The Scholastic Art & Writing Awards

Introduction

Artists, writers, curators, critics, educators and professionals from the nation's creative industriesÑsome of whom were recognized through The Awards as teenagersÑparticipated on the selection panels for The Scholastic Art & Writing Awards of 2008. They selected works that best exemplify originality, technical proficiency, and the emergence of an authentic voice and vision.

Art Jurors (by category):

American Visions

Art Portfolio Silver Award

Art Portfolio Gold Award

Ceramics/Glass

Design

Drawing

Group 1: Grades 7-9

Mixed Media and Printmaking

Painting

Photography and Digital Imagery

Photography Portfolio

Sculpture

Video, Film and Animation, and Computer Art

Writing Jurors (by category):

American Voices Awards

Dramatic Script

General Writing Portfolio

Humor

Journalism

Nonfiction Portfolio

Poetry

Personal Essay/Memoir

Science Fiction/Fantasy

Short Short Story

Short Story

Region-at-Large Art Jurors

Art Portfolio

Drawing and Group 1

Photography Portfolio, Digital Imagery

Video, Film and Animation, Computer Art

Painting and Printmaking

Ceramics/Glass, Sculpture, Design and Mixed Media

American Visions

Willow Hai Chang, holds undergraduate and master's degrees in History and Archaeology from Nanjing University and is the director of China Institute Gallery/China Institute in America. Since 1989, Ms. Chang has contributed to, supervised, and produced more than forty exhibitions at China Institute Gallery, including "Power and Virtue: The Horse in Chinese Art," "The Resonance of the Qin in East Asian Art," "The Chinese Painter as Poet," "Passion for the Mountains: Seventeenth Century Landscape Paintings from the Nanjing Museum. Ms. Chang has lectured extensively on Chinese art and culture at American museums and universities including The American Folk Museum, The Naples Museum of Art, The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and The University of Pennsylvania.

Ira Goldberg's work has been shown in galleries, exhibited in juried shows, and included in numerous private collections across the United States since the mid-1980s.29-year commitment to the Art Students League of New York began in 1979 when he became a student of the renowned anatomist and lecturer Robert Beverly Hale. In 1982, he joined the League staff as an administrator and continued his art studies with painting instructors David Leffel, Knox Martin, and Frank O'Cain. For the next fourteen years, he worked closely with Executive Director Rosina Florio, and served as Administrative Manager beginning in 1996. In August of 2001, he was appointed Executive Director. Goldberg's years with the League as a student and an administrator, his deep rapport with the artists who make up the League's world-renowned faculty and his in-depth knowledge of the art world have made him uniquely prepared to serve as a guardian of the League's rich history and a leader with a clear vision of the League's future.

Grace C. Stanislaus has over twenty years of experience as an arts administrator working with nonprofit organizations. She was formally the Executive Director of the Museum for African Art, New York, and director of the Bronx Museum of the Arts and curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem. A graduate of Columbia University with a Masters degree in Art History, Ms. Stanislaus is currently the Executive Director of the Romare Bearden Foundation, a New York based nonprofit organization that preserves, perpetuates and makes publicly accessible the legacy of the artist through its programs. Prior to taking the position at the Foundation, she was Senior Vice President of the August Wilson Cultural Center in Pittsburgh.

Kathleen Goncharov currently serves as the Director of the Brodsky Center for Innovative Editions, at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. She has a long curatorial career and was appointed U.S. Commissioner to the 50th Venice Biennale where she organized an exhibition by Fred Wilson. She was Adjunct Curator of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Public Art Curator at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Curator of the Collection at The New School, and Director of Exhibitions at Creative Time.

Rudy Shepherd's work explores how family, society, and popular culture form and influence personal (and collective) identity, as he says so himself: "As a person who has lived within the confines of two cultures, the African- American culture of my birth, and the white middle-class society in which I grew up, I'm interested in dissecting the structures and assumptions of both, and examining how those cultures manifest themselves in my own life, in the person I've become. I am fascinated by facades, whether they're the facades of houses, or the clothes in which we dress (to both reveal and conceal) ourselves every day: how we express who we are to other people, and how people read the codes sent out by others around them."

Darryl Zudeck is a realist painter with a modern sensibility. Contemporary life is his subject matter and his work has the look of the present day - the urban, the harder edged. Yet there is something in his paintings, especially his portraits that is not quite consonant with this view. One can glimpse in his use of light or his positioning of a face, faint resonances with the Dutch and Flemish Masters. These are merely suggestive, but lend authority to the artist's vision, linking present to past. The people occupying his portraits are usually young and artistic, characters he has known or discovered on the streets of New York, whose distinctive personae have captured his interest.

