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.

Susan Cianciolo is an artist and fashion designer who lives and works in New York. Since the early 1990s she has been collaborating with friends and other artists on projects such as her Run clothing label (1995–2001), Run Restaurant at New York’s former Alleged Gallery, and The Lilac Spaceship Fanzine. This month during New York Fashion Week, Cianciolo will launch her new ready-to-wear line, SC3, as well as a special couture collection featuring textile collaborations with Hinaya and Akira Minagawa.

Amy Yao is an artist based in New York and Phoenix and a former member of the ’90s teen punk band Emilys Sassy Lime (ESL). Included in MoMA PS1’s “Greater New York” 2010, she staged a solo show in December at New Jerseyy in Basel and is currently working on projects for JF+Sons and New York’s Audio Visual Arts that will take place this spring.

Christian Holstad is an artist based in New York. He is currently preparing a body of work made from melted plastic, which will be presented in 2011 at an as-yet-undetermined location in Manhattan.

Ed Halter, one of the founders and directors of Light Industry in Brooklyn, teaches in the Department of Film and Electronic Arts at Bard College, in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, and has recently organized film programs for Artists Space in SoHo and for MoMA PS1’s quinquennial survey “Greater New York,” which remains on view through October 18. His writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Afterall, The Believer, Rhizome, and the Village Voice, and he is currently working on a critical history of contemporary experimental cinema, supported by a Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation

Poet, essayist, and cultural critic Lewis Hyde is a MacArthur Fellow; the Thomas Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio; a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society in Cambridge, Massachusetts; and the author of The Gift (Random House, 1983), a defense of the noncommercial portion of artistic practice. His new book on the ownership of art and ideas, Common as Air, will be published in August by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.