Julia Alekseyeva teaches in the Department of English and the Cinema and Media Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on the interactions between global media and radical leftist politics, especially in 1960s Japan, France, and the former Soviet Union. She is the author-illustrator of the graphic memoir Soviet Daughter: A Graphic Revolution (2017), and she publishes academic work in both written and graphic essay formats.
Octavian Eşanu teaches at the American University of Beirut (AUB) and is the curator of AUB's Art Galleries. In the late 1990s he was the founding director of the Soros Center for Contemporary Art in Chişinău, Moldova. He is the author of: Transition in Post-Soviet Art: The Collective Actions Group before and after 1989 (2013); The Postsocialist Contemporary: The Institutionalization of Artistic Practices in Eastern Europe after 1989 (2021), and editor of: Art, Awakening and Modernity in the Middle East: The Arab Nude (2018); Contemporary Art and Capitalist Modernization: A Transregional Perspective (2020). Among his most recent curatorial projects are: One Hundred Years Closer to Communism (2017); Cut/Gash/Slash—Adachi Masao—A Militant Theory of Landscape (2019).
Fokus Grupa has been active as an artist collective since 2012. In its work, the group tries to establish a critical framework for reading the artistic, economic, and political surroundings in which it operates. It borrows and learns from design, architecture, curatorship, and writing, while often expanding its working team with collaborators from other fields.
Angela Harutyunyan is an art historian and curator. She teaches in and currently chairs the Department of Fine Arts and Art History at the American University of Beirut. Her research interests include theories of art historiography, late Soviet and post-Soviet art, art and labor, and critical theory. She is a founding member of the Ashot Johannissyan Institute for research in the humanities in Yerevan. Her book The Political Aesthetics of the Armenian Avant-Garde: The Journey of the “Painterly Real” was published in 2017.
Jaleh Mansoor teaches art history at the University of British Columbia (UBC). Her current project, Universal Prostitution: A Counter-History of Abstraction Crossing Modernism, 1888–2008, is forthcoming from Duke University Press. Mansoor's first monograph, Marshall Plan Modernism: Italian Postwar Abstraction and the Beginnings of Autonomia, was published in 2016, and she also co-edited an anthology of essays addressing Jacques Rancière's articulations of politics and aesthetics, entitled Communities of Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics (2010).
W. J. T. Mitchell teaches literature, visual arts, and cinema at the University of Chicago, and is Senior Editor of Critical Inquiry. He is the author of numerous books on images, visual culture, and media, including Iconology (1986), Landscape and Power (1994), Picture Theory (1995), What Do Pictures Want? (2005), Cloning Terror (2011), Seeing Through Race (2012), Image Science (2012), and Mental Traveler (2020). He is currently finishing a new book, Seeing Through Madness.
Franz Prichard teaches in the Department of East Asian Studies at Princeton University. His work explores the literature, visual media, and critical thought of contemporary Japan. He is the author of Residual Futures: The Urban Ecologies of Literary and Visual Media of 1960s and 1970s Japan (2019).