Robert Cottingham was born in Brooklyn, NY in 1935 and received his B.F.A. from Pratt Institute. He is a painter best-known for his photo-realistic depiction of signs, storefront marquees, railroad boxcars, letter forms, and recently, cameras and typewriters. Cottingham held his first solo show in New York City at O.K. Harris Gallery in 1971, and has also exhibited in many seminal group shows throughout the United States, France and Germany. In 1993, Cottingham began his ambitious project, An American Alphabet, completing twenty-six canvases in three years, as well as a corresponding series of watercolors and drawings. Another retrospective of Cottingham's print media work took place in 1998 at what is now known as The Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. Recently, Cottingham participated in a Lab Grant residency at Dieu Donne Papermill, New York, NY and is represented by Forum Gallery, New York, NY.

Don Gummer was born in Louisville, Kentucky and raised in Indiana. He studied at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and later attended the Yale University School of Fine Arts where he earned his BFA and his MFA. Since the late 1980's the well-known New York sculptor has been concerned with construction by the stacking of vertical and horizontal planes. He combines materials such as cast bronze, aluminum, stainless steel, and stained glass in his works, which have gained national recognition and are celebrated publicly as well as in private collections. Since 1973, Gummer has been included in numerous group shows including exhibitions hosted by the Aldritch Museum of Contemporary Art, The National Arts Club, and Cranbrook Academy.

Jill Gansman Kraus is a life trustee of Carnegie Mellon, dedicated to advancing the role of contemporary art in the life and environment of the university. She is a board member of World Studio Foundation that gives awards and scholarships to at-risk youth involved in the arts, and is she also a trustee at the New Museum of Contemporary Art.

D. Dominick Lombardi's paintings, drawings, sculptures and screen prints are shown by Kasia Kay Art Projects in Chicago, Illinois, Ada Gallery in Richmond, Virginia, and Van Brunt Gallery in Beacon, New York. Feature articles and reviews of his art have been have appeared in ARTnews, The New York Times, The Greenwich Times, Art New England, ZING magazine, THE NEW YORK GAHO, Poetry and Thought, ANIMAL and ANIMALNEWYORK.com, artnet, NYARTS magazine, DART, culturecatch.com and BLURRED. As a curator, Lombardi has worked with numerous artists on such shows as "Bom: How art can disrupt, reorient or destroy," "Art Noir," "Fear is a Four Letter Word," "The Reality Show" ,"Over the Top - Under the Rug," "FUNKADELICIDE," "The Impact of War," "The Waking Dream," "Lights - Sound - Action!," "The Tradition of Icons," and "Champions of Modernism: Non- Objective Art of the 1930s & 40s and Its Legacy."

Based in New York City, Joan Bankemper holds a B.F.A. from the Kansas City Art Institute and an M.F.A. from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including commissions at the New Museum for Contemporary Art, New York; Creative Time's Art in the Anchorage, New York; Maria Cilena Galeria, Milan, Italy; and White Columns, New York. Bankemper is known for her community-based projects which involve planting and growing gardens, blurring the boundaries between nature and art. Bankemper's site-specific, time-based p1997 the artist rebuilt a 12th Century monastic garden in Palermo, Italy. jects bring people together for a common goal, involving planning, cooperation, nurturing, maintenance, reflection, and pride. Combining formal devices and social intentions, Bankemper's garden projects have a strong visual impact, as well as medicinal functions of the plants she chooses to grow.

Jennifer McGregor is the Director of Arts & Senior Curator at Wave Hill, 28-acre public garden and cultural center in the Bronx, presenting exhibitions in the galleries and on the grounds that engage the public in a dialogue with nature, culture and site. This year's season featured a series of exhibitions that explored 19-century writing through the lens of contemporary art, looking at Emily Dickinson, Henry David Thoreau, Edgar Allan Poe and Mark Twain. She was the first Director of the New York City Percent for Art Program from 1983-1990, where she implemented the program guidelines and supervised sixty public art projects. In 1990, she founded McGregor Consulting to work nationally on public art commissions, exhibitions, and art master planning projects. Most recently she managed the design selection process for New York City's Flight 587 Memorial that was dedicated in November 2006 in the Rockaways. She lectures frequently on contemporary art and serves onselection panels and juries.

A native of Poughkeepsie, Arnold Zimmerman has held an interesting and unique position among artists that use clay as their medium. His work has set a standard for ambition and raw power. Zimmerman's work is included in many major and private collections, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Nacional Museu do Azulejo in Portugal. He has won three NEA Fellowships and two NYFA Fellowships. He is currently exhibiting at the John Elder Gallery in New York City.

Meredith Bostwick graduated from Princeton University with a Masters in Architecture in 2003 and was immediately selected for the position of Architectural Assistant to J. Robert Hillier, FAIA, the founder of Hillier Architecture (now RMJM Hillier). As a Designer and Associate at RMJM, now one of the top 10 architecture firms in the world, Meredith has designed and a variety of built works and projects including recent renovations for New York University's School of Dentistry, and the designs for 101 Central Park North. More recent projects include programming, planning, and design for the Award winning Duke University Graduate Medical School in Singapore, University of Puerto Rico's Molecular Science Complex, Yong Loo Lin Medical School in Singapore, and a China Research and Development Center in Shanghai, China. In collaboration with Pablo Lorenzo Eiroa, she has been published with the New York Times Magazine, "Thinking Big: A Plan for Ground Zero and Beyond," curated by Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp.

