Alexander Alberro is an associate professor of art history at Barnard College, New York. He is the author of Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity (MIT Press, 2000) and coeditor (with Blake Stimson) of Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology (MIT Press, 2000).

Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke was born in 1939 in Athens. She is the author of eighteen books of poetry, and she won the Greek National Prize for Poetry in 1985 and the Greek Academy’s Poetry Prize in 2000. Her recent books in English translation include Translating into Love Life’s End (Shoestring Press, 2004) and The Scattered Papers of Penelope: New and Selected Poems (New Directions, 2009).

Aristide Antonas is an architect and writer based in Athens and Berlin. He earned a Ph.D. in philosophy (University Paris X Nanterre). He is the author of many books, including Ta dyo dwmatia (The Two Rooms) (JRP-Ringier, 2011) and The Singer and the Armchair (Agra Publications, 2009). He is the principal in the Antonas office, which was nominated for the Mies van der Rohe Award in 2009 and for the Iakov Chernikhov Prize in 2011.

Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) was a political philosopher and writer. Born into a German-Jewish family in Hanover, she was forced to flee to Paris in 1933. After working for various Jewish refugee organizations in France, she immigrated to the U.S. in 1941. Her many seminal books include The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1958), Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), Men in Dark Times (1968), Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman (1974), and The Life of the Mind (1978).

Pierre Bal-Blanc is a curator of documenta 14. From 2003 to 2014, he directed the Contemporary Art Center, Brétigny (CAC), in France, where he developed the site-specific program “Projet Phalanstère.” Other recent projects include Soleil politique, at Museion, Bolzano (2014) and La monnaie vivante/Living Currency, at CAC Brétigny/Micadanses (2005–6) and Tate Modern, London (2008).

Miriam Cahn is a painter who was born in 1949 in Basel. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at La Caixa Foundation, Madrid; Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe; Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris; DAAD Gallery, Berlin; and Kunsthaus Zurich (1993). In 1998, she was the recipient of the Käthe-Kollwitz-Preis from the Akademie der Künste, Berlin. Her writing has been anthologized in Contemporary Jewish Writing in Switzerland (University of Nebraska Press, 2002).

Manthia Diawara is a Malian writer, cultural theorist, director, and professor of comparative literature and cinema at New York University (NYU). He is the author of In Search of Africa (Harvard University Press, 1998) and African Film: New Forms of Aesthetics and Politics (Prestel, 2010). His many films include Sembène Ousmane: The Making of African Cinema (1994) and Édouard Glissant: One World in Relation(2009).

Angela Dimitrakaki is a writer and senior lecturer in contemporary art history and theory at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of Gender, ArtWork and the Global Imperative: A Materialist Feminist Critique (Manchester University Press, 2013) and Art and Globalization: From the Postmodern Sign to the Biopolitical Arena (Estia Publishers, 2013), and coeditor of Economy (Liverpool University Press, 2015). Her novels include Inside a Girl Like You (Estia Publishers, 2009), which was shortlisted for the Athens Prize for Literature.

Maria Eichhorn is an artist based in Berlin. She studied at the Hochschule der Künste in the 1990 class of Karl Horst Hödicke, and her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland (2001); Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2007); and Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2014). She received the George Maciunas Prize in 1992, and the Arnold Bode Prize, in Kassel, in 2002.

Fouad Elkoury is a Lebanese photographer and filmmaker. He is a cofounder of the Arab Image Foundation, whose mission is to collect and study photographs from the Middle East, North Africa, and the Arab diaspora. As a photographer, he documented the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and later, in 1991, joined a collective photographic project capturing Beirut’s postwar ruins. Elkoury represented Lebanon in the 52nd Venice Biennale, in 2007. His latest projects have taken him to Thessaloniki, the ex-Soviet states, and Gwangju.

Marina Fokidis is the head of the Artistic Office Athens for documenta 14. She is the founding and artistic director of Kunsthalle Athena, and the founding director of South as a State of Mind. She was a curator of the 3rd Thessaloniki Biennale for Contemporary Art (2011) and the curator of the Greek Pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale (2003).

Peter Friedl is an artist. Since the 1980s he has published numerous essays and book projects such as Four or Five Roses (2004), Working at Copan (2007), Playgrounds (2008), and Secret Modernity: Selected Writings and Interviews 1981–2009 (2009).

