Dr. Ama Josephine Budge Johnstone is a British-Ghanaian speculative writer, artist, scholar and pleasure activist. Her praxis navigates that which she has termed Intimate Ecologies to explore Blackness, erotics and the more-than-human in queer and speculative ways toward interspecies futures. Her sculptural, video, performance and installation work has been commissioned and installed internationally including in London, Berlin, Utrecht, Madrid and New York. Ama is a Lecturer in Culture, Criticism and Curation at Central Saint Martins, an MFA thesis supervisor at the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam, and a Research Associate with VIAD, University of Johannesburg. She is currently working on her first novel, a speculative meditation on sentient trees, queer erotics and the moments where decolonisation ends and futuring begins. Photo: Zachary Maxwell Stertz.

Heather Davis is Director and Associate Professor of Culture and Media at The New School. An interdisciplinary scholar working in environmental humanities and visual culture, she is interested in how the saturation of fossil fuels has shaped contemporary culture. Her most recent book, Plastic Matter (Duke University Press, 2022), argues that plastic has transformed not only our environments and bodies, but our expectations of matter itself. She is a member of the Synthetic Collective, an interdisciplinary team of scientists, humanities scholars, and artists who investigate and make visible plastic pollution in the Great Lakes.