Louise Fili Ltd, founded in 1989, specializes in logo, package, restaurant, type, book and book jacket design. A senior designer for Herb Lubalin from 1976-1978, Louise was art director for Pantheon Books from 1978-1989, where she designed over 2000 book jackets. She has received awards from every major design competition, including Gold and Silver medals from the Society of Illustrators and the New York Art Directors Club, the Premio Grafico from the Bologna Book Fair, and three James Beard award nominations. Fili has taught and lectured on design and typography and her work is in the permanent collection of the Library of Congress, the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, and the Biliotheque Nationale. She was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts design grant to study the work of W.A. Dwiggins and is co-author of Italian Art Deco, Dutch Moderne, British Modern, Deco Type, German Modern, Design Connoisseur, Deco Espa–a, Typology and Euro Deco. Fili was recently inducted into the Art Directors Hall of Fame.

Anne Van Ingen holds a BA from Middlebury College and an MS in Historic Preservation from Columbia University and has been the Director of the Architecture, Planning and Design Program and Capital Projects at the New York State Council on the Arts since 1986. From 2000 to 2002 she was an Assistant Adjunct Professor in the School of Architecture at RPI in Troy, NY. Other board service has included being a Director of Preservation Action in Washington, DC, trustee of Garrison Forest School in Maryland, and a member of the Metropolitan Transit Authority's Arts Advisory Board. In the private sector, she is Vice President of the Board of the Good Hope Plantation in Ridgeland, South Carolina and a Director of Charles Pratt and Co., LLC, a financial services company in New York City. Ms. Van Ingen. She is an Honorary Member of the New York State Chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

Jamal Yaseem Igle has worked his way up the ranks from Intern at D.C. Comics to a successful penciling career. He is currently an Exclusive Artist for DC Comics, but Jamal has been editor, art director and animation storyboard artist for numerous companies such as Sony Animation and Scholastic Inc. He is the Co- creator of the comic book series VENTURE, along with writer Jay Faerber, published by Image Comics. Jamal's drawings have appeared in books such as Countdown: The Search for Ray Palmer: Crime Society, Nightwing, Firestorm, and The Nuclear Man. Jamal is an active volunteer with the Museum of Comic and Cartoon art, as well as a guest lecturer on the subject of comics and animation. He teaches a class in Comics and Sequential art at the Art Students league of New York.

Basing her work on both the microscopic and macroscopic worlds of science, biology, physics and cosmology, Karen Margolis directly relates her line drawings to her sculptures, while sometimes interweaving the two in single works. Margolis employs line in various all-over compositions that trace out worlds and spatial dimensions unseen to our own eyes. Even though defined by paper edges, her line renderings become expansive and far reaching, as they seem to form an intuitive underlying, unbreakable structure that connects all things.

Eung Ho Park was born in Woonchun, South Korea and he received his BFA from Pratt Institute. Eung Ho Park has exhibited at Exit Art, the Drawing Center in New York City, Sculpture Center, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Queens Museum of Art, the Long Island University, DM Contemporary, Maxwell Davidson Gallery, Sabina Lee Gallery in Los Angeles, and Wake Forest University in South Carolina. Park has created a permanent sculpture for PS 270 in Queens, New York. His work had been reviewed in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Baltimore Sun, Art on Paper, The Boston Globe, and other publications. He lives in Jackson Heights, Queens and maintains a studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Antonio Sergio Bessa is acting Director of Curatorial and Education Programs at The Bronx Museum of Art, New York. A writer, translator and poetry scholar, his books include Novas--Selected Writings of Haroldo de Campos, and …yvind Fahlstršm--The Art of Writing (forthcoming), both through Northwestern University Press. His Portuguese translation of Susan Howe's Pierce-Arrow will be published in S‹o Paulo this spring by Lumme Editor.

Nancy Friedemann Sanchez was born and raised in Colombia, but for the past sixteen years has lived and worked between New York and Bogota. In her drawings and paintings she manipulates symbols concerning ideas about femininity and the role of women in art history. Among the many of her interests conveyed in her work are Spanish colonial art and Minimalism.

Wendy Woon is the Edward John Noble Foundation Deputy Director for Education at MoMA. She oversees all educational departments at MoMA including Educational Resources, Adult and Academic Programs, Community and Access Programs and School and Family Programs. Ms. Woon holds a Masters of Fine Arts from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. She acted as part-time faculty and thesis advisor at SAIC in both the Masters of Art in Art Education and Museum Administration Program. In addition to having experience as an animator, filmmaker, a museum and curriculum consultant and curator, she participated as an Exchange Partner through International Partners Among Museums at the Nagoya City Art Museum in Nagoya, Japan. Ms. Woon was recently named a New York City Scholar through the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University for 2007-2008.

