The author of more than twenty books, including the best-selling Mars trilogy (Bantam, 1992–96) and, most recently, the critically acclaimed 2312 (2012) and Shaman (2013; both Orbit), Kim Stanley Robinson is the winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards for science fiction. He is an active affiliate of the Sierra Nevada Research Institute at the University of California, Merced, and lives in Davis, California.
Ana Lily Amirpour is a Los Angeles–based filmmaker. Her most recent feature, a black-and-white Iranian vampire western titled A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, premiered at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival and opened New Directors/New Films in March at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which co-organizes the festival with the Film Society of Lincoln Center. She is currently working on her next film, The Bad Batch, a postapocalyptic cannibal love story.
Composer, performer, and educator Pauline Oliveros is the founder of the Deep Listening Institute and a professor of music in the Department of Arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. Currently composing The Nubian Word for Flowers—an opera produced in collaboration with author and director Ione—Oliveros is included in this year’s Whitney Biennial.
Fred Tomaselli is an artist based in New York. His paintings and collages have been exhibited at such institutions as the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Rose Art Museum, Waltham, MA; and the Aspen Art Museum. A survey of his work is currently on view at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, through March 23. This May, Prestel will publish The Times, a book comprising Tomaselli’s recent series of manipulated New York Times front pages.
The creator of the early Web fonts Verdana and Georgia, Matthew Carter is a type designer based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has worked at Linotype and Bitstream, and since 1991 has been a principal of the firm Carter & Cone Type. His most recent designs are Carter Sans for Monotype Imaging, and Sitka for Microsoft.
Bunny Rogers is an artist and poet who lives and works in New York, where she is currently in residency at the Queens Museum of Art. Recent activities include a solo show at Appendix Project Space in Portland, Oregon; an exhibition, with Benjamin Asam Kellogg, at Sandy Brown, Berlin; and a multimedia installation at 319 Scholes, Brooklyn, with Filip Olszewski. A book of her poetry, My Apologies Accepted, is forthcoming from Civil Coping Mechanisms.
Linder Sterling is currently an artist-in-residence at Tate St. Ives, UK. The founder of the post-punk group Ludus, she is also known for her prolific collage work, which is featured on the iconic cover of the Buzzcocks’ 1977 single “Orgasm Addict,” and has been celebrated internationally, with solo shows this year at Tate St. Ives; the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles. On November 11, her ballet The Ultimate Form will be staged in New York as part of Performa 13.
Bernadette Mayer has been a key figure on the New York poetry scene for decades. She is the author of more than two dozen volumes of poetry. Her most recent book, The Helens of Troy, NY, was published by New Directions this past spring. She lives in upstate New York.
Mark Aerial Waller is an artist based in London. His practice, which encompasses video, sculpture, and constructed situations, engages a spectrum of subjects and subjectivities ranging from the biochemical mechanisms that shape our social interactions to nuclear contract workers in the UK. Last year Waller’s art was featured in the Eleventh Baltic Triennial in Vilnius, Lithuania. He is currently producing, with London’s Institute of Contemporary Art, a new video piece, Live from the Crucible, which will air on the UK’s Channel 4 television this fall.
Sadie Benning is an artist and musician who lives and works in New York. Benning was included in “NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star” at the New Museum and recently staged a solo show of new paintings and videos at New York’s Callicoon Fine Arts. Benning’s work will also be featured in the 2013 Carnegie International, which opens this fall at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh.
Matthew Porterfield is a filmmaker living and working in Baltimore. He participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 2012 Biennial with Putty Hill (2010), which was recently acquired, along with his first feature, Hamilton (2006), by New York’s Museum of Modern Art. His new film, I Used to Be Darker, premiered at Sundance and will be released this fall by Strand.
Norwegian architect Kjetil Trædal Thorsen is a founding principal of Snøhetta, an Oslo- and New York–based practice that has designed such renowned structures as the Oslo Opera House and the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt. Current projects include the National September 11 Memorial Museum Pavilion in New York; the International Center of Cave Art at Lascaux IV in Montignac, France; the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s 235,000-square-foot expansion.