Adriana Lara is an artist based in Mexico City and a member of the production agency Perros Negros. Currently in residence at Beta-Local in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Lara is at work editing issue 10 of the journal Pazmaker, while preparing a fall solo show at the Kunsthalle Basel. This June, Perros Negros will present an exhibition at the Basel gallery New Jerseyy.

Hank Willis Thomas is an artist based in New York and Paris. His collaborative project Question Bridge: Black Males premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival and is currently on view at the Brooklyn Museum in New York, the Oakland Museum of California, the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art in Salt Lake City, and Chastain Arts Center in Atlanta.

Loretta Fahrenholz is an artist and filmmaker who lives and works in Berlin and New York. Last fall, she had shows at sotoso.org in Brussels and at Reena Spaulings Fine Art in New York, where she presented Implosion, 2011. Other recent films include Haust, 2010, and Que Bárbara, 2011. She is currently shooting a new video-based work featuring the German actor and horror-movie director Ulli Lommel.

Maya Lin is a New York–based artist whose body of work encompasses studio art, Earthworks, architectural projects, and memorials. In 2009 she installed Stormking Wavefield, a permanent, site-specific Earthwork for the Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, NY. More recently, she has begun work on a biomedical-research facility for Novartis in Cambridge, MA. On February 11, a survey of her work opens at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh.

Uri Aran is a New York–based artist working in video and mixed media. This past summer he exhibited at Art Basel Statements with Dublin-based gallery Mother’s Tankstation, and this month he opens his second New York solo show, “By Foot, by Car, by Bus,” at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise.

Born in Argentina, Amalia Pica is a London-based artist. Her work was recently on view in “ILLUMI_nations_” at the Fifty-Fourth Venice Biennale and has been selected for the New Museum’s “Generational” triennial, which opens in New York in 2012. She is currently engaged in a yearlong off-site project for London’s Chisenhale Gallery.

Artist, poet, singer, and songwriter Patti Smith lives and works in New York. Last year she published Just Kids, a memoir chronicling her friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe and their pursuit of art and music in New York City, which won the 2010 National Book Award for nonfiction. Currently drafting the screenplay adaptation of Just Kids and recording a new album with her band, Smith opens an exhibition of her photo-based works, “Camera Solo,” at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, on October 21. PHOTO: EDWARD MAPPLETHORPE, 2007.

Curator of the newly established Department of Olfactory Art at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, Chandler Burr is the author of the novel You or Someone Like You (Ecco, 2009) and the former scent critic for the New York Times.

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Leilah Weinraub is a film director currently based in New York, where she recently performed IDEAS: PRESENT THEM, a lecture series about independent inventors. Her feature-length documentary SHAKEDOWN is scheduled to premiere in 2012.

An artist based in London, Hilary Lloyd has recently had solo shows at Raven Row, London, and Le Consortium, Dijon, France. Last month, an exhibition of her new work opened at Artists Space in New York.

Berlin-based conductor and composer Christian von Borries is also a creator of site-specific projects. His work has been commissioned by Documenta 12, Kunstfest Weimar, the Lucerne Festival, and the Volksbühne Berlin; in 2002, he cofounded the record label Masse und Macht; and last year, he produced his first film, The Dubai in Me. This month, he will present Global Design, a multimedia orchestral work staged on a cargo ship in Hamburg’s Free Harbor.

Ashley Bickerton is an artist who lives and works in Bali. Previously based in New York, he showed at Sonnabend Gallery and various East Village spaces throughout the 1980s, and was included in the “Aperto” section of the 44th Venice Biennale (1990). In May, Bickerton will exhibit new paintings at Lehmann Maupin gallery in New York; a major monograph on his work is forthcoming this spring from Other Criteria.