Ming Fay was born in Shanghai, China. He has been making art and teaching in the New York area since 1975 and has mounted thirty-one solo exhibitions over that period. Newly installed public art commissions include the Delancey Street MTA mosaic tile mural, Seattle Courthouse outdoor sculpture, Lluberas Park outdoor sculpture in Yauco, Puerto Rico, and the Portland Oregon Convention Center.

Tamiko Kawata begins with things that are under-recognized, and almost invisible, but of great usefulness. Through her sculptures and installations she reveals the beauty of accumulated objects, and by doing so, raises awareness of waste and the neglect of the environment's health as well as highlights the differences between American and Japanese culture. Tamiko Kawata's work was exhibited this winter at the Williamsburg Art & Historical Center. She has had solo exhibitions at Hudson Guild Gallery II, Florence Lynch Gallery, and an outdoor exhibition of large-scale sculptures at the LongHouse Reserve in East Hampton, NY. She has had residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Edward Albee Art Center and the Millay Colony for the Arts.

Bill Schuck lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He is a multimedia artist who manipulates materials to encourage natural transformation and change. By exploring systems of growth and regeneration Schuck's work speaks about the world of flux and uncertainty which our lives inhabit. Some of his recent exhibitions include "What is a Line?" at the Yale University Art Gallery, "Site Specifics" at the Islip Art Museum and "Landslide" at Smack Mellon Gallery. He received a Fulbright Fellowship to Slovenia in 2005 and was a resident at The MacDowell Colony, Blue Mountain Colony inBlue Mountain, NY and Straumur Art Commune, in Reykjavik, Iceland.

Dusica Kirjakovic has served the Lower East Side Printshop, a 40-year-old non-profit printmaking center in New York City, since 1993. Before moving to New York City in 1991, she received her BFA and MFA in printmaking from Belgrade University in former Yugoslavia. Kirjakovic is a member of Art Table and one of the founding members of the New York State Artist Workspace Consortium. She has served on numerous panels, including the New York State Council on the Arts, NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, Few York Foundation for the Arts, and many others.

Janice Oresman, an art advisor and independent curator, lives in New York City. She received her BA in art history from Smith College and an MA from the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University, where she has completed all but her dissertation for a PhD. For over thirty years she has collected art on behalf of corporations such as Hess, Champion Paper, Chemical Bank, and the law firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett. She is a board member of The Alliance for Young Artists and Writers, President of the Board of the Smithsonian Archives of American art, Chairman of the Board of the International Print Center New York (IPCNY,) and a member of the Associates of Prints and Illustrated Books at MoMA. She has curated many exhibitions through the years, most recently HOT OFF THE PRESS-Prints of 2006 from New York Printshops for the Grolier Club in New York.

Mark Sheinkman was born in New York City in 1963 and received his BA from Princeton University. His works can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven. He has an extensive national and international exhibition background, including recent solo exhibitions at the osp Gallery in Boston and Fruehsorge Gallery in Berlin.

Edgar Jerins was born in Lincoln, Nebraska in 1958. By the age of 18, Edgar had received a full scholarship from the Scholastic Art Awards to attend the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Edgar won numerous awards before graduating from the Academy in 1980, the year he was awarded the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant, an international grant for realist artists. Jerins was then able to move to Los Angeles, where he began his portrait career. After his stay in California he returned to the east coast and continued to participate in group shows where he won many awards, including the Nathaniel Burwash Artist Award in Boston (1997), the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Grant (2002) and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2004). Since 1981 Jerins has exhibited widely throughout the United States and abroad, including exhibitions at the Latvian Foreign Museum in Riga, Latvia, the Arkansas Art Center in Little Rock (2001), the Frye Art Museum in Seattle (2002), the Arnot Art Museum in Elmira, N.Y. (2003) and Moravian College in Bethlehem, PA (2004).

Angela Mirro studied art at Parsons School of Design. She developed a career as a textile designer, while focusing on botanical watercolor paintings of orchids for seventeen years. Her textile clients include Polo Ralph Lauren and Lee Jofa Inc. She has also painted and exhibited watercolor landscapes. Her work is contained in many private collections and is included in The Shirley Sherwood Collection, London, England, The Brooklyn Botanic Garden Florilegium Society, Brooklyn, NY, The Atlanta Botanic Garden, Atlanta Georgia and that of The American Orchid Society's Headquarters in Delray Beach, Florida.

