable topics that invite public participation. Environmental justice and ecosystemic thinking are at the core of her work, as is love and reverence for plants, water, and animals. She currently works as a design consultant for studios and companies that share that ethos. Among other shows, she has been part of the London Design Festival, MoMA PS1 Homeroom, Science Gallery Detroit, and NYCxDESIGN.

Jessica Segall is a multidisciplinary artist whose work is screened and exhibited internationally including The Fries Museum, the Havana Biennial, The Coreana Museum of Art, among others. Jessica received grants from The Pollock Krasner Foundation, The Rema Hort Mann Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, among others, and attended residencies at The Van Eyck Academie, The MacDowell Colony and Skowhegan. Her work has been featured in Cabinet Magazine, The New York Times, Sculpture Magazine, Mousse Magazine and Art in America. She received her BA from Bard College and her MFA from Columbia University. Segall is currently based in Brooklyn.

VK Sreelesh is a poet and writer based in Kerala. He has contributed to the US food and cultural magazine Saveur, UK Commonwealth Foundation’s Adda magazine and Women’s Era (India). He received his MA in English Language and Literature from Calicut University. Sreelesh currently lives in a sleepy canopied village in Pinarayi—where humans and trees compete for room—about 30 minutes away from Thalassery with his wife and children.

Candace Thompson is a human being who collaborates with soil, plants, microbes, fungi, animals, food, land, digital media and other human beings in the search for healing, resilience and mutualism as we face the climate crisis. Her project, The Collaborative Urban Resilience Banquet (C.U.R.B.) uses citizen science, non-human storytelling and foraged community meals to unpack the complexities of edible urban ecosystems and imagine a future where the streets are 'clean enough to eat off of'. She is also the Manager of Solar 1's Stuyvesant Cove Park, a two-acre native food forest in lower Manhattan where the public is encouraged to forage from clean land atop a former industrial site.

Michelle Villegas Threadgould is a biracial, Chicana writer and poet who covers Latinx issues and resistant movements. Her work has been featured in CNN, Pacific Standard, KQED, New York Observer, and Latino USA. Seven of her essays were in the music anthology Women Who Rock, and her poems about Broken Borders were published in the Chachalaca Review, Harpy Hybrid, and Global Poemic.

Andrew Vigil-Emerson is a Socially Engaged Intermedia artist based in Tucson, Arizona. His work addresses the social relationships and histories around food, phenomenology, queerness, language, and the environment. He utilizes social practice as a way to collectively understand, relate and develop work based upon the shared relationships we understand ourselves in.

Jenifer Wightman is a research scientist specializing in greenhouse gas (GHG) inventories and life cycle analysis at Cornell University. Currently she is working to establish an inventory, mitigation, and future scenarios for agriculture to meet NYS goals of reducing GHG 40% by 2030 and 85% by 2050. Her art practice employs scientific tropes to incite curiosity of biological phenomena and inform an ecological reflexivity. She has been commissioned by NYC parks, Science Gallery-Bengaluru, and Cornell Biennial; featured at the Lincoln Center, BAM, and Imagine Science Festival; published in Orion Magazine, Pacific Standard, and Journal of Visual Culture; granted residency at MacDowell, Nordic Artists’ Center, and Djerrasi, and has work in collections such as the Morgan Library, Library of Congress, Gutenberg Museum, Bodmer Museum, Russian State Library, and the Danish Royal Library.

Allie E.S. Wist’s work encompasses photography, radio broadcasts, artifacts, dinners, writing, and experiential installations that render futuristic speculation immediately accessible through sensory narratives. She looks at the role of food, taste, and smell in our perception of change over time, and in our ability to adapt to apocalypse. Her work has been exhibited in the Honolulu Biennial, The Wellcome Collection, and HESSE FLATOW. Recent publications include Food Futures: Sensory Explorations in Food Design [Promopress], and A Ritual in X Movements [Montez Press]. She teaches at New York University and The New School.

Viswan Zorba is a Kerala based photographer and videographer who tells stories through the lens of people, places and culture discovered in his cross-country lone tours. He has exhaustively filmed Theyyam, a traditional art form within the Malabar region. He is a former stereo compositing artist who burnt midnight oil for three years at a film studio in Pune, Maharashtra, before returning to Kerala. Zorba currently lives in Kannur with his father and mother.

Livia Alexander is a curator, writer, and Assistant Professor of Global Visual Cultures at Montclair State University. Her work is focused on examining the relationship between art infrastructure and artistic production, urbanity and placemaking, cultural politics of food and art, and contemporary art from the Middle East and Southeast Asia. She has curated and directed numerous art and film programs, exhibitions and events at renown worldwide venues. Her award-winning scholarly writing has appeared in the Journal of Visual Anthropology, Framework, MERIP, and as book chapters and catalog essays. She regularly contributes to Hyeprallergic, Harpers Bazaar Art Arabia, and Art Africa.

Isin Önol is a curator and educator who focuses on interconnecting archival information with oral histories to create platforms for collective memory through collaborative art practices. She is a research scholar at the Center for the Study of Social Difference, Columbia University, and teaches at Montclair State University, Department of Art & Design. She was visiting faculty at the Social Design MA Program at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna (2016-17). Önol founded the Nesin Art Village, an independent art school in Turkey. She has produced more than 50 exhibitions internationally, and published on the intersection of social justice and art. Önol holds an MFA from Sabanci University, Istanbul, an MAS from Zürich University of the Arts, and is a PhD candidate at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna. She is a member of directors at Roberto Cimetta Fund.

Nathalie Anglès is co-founder and Executive Director of Residency Unlimited (RU). Based in Brooklyn, RU was founded in 2009 to foster customized residencies for artists and curators and year long programming.

Julian Tiso Mathews is a multimedia artist, technologist, researcher and writer who is particularly interested in interdisciplinary projects that explore the intersection of art, culture, politics, and technology

Chayna Yoshida is a visual artist and assistant curator pursuing her Bachelor's degree in Art from the University of Hawaii at Hilo.

Lulu Meng is the Project Manager at RU and 2015 RU artist resident. Lulu worked in costume design, stagecraft and event planning where she acquired experience in woodworking, welding, set construction, CAD drawing, garment making and project management. After switching paths to be an artist, Lulu applies her skills to both her artwork, art handling and to assist other artists in realizing their works. Previously, she was the gallery manager at William Harris Gallery in Rochester, NY where she was in charge of exhibition installation, and has worked with artists and organizations including Taraneh Hemami, Hongtu Zhang, Smack Melon and others.