Chiara Bottici (pronouns: she/her) is a philosopher and a writer. She is Associate Professor of Philosophy and co-Director of Gender Studies at The New School. She is the author, among others, of Imaginal Politics (Columbia University Press 2014), and A Philosophy of Political Myth (Cambridge University Press 2007). She also co-edited The Anarchist Turn (Pluto 2013) and Feminism, Capitalism and Critique (Palgrave 2018). Her short stories have appeared in Il Caffe illustrato and L’immaginazione, while her feminist experimental writing Per tre miti, forse quattro was published by Manni Editore in 2016 and is forthcoming in English with the title A feminist mythology (Bloomsbury 2021).

Composer Stefania de Kenessey has worked in a wide variety of genres, from chamber and orchestral to vocal and operatic. Her radical reimagining of Tom Wolfe’s classic novel “The Bonfire of the Vanities” (bonfiretheopera.com) created a leading role for an African- American female defense attorney and updated story all the way to the collapse of the New York Stock Exchange. Described as "caustically witty” by the Financial Times, it debuted at the Museo del Barrio in 2015. Her recent “Unorthodox”, a Klezmer-inspired electronic score about a young woman who leaves a strict Hasidic sect, was commissioned by the all-female Ariel Rivka Dance company. Modeled on the book by Deborah Feldman and the subsequent Emmy-nominated Netflix series, the video version premiered at the 2020 Gershman Jewish Film Festival in Philadelphia. De Kenessey’s music has been performed locally in venues ranging from Carnegie Hall to Joe’s Pub, and she is the founding president of the International Alliance for Women in Music. For further information, please visit her website at www.stefaniadekenessey.com

Andrea Geyer’s work ranges across text, photography, painting, sculpture, video and performance. It explores the complex politics of time and memory, with a particular focus on those who identify or at some point were identified as woman. Her work re-materializes the entanglement of presence and absence created by ideologically driven omissions in archives and histories through a process of performatively un-sensing time. Geyer’s work continuously seeks to create spaces that offer re-orientation(s) of the past towards the urgency of a present moment. Exhibitions include: Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; TATE Modern, Serpentine Gallery in London; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Generali Foundation, Secession in Vienna; Witte De White in Rotterdam; Sao Paulo Biennal and documenta12/ Kassel. Her monograph, Dance in a Future with All Present was published by Dancing Foxes and Pica in 2019. She lives and works in New York. www.andreageyer.info

Mary Kelly addresses questions of sexuality, identity and historical memory in the form of large-scale installations.  Her exhibitions include retrospectives at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester and Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw as well major surveys such as the Whitney Biennial, 1992 and 2004, the Biennale of Sydney, 1982 and 2008, and Documenta 12. Her publications include Post-Partum Document, (1983), Imaging Desire, (1996), Rereading Post-Partum Document, (1999), and Dialogue, (2011).  She is the recipient of a 2015 Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. Currently, she is Judge Widney Professor, Roski School of Art and Design, University of Southern California. 

Vanessa Place is an American writer and criminal appellate attorney. She has performed internationally, including at the Musée d’Orsay and the Modern Museum of Art (New York) and published numerous books of poetry and prose. Place has held teaching appointments at the Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense and the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Photo Credits: Jo Ann Toy