John L. Moore's work has been shown in more than two dozen solo exhibitions and more than a score of group shows. Among the numerous private, public and corporate collections throughout the U.S. and Canada his work is in are the New York Public Library, the Brooklyn Museum, the Hahn Loeser & Parks corporate collection in Cleveland, and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Art in Alabama. Moore has served three years in the Army's elite 101st Airborne Division, taught painting and drawing at Cuyahoga Community College, worked as an assistant curator and instructor in the education department of the Cleveland Museum of Art, held positions as adjunct professor at Queens College, City University of New York, and Parsons School of Design. From 1994 to 2004 he was senior visiting artist at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York, and was also an artist in residence at the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cleveland Institute of Art and the Rhode Island School of Design.

Jules Allen is an award-winning photographer who was born in San Francisco. Professor Allen has been a committed and innovative CUNY professor of art and photography for two decades. Allen's work expresses the essential truth that a culture's power is clearest when presented on its own terms. Mr Allen's ground-breaking books, Hats and Hat Nots and Black Bodies, as well as the as-yet-unpublished series Fulton Street Mall, Rhythmatism, American Light and Marching Bands, have shed new light on our society. His photographs are in museums and private collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Brooklyn Museum, the Smithsonian, the National Gallery, the Schomburg Center for Culture & Research and others.

Turning a lens on her kin, Andrea Stern photographs the visually rich and psychologically intriguing world of the wealthy New York Jewish families. She chronicles momentous family gatheringsÑweddings, bar mitzvahs, funerals - as well as everyday events, often zeroing in on the tension that arises as individuals attempt to carve out separate identities in the midst of family entanglements. Her photographs have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Art in America, and The Village Voice, in addition to other publications. Her book, Inheritance, is in stores now.

Born in Chile and raised in Argentina, photographer Mart’n Weber currently resides in Brooklyn, NY. He studied at the University of Buenos Aires and the International Center for Photography in NYC. He received a 2005 No Strings Foundation Grant, a 2004 Prince Claus Grant. Weber, a Guggenheim fellowship recipient in 1998 has also been awarded two Hasselblad Foundation grants in 1999 and 2001 grants. His work has been exhibited in internationally, and at The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and The International Center of Photography in NY. He also participated in PhotoEspana 2001 and in 2002 exhibited in The Project Gallery Los Angeles and in 2003 at The Photographers Gallery in London. Lightwork published a selection of his work from A Map of Latin American Dreams in Contact Sheet issue #125.

Since 1973, Helen Evans Ramsaran has lived and worked in New York City, where her sculptures have been exhibited in a number of one-woman shows as well as group shows, internationally, throughout the United States and New York City. Recent exhibitions have been held at the University of Kansas, The African American Art Museum in San Francisco, The Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington, Indiana State University, Parsons Galleries, The Phillips Museum of Art, Franklin Marshall College, the Cultural Institute of New York, and Gallery Brocken in Tokyo.

Born in 1952, John Newman came of age during an era when Minimalism held sway. "When I was a student," he says, "it was all about being essential and exclusive and refined and simple in a formal sense." Newman's development as a sculptor reverses that notion, embracing a process that is additive rather than subtractive. His work opens up a space, as writer Raphael Rubinstein described it, "in which unexpected conjunctions are the rule, in which theory bows to intuition and humor, and associative imagery runs riot." Newman's expanding repertoire of materials and techniques has been shaped in part by his extensive travels in India, China, Japan, and Africa and the local craftspeople he encountered there. Solo exhibitions of John Newman's works number over 40 and his work has been shown in hundreds of group national and international group shows and the list of articles regarding his drawing and sculpture multiplies each year.

Dona Warner is a sculptor and former freelance sculpture consultant. She is the executive director of Dieu Donne, a non-profit artist workspace located in New York City, dedicated to the creation, promotion and preservation of contemporary art utilizing the hand papermaking process. In fulfillment of that mission Dieu Donne partners with the artistic community. Dona has been the Executive Director since 2003 and directs the organization and all studio programs and art publishing programs. Serves as Assistant Secretary of Dieu Donne.

Henriette Huldisch is Assistant Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, a position she has held since 2004. She was a co-curator of Full House: Views of the Whitney's Collection at 75, and previously curated the a retrospective of films by Robert Beavers and the exhibition The Object in Film, Video , and Slide Installation, presenting the work of Sol LeWitt, Jonathan Monk, Michael Snow, and Rirkrit Tiravanija, among others, in 2004. Since joining the Museum as curatorial coordinator in 2001 she has worked on numerous exhibitions including Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art 1964-77, several Biennials, Ana Mendieta, Jack Goldstein, Lorna Simpson, and Lothar Baumgarten. Huldisch oversaw the installation of Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era. Until July 2004, she was Chair of the Board of Directors of Ocularis, a non-profit media arts venue committed to the exhibition of video art, avant-garde film, and repertory cinema in Brooklyn, New York.