Hans Haacke was born in Cologne in 1936, and lives and works in New York. He studied at the Staatliche Werkakademie in Kassel, Germany, and became a member of the artist group Zero. For almost four decades, he was a professor at Cooper Union in New York. His work was featured in the German Pavilion at the 1993 Venice Biennale, for which he won the Golden Lion. He is the author of Free Exchange (Polity Press, 1995).

Bhanu Kapil is a poet who teaches writing and thinking at Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Colorado. She is the author of The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (Kelsey Street Press, 2001); Incubation: A Space for Monsters (Leon Works, 2006); Humanimal, a Project for Future Children (Kelsey Street Press, 2009); Schizophrene (Nightboat, 2011), and Ban en Banlieue (Nightboat, 2014).

Quinn Latimer is a poet and critic, and is editor-in-chief of publications for documenta 14. She is the author of Rumored Animals (Dream Horse Press, 2012), which won the American Poetry Journal Book Prize, and Sarah Lucas: Describe This Distance (Mousse Publishing, 2013), and coeditor of Stories, Myths, Ironies, and Other Songs: Conceived, Directed, Edited, and Produced by M. Auder (Sternberg Press, 2014).

Yorgos Vassiliou Makris (1923–1968) was a Surrealist poet and artist and a personality on the margins of the Athens artistic scene. He refused to publish during his lifetime; two decades after his suicide, his various poetic and theoretical texts were collected in Writings: 1940–1967 (1986).

Jonas Mekas was born in 1922 in Semeniškiai, Lithuania. After World War II, which he spent in a forced labor camp in Germany, he studied philosophy at the University of Mainz before the UN Refugee Organization brought him to New York, where he continues to live. In 1954, he started Film Culture magazine; in 1964, he founded the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque, which became Anthology Film Archives. He is the author of many books of poetry, and his film works include The Brig (1963), Scenes from the Life of George Maciunas (1992), and As I Was Moving Ahead I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2000).

Marta Minujín was born in 1943 in Buenos Aires, where she lives and works. Marta Minujín: 1959–1989, a retrospective of her work, was mounted at the Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires (MALBA), Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 2010. The following year, an individual film retrospective of works by Minujín was presented at the Centre Pompidou, Paris. In 2001 she was the recipient of the Jorge Romero Brest Prize of the Asociación Argentina de Críticos de Arte.

Naeem Mohaiemen is a Ph.D. candidate in historical anthropology at Columbia University, New York, and a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow. His work in film, photography, and text explores borders, wars, and belongings and Bangladesh’s two postcolonial markers (1947, 1971) as forms of global history. Since 2006 he has worked on The Young Man Was (No Longer a Terrorist), about the twilight of the 1970s revolutionary left, the latest chapter of which premiered at the 2015 Venice Biennale.

Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Ph.D., was born in Yaoundé, Cameroon, and lives and works in Berlin. He is a biotechnologist, curator, and founder of SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin, as well as editor-in-chief of the journal SAVVY|art.contemporary.african. He is currently a curator at large of documenta 14.

Linda Nochlin was born in New York in 1931. She is a feminist art historian and the Lila Acheson Wallace Professor of Modern Art at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. Her books include Representing Women (Thames and Hudson, 1999), The Politics of Vision (Harper & Row, 1989), Women, Art and Power (Harper & Row, 1988), and Realism (Penguin, 1971). She was the curator of “Global Feminisms” at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, in 2007.

Paul B. Preciado is a philosopher and transfeminist activist. He holds a Ph.D. in philosophy and theory of architecture from Princeton University. He is the author of Contra-Sexual Manifesto (forthcoming from Columbia University Press in 2015), Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs and Biopolitics (The Feminist Press, 2014) and Pornotopia (Zone Books, 2014). He is the curator of public programs of documenta 14.

Thomas Sankara (1949–1987) was a Marxist revolutionary, pan-Africanist theorist, feminist, and president of Burkina Faso from 1983 to 1987. He came to power in a coup in 1983, when he renamed the country—then called Upper Volta—Burkina Faso, or Land of Upright Man. He was assassinated in a coup d’état organized by Blaise Compaoré on October 15, 1987; Compaoré’s regime remained in power until 2014