Swiss-born Ligia Dias is a designer based in Paris. From 2002 to 2005 she worked under Alber Elbaz for Lanvin, before launching her own jewelry line, Ligia Dias Colliers. She has since collaborated with 3.1 Phillip Lim, Comme des Garçons, and Swiss artist Mai-Thu Perret and was a recipient of the 2009 Association Nationale pour le Développement des Arts de la Mode (ANDAM) award for Best Young French Designer. A solo exhibition of her new work opens May 7 at Art Since the Summer of ’69 in New York.

Founded in 2007 as an import/export agency by German-born, New York–based artists Kerstin Brätsch and Adele Röder, DAS INSTITUT is an ongoing collaboration that creates hybrid forms of artistic production and reproduction through painting, design, and performance. In September 2009, the Swiss Institute presented the duo’s first solo exhibition in New York, and this past winter their installations were included in “Leopards in the Temple” at the SculptureCenter in New York and as part of Ei Arakawa’s “Non-Solo Show, Non-Group Show” at the Kunsthalle Zürich. Next month a solo exhibition of their

Los Angeles–based artist Margaret Honda most recently exhibited her sculptures and photographs in group shows at S1F Gallery, Los Angeles, and Estación Tijuana, Mexico, and as part of the 2008 California Biennial. Currently she is constructing a full-scale paper rendition of a house that is being published and distributed piece by piece in publications such as North Drive Press and the Drawing Center’s Drawing Papers.

A Berlin-based architect and artist, Jesko Fezer has collaborated with the architecture cooperative ifau to realize projects in Berlin, Munich, and Stuttgart, Germany; Utrecht, the Netherlands; Graz, Austria; London; and New York. He is cofounder and manager of Berlin’s Pro qm bookstore and coeditor of the journal An Architektur. He is also head of the research program Civic City: Design for the Post-Neoliberal City at the Institute for Design Research, Zurich University of the Arts.

Tirdad Zolghadr is a freelance writer and curator. He teaches at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, and is cocurating the 2010 Taipei Biennial with Hongjohn Lin. The working title of his second novel is Top Ten.

New Jerseyy is a gallery based in Basel and run by curator Daniel Baumann, artists Tobias Madison and Emanuel Rossetti, and graphic designer Dan Solbach. With support from Nordtangente-Kunsttangente, the gallery has recently staged projects such as Ei Arakawa’s “M.A.V.O.E. (killer COMMERCIAL)”; Ei Arakawa, Gela Patashuri, and Sergei Tcherepnin’s “Shindisi Autocenter”; and the group show “Bridges and Tunnels” at Hard Hat in Geneva.

British installation artist Ian Kiaer is currently participating in the 10th Biennale de Lyon. A solo exhibition of his work will open this month at the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Turin, Italy.

Joshua Kit Clayton is an artist, musician, and computer programmer based in San Francisco. He produces dance music for post-rave casualties both on his own and in the band Pigeon Funk, and is responsible for the development of Jitter, a video and 3-D-graphics programming language.

British artist Lindsay Seers works in a variety of media, including performance, photography, and large-scale video installation. Her recent solo exhibition, “It has to be this way,” opened in January at Matt’s Gallery, London, and her video Extramission 6 (Black Maria), 2009, was included in the fourth Tate Triennial at Tate Britain, London, this past spring.

Byron Kalet is founder of the Journal of Popular Noise, a Brooklyn-based audio magazine that will publish its Spring/Summer edition in June. Last month, the journal released Leisure Time, the debut EP from the Seattle-based post-rock duo Flexions.

Michael Almereyda’s films include Twister (1989), Nadja (1994), Hamlet (2000), and William Eggleston in the Real World (2005). His latest, Paradise, opened the 2009 Film Comment Selects series at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York this past February. A retrospective of his films will screen in June at Ballroom Marfa in Marfa, Texas.