Simon Leung, Associate Professor (BA magna cum laude 1987, University of California, Los Angeles; Whitney Program 1988-89) and Affiliate Faculty in Asian American Studies, teaches critical theory, art history, and new genres. His interests lie in the intersection between ethics/aesthetics, critical theory, politics of sexuality and post-coloniality, public space, and theories of modernism and postmodernism. He is also Affiliate Faculty in Asian American Studies, the Center in Law, Society and Culture, and the Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies.

Broadcast designer/artist Sharon Haskell has decades of experience creating visual effects, animation, and titles for clients such as Saturday Night Live.

Wendy Richmond's photographs, prints and installations have been exhibited in the United States, Italy and Asia, and her collaborative works have been performed and distributed throughout North America and Europe. Richmond is the recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation residency in Bellagio, Italy, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a LEF Foundation grant, and numerous art and design awards. She a contributing editor at Communication Arts magazine; her column Design Culture began in 1983. She is the author of Design & Technology: Erasing the Boundaries and Overneath, a collaboration of photography and dance. She has taught at MIT, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, ICP and Harvard University.

Jeff L. Rosenheim is curator of photography at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His selected exhibitions include: New Orleans after the Flood: Photographs by Robert Polidori; Sight Unseen: Selections from the Gilman Collection; Diane Arbus Revelations; Few Are Chosen: Street Photography and the Book, 1936-1966; Old Faces and Places: American Photographs, 1845-1870; Thomas Eakins; New York, New York: Photographs from the Collection; and Along the Nile: Early Photographs of Egypt; Art and the Empire City: New York, 1825-1861.

Dread Scott first received national attention in 1989 when his art became the center of controversy over its use of the American flag: George Bush, Sr. declared his artwork "disgraceful" and the entire US Senate passed legislation to "protect the flag." His work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and at the DeBeyerd Center for Contemporary Art in the Netherlands. He has been awarded a Mid-Atlantic\NEA Regional Fellowship in Photography, New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships in Sculpture (2001) and in Performance Art/Multidisciplinary Art (2005) and a Creative Capital grant. His work is in the collection of the Whitney Museum, The New Museum of Contemporary Art and the Arkon Art Museum. He works in a range of media including installation, photography, screen printing, video and performance.

Lisa Grunwald is the author of the novels Whatever Makes You Happy, New Year's Eve, The Theory of Everything, and Summer. Along with her husband, BusinessWeek editor-in-chief Stephen J. Adler, she edited the anthologies Letters of the Century and Women's Letters. Grunwald is a former contributing editor of Life and former features editor of Esquire. She and her husband live in New York City with their son and daughter. She is currently working on a new novel.

Kate E. Ryan's plays have been produced and developed by New York theater companies including 13P, The Flea, Clubbed Thumb, Soho Rep, and Target Margin. She is a member of the OBIE Award-winning playwrights collective 13P and is former Co-Curator of the OBIE Award-winning performance series Little Theatre at Tonic. She has worked with young writers through The 52nd Street Project, LEAP, and Young Playwrights Inc., and has co-led workshops at The Flea Theater (through its Pataphysics playwriting workshops program) and the Lincoln Center Theater Director's Lab. She has served on Pataphysics' administrative/selection committee for five years. She received her MFA from Brooklyn College, where she has taught undergraduate creative writing.

Danielle Bennett is from Victoria, BC, where she studied English literature at Camosun College. She co-wrote Havemercy, a fantasy novel to be published by Bantam Dell in June of 2008, between shifts at Starbucks. Her second published fantasy manuscript, also co-written with Jaida Jones, will be out from Bantam Dell in summer of 2009.

Stephanie Cabot spent nine years at the William Morris Agency in London, the last five as Managing Director, where she represented many international bestselling and prize-winning authors. She moved back to the States in 2005, joined the Gernert Company, and is now selectively adding American writers to her list. In addition to working with her own clients, she also draws on her international publishing experience as the agency's Foreign Rights Director. She spends her weekends on a family dairy farm with her husband and four children.

Jesse Cameron Alick is poet, playwright, actor and Zen Master. Born and raised Buddhist high in the mountains of Montana, he began writing poetry at the age of six and short plays at the age of fourteen. Jesse works as the Artistic Director for Subjective Theatre, Associate Producer for Smokin' Word Productions and as Assistant to the Artistic Director at the Public Theater. He has had articles and poetry published by A&U, POZ, The Errorist and in an anthology by Random House called "The Full Spectrum." Jesse was commissioned to write work for Streetlight Productions and Freedom Train Productions and is a resident playwright with Ensemble Studio Theater's Youngblood program. His work has been heard at Cherry Lane Theater (Downtown Urban Theater Festival), Asian American Writers Workshop (co-produced by New York Theater Workshop), Collective Unconscious, Blue Heron, Bowery Poetry Club, The Poetry CafŽ (UK) and Hip Heaven (UK).

