Belief

Carolee Schneemann is a multidisciplinary artist. Her video, film, painting, photography, performance art, and installation works have been shown internationally.

Erik Ehn is a playwright and director, and head of playwriting at Brown University. He founded Arts in the One World theatre conference as a forum for exploring issues of human rights and social justice. Ehn has spent considerable time in Rwanda and Uganda investigating genocide and the process of reconciliation.

George Quasha, artist/poet/sound artist/writer, explores a three-term principle (axiality/liminality/configuration) in language, sculpture, drawing, video, sound, installation, and performance. Most recent of his seventeen books are Axial Stones: An Art of Precarious Balance, An Art of Limina: Gary Hill's Works and Writings, and Verbal Paradise (preverbs). He was a 2006 Guggenheim Fellow in video art whose art is: Speaking Portraits, recording more than 900 artists/poets/composers in eleven countries, appears online at http://www.quasha.com.

Vicky Shick has been involved in the New York City dance community performing, teaching, and choreographing since the late seventies. She has been honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship, a grant from The Foundation for Contemporary Art, and two Bessie Awards.

Alison Knowles's work encompasses performance, books, prints, sculpture, radio plays, and sound events. Since her early days as a Fluxus member she continues to perform nationwide and in Europe. In 2011, the Museum of Modern Art's Performance Exhibition Series featured the artist hosting her iconic performance The Identical Lunch for museum visitors.

Ishmael Houston-Jones is an artist, teacher, curator, and activist who lives and works in New York. http://www.ishmaelhj.com

Lee Breuer is a writer, director, lyricist, and founding member of Mabou Mines. A MacArthur Fellow, he has staged original works, classics, and musicals on numerous stages around the world, and written poems, plays, and essays. He adapted his recent Mabou Mines Dollhouse, touring internationally, into a film for television.

Carl Hancock Rux is an award-winning poet, playwright, novelist, essayist, and recording artist. He is the former Head of the MFA Writing for Performance Program at the California Institute of the Arts. Rux is the author of the novel Asphalt, the OBIE Award-winning play Talk and the Village Voice literary prize-winning collection of poetry, Pagan Operetta. He has also been a frequent guest performer in dance, and he originated the title role in the folk opera production of The Temptation of St. Anthony, directed by Robert Wilson, with book, libretto, and music by Bernice Johnson Reagon.

Lenora Champagne is a performer, writer, and director. December 2011 marks the thirtieth anniversary of her first performance. Her most recent play, Staying Afloat, was for two women and a polar bear adrift on a remaining ice floe sometime in the near future; her new solo, Memory's Storehouse, is more capacious and grounded. Champagne is professor of theatre and performance at Purchase College, SUNY. http://www.lenorachampagne.com

Mac Wellman is distinguished professor of playwriting at Brooklyn College. His play Left Glove has just been published by Solid Objects Press.

Richard Foreman has directed more than fifty of his own plays for his Ontological-Hysteric Theater since 1968. He has received nine Obie Awards and a MacArthur Fellowship. He has directed many operas and works by other playwrights at major theatres around the world.

Deborah Hay is a dancer, choreographer, teacher, and author whose career spans the Judson era to the present. As a solo performer and in collaboration with other dancers, she has created works for numerous individual artists and dance companies here and abroad. She recently received the United States Artists Friends Fellowship.

Judith Malina co-founded The Living Theatre (with Julian Beck) in 1947. She is currently directing The History of the World, which will open at the company's home in New York City in 2012.

Meredith Monk is a composer, performer, and director of new opera, music theatre works, and film. A pioneer in what is now called “extended vocal technique” and “interdisciplinary performance,” she is also a MacArthur Fellow and recipient of Guggenheim, Obie, and Bessie Awards.

Gregory Whitehead is a writer, sound poet, playwright, and radiomaker. Potato God Scarecrow was broadcast as part of Radiophonic Creation Day 2011.

Tere O'Connor is the choreographer and artistic director of his eponymously named dance company, working in New York City for the last twenty-five years. He is also professor of dance at the University of Illinois at Urbana and continues his choreographic research in both of these arenas.

Ruth Maleczech is an award-winning performer and director, and a co-founder/co-artistic director of the experimental theatre collaborative Mabou Mines, entering its fifth decade. Her next work, /Imagining The Imaginary Invalid/, concerns Molière's last work.

Barbara Hammer is a visual artist working primarily in film and video, installation, photography, and performance. A pioneer of queer cinema, she has made more than eighty moving image works in a career that spans forty years. A retrospective of her work was featured at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 2010, and another is forthcoming at the Tate Modern in London in 2012.

Yvonne Rainer is a choreographer, writer, and former filmmaker who has been involved in art-making since 1960. She currently teaches at UC Irvine in the studio art department.