Özge Serin received her doctorate in Anthropology from Columbia University and is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Politics and Anthropology at Whitman College. Her research and writing are principally concerned with formations of violence, carceral regimes, and corporeal forms of resistance with a particular focus on the practice of hunger striking, its temporal structure, modes of strategic functioning, communicative force, and ethical vicissitudes. She has published articles and chapters in boundary 2, Kampfplatz, and Re-enactment Strategies in Contemporary Arts and Theory. Her book manuscript, Writing of Death: Ethics and Politics of the Death Fast in Turkey, explores the divide between the incompatibly distinct and yet inextricably linked space-times of death and politics, and poses the question of the mediality of the hunger strike

Brian Karl has worked as a curator, producer and director at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), Harvestworks Media Arts, Headlands Center for the Arts, Art­in­General, Creative Time, and the Kitchen, along with serving as editor for Tellus, the Audio Art Magazine. His art criticism has been published in Artforum, Art Practical, Daily Serving, Hyperallergic and Yishu, among others. He has also produced multiple experimental documentaries screened at the Jewish Museum, the Whitney Biennial, and the New York and San Francisco Film Festivals, among other venues. He has taught courses widely in art, music, and cultural anthropology, including at the New School, Fordham University, Colby College, the University of Michigan, the California College of the Arts and San Francisco Art Institute.

Billy Dufala is a Philadelphia-based artist engaged in a variety of creative disciplines, including sculpture, performance, digital media, and drawing. He is co-¬founder of the artist collective Traction Company, and of RAIR (Recycled Artist in Residence), an arts organization operating onsite at Revolution Recovery, a recycling company in Northeast Philadelphia.

Dufala is best known for his ongoing collaborative work with his brother Steven; together they are known as the Dufala Brothers. The duo's work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the West Collection; Delaware Center for Contemporary Arts; Space 1026; Fleisher/Ollman, and Fleisher Art Memorial; as well as in group exhibitions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; the Galleries at Moore College of Art and Design, and others.

​In 2009, the Dufala Brothers were awarded the West Grand Prize, an international juried prize in its inaugural year. In 2015, RAIR received Center support to present Live at the Dump, an interactive, site-specific program that utilized a series of films, performances, and discussions to increase public awareness of the waste stream and the role of art in shaping social and environmental consciousness.

Ken Lum was born in Vancouver, Canada but presently resides in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania where he is the Marilyn Jordan Taylor Presidential Professor and chair of the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design.

From 2000 to 2006 Ken Lum was head of the graduate program in studio art at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, where he taught from 1990 until 2006. Lum joined the faculty of Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, in 2005 and worked there until 2007. He has been an invited professor at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, the Akademie der Bildenden Kunst, Munich, California College of the Arts, San Francisco, and the China Art Academy, Hangzhou.

Lum is co-founder and founding editor of Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art. He has published extensively; and recently completed an artists’ book project with philosopher Hubert Damisch that was launched with Three Star Press, Paris.

Lum was Project Manager for Okwui Enwezor’s The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa 1945 – 1994 (2001). He was also co-curator of the 7th Sharjah Biennial (2005), and Shanghai Modern: 1919 – 1945 (2005).