A native of Fort Wayne, Indiana, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Charlie Savage is a Washington correspondent for the Boston Globe. He covers national legal affairs with a focus on issues related to counterterrorism and executive power. Savage graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College in 1998 and began his career as a local government and politics reporter for the Miami Herald. Savage later earned a master's degree from Yale Law School while on a Knight Foundation journalism fellowship. He joined the Boston Globe's Washington bureau in the fall of 2003. In addition to the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, he has received the American Bar Association's Silver Gavel Award and the Gerald R. Ford Prize for Distinguished Reporting on the Presidency. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, the journalist Luiza Savage, and their son.

Aimee Friedman was born and raised in New York City, and attended the Bronx High School of Science where, at the age of seventeen, she entered the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards and won a Gold Key for Writing. After graduating from Vassar College with a degree in English, Aimee returned to Scholastic in a professional capacity and began working as an editorial assistant. Aimee is now a Senior Editor in the Trade Paperbacks group, under Abby McAden. Aimee is also a New York Times bestselling author of several novels for young adults, including South Beach, French Kiss, Hollywood Hills, Breaking Up: A Fashion High Graphic Novel, and, most recently, The Year My Sister Got Lucky. She lives in Manhattan.

Brett Blackledge, a native of Baton Rouge, LA, received the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Journalism and the Associated Press Managing Editors public service award for his ongoing series on corruption and cronyism in Alabama's two-year colleges. He began his career with the Associated Press in New Orleans, and later worked for AP in Jackson, Mississippi, and Tulsa, Oklahoma. Brett is a general assignment and special projects reporter with The Birmingham News. He moved to Alabama in 1993, joining The Mobile Register as a local government reporter. He also covered education and state government. He has worked at The Birmingham News since 1998.

C. K. Williams has published over nine books of poetry, the most recent of which, The Singing, won the 2003 National Book Award. His previous book, Repair, was awarded the 2000 Pulitzer Prize. He has published translations of Sophocles' Women of Trachis, Euripides' Bacchae, and poems of Francis Ponge, among others. His book of essays, Poetry and Consciousness, appeared in 1998, and a memoir, Misgivings, in 2000. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University.

Robert Glass has been a reporter, writer and editor for The Associated Press for more than 30 years, including a decade as a foreign correspondent in London and the Caribbean. He is currently a supervising editor in the AP's Washington bureau.

Art Brisbane retired in 2006 as senior vice president of Knight Ridder, the nation's second largest newspaper publisher at the time of its sale. Previously, he served as publisher of The Kansas City Star and was the newspaper's editor prior to that. Art has worked as a reporter and metro columnist for The Star and also as a reporter and assistant city editor for the Washington Post. Art is married to the former Jo Hull and they have three teenaged daughters. The Brisbanes live in Monte Sereno, CA.

Richard Schlesinger is a correspondent for 48 Hours Mystery and contributes to the CBS Evening News and other broadcasts. He previously served as a full-time correspondent for 48 Hours, reporting on a wide range of topics: innocent Americans behind bars, marriage and divorce in the 1990s and the middle-class recession. He was the sole reporter for 48 Hours: "Death by Midnight,"-an in-depth profile of one convict facing the death penalty-and for 48 Hours: "Searching for a Cure," an unprecedented look at an experiment for a potentially groundbreaking new AIDS treatment. Schlesinger won an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award for CBS Reports: "Enter the Jury Room," a two-hour 1997 documentary which examined the American jury system and marked the first time network television cameras were given access to actual jury deliberations. Schlesinger is the recipient of nine Emmy Awards.

Phil O'Donoghue teaches Developmental English, English Composition, and Theater at Springfield Technical Community College, in Springfield, Massachusetts. He holds an M.F.A. in Playwriting from Smith College. His plays have been performed in Boston and Los Angeles, and he is director of an intensive summer theater workshop for middle school students. He lives in Florence, Massachusetts with his wife, Valle Dwight, a writer for parentsconnect.com, and their two sons.

Beagan Wilcox is the managing editor of BoardIQ, a financial trade publication. She has written for the New York Daily News, Forbes.com, the International Herald Tribune, and the Italian daily, Corriere della Sera. She is a graduate of Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs and the Graduate School of Journalism.

Patricia Smith is the author of four books of poetry, including Teahouse of the Almighty, a 2005 National Poetry Series selection, winner of the 2007 Hurston-Wright Legacy Award and the 2007 Paterson Poetry Prize. Blood Dazzler, a book of poems chronicling the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina, will be published by Coffee House Press in 2008. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, TriQuarterly and many other journals. She is a Pushcart Prize winner, a Cave Canem faculty member and a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam.

Publishing executive Andrea Davis Pinkney has worn many hats throughout her career, spanning more than twenty years: as Vice President and Editor-at-Large for Scholastic Trade, she acquired and edited a mix of titles, including Elijah of Buxton by Newbery Award winner Christopher Paul Curtis; The Clone Journals, a science fiction series by Newbery Honor author Patricia McKissack; Odetta, a picture book about the legendary folk singer; Sunrise Over Fallujah by Newbery Honor author and National Book Award finalist Walter Dean Myers; March On! The Day My Brother Martin Changed the World by Christine King Farris (the sister of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.); and the upcoming Sassy series by New York Times bestseller Sharon Draper. In addition, Andrea will soon publish Crow Call, the first picture book by two-time Newbery medalist Lois Lowry and Beautiful Ballerina, a gift book featuring the principal dancers from Dance Theater of Harlem, to be published for Dance Theater of Harlem's 40th anniversary. During Andrea's tenure at Disney, she was the founding editor of Jump at the Sun, the first African American children's book imprint at a major publishing house. Under Jump at the Sun, Andrea launched the hugely popular best-selling series, The Cheetah Girls, which has now become a Disney media franchise. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband, award-winning illustrator Brian Pinkney, and their two children.

Olivia Barker is a features reporter at USA Today, where she's covered everything from the demise of thank-you notes to the rise of Jon Stewart. Prior to joining USA Today, she worked as a features reporter at the Westchester (N.Y.) Journal News. She's also an adjunct journalism instructor at Queens College. Olivia is a graduate of Columbia University's journalism school and Brown University.

Jimmy Santiago Baca was raised first by his grandmother and later sent to an orphanage. A runaway at age 13, it was after Baca was sentenced to five years in a maximum security prison that he began to turn his life around: he learned to read and write and unearthed a voracious passion for poetry. Baca sent three of his poems to Denise Levertov, the poetry editor of Mother Jones. The poems were published and became part of Immigrants in Our Own Land, published in 1979, the year he was released from prison and earned his GED. He is the winner of the Pushcart Prize, the American Book Award, and the International Hispanic Heritage Award and for his memoir A Place to Stand. In 2006 he won the Cornelius P. Turner Award, a national award that recognizes one GED graduate a year that has made outstanding contributions to society in education, justice, health, public service and social welfare. In 2005 Baca created Cedar Tree Inc., a nonprofit foundation that provides free instruction, books, writing material and scholarships to help people of all walks of life become educated and improve their lives.

Elliott Rebhun is the editor and publisher of The New York Times Upfront, Scholastic's newsmagazine for high school students published with The New York Times. Elliott worked at the Times newspaper and website and on the international editions of Newsweek before joining Upfront.

Benjamin Cavell is the author of the short story collection "Rumble, Young Man, Rumble," which was named a Best Book of the Year by Esquire Magazine. He is a graduate of Harvard College, where he was a boxer and an editor for The Harvard Crimson. He was born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts and now lives in New York City with his wife and daughter.

Ed Herro is a nationally touring stand-up comedian, improv performer and comedy writer. He's trained at New York's Upright Citizens Brigade Theater, Chicago's Second City and ImprovOlympic. Between stand-up club dates he writes comedy for Public Radio International's Fair Game Ð a nationally syndicated radio show. He's also written and created national television commercials and directed and edited comedic documentaries. Finally, he's written for Comedy Central's Motherload and Chappelle's Show.

Brian Cox is an actor, comedian, and writer based in New York City. He currently serves as Head Writer for Fair Game with Faith Salie, a national news and comedy variety show from Public Radio International. Some of his notable television credits include contributing writer for Chappelle's Show and co-creating/directing/starring in I Love the 30s, a flagship show for Comedy Central's Motherload. As well as acting on stage, Brian appears frequently on VH1 where he makes fun of the far more famous and successful.

David LaRochelle has been writing and illustrating children's books for the past twenty years, including the backwards fairy tale, The End. His young adult novel, Absolutely, Positively Not, received the Sid Fleischman Humor Award and was chosen by teens as one of their top 30 books in IRA's 2007 survey. A former teacher, he currently visits dozens of classrooms each year as an author-in-residence. For the past 18 years David has been a judge for the Odyssey of the Mind and Destination Imagination creative problem-solving competitions. He is a professional pumpkin carver and devoted game player.

Brighde Mullins is the author of ten plays that have been produced in New York, London, and San Francisco. Titles include: Monkey in the Middle, Those Who Can Do, Topographical Eden, and Pathological Venus. Her chapbook of poems, Water Stories, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her honors include: a Whiting Foundation Award, an NEA Fellowship, the Will Glickman Award, and the Jane Chambers Award. She has held residencies at Lincoln Center, New York Theatre Workshop, the O'Neill Center, Mabou Mines, and many other theatres. She holds MFAs from the Yale School of Drama and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and has taught playwriting at Harvard and Brown University. For twelve years she curated the Reading Series in Contemporary Poetry at Dia Art Foundation in New York. She is currently the Director of the MFA Writing Program at the California Institute of the Arts and lives in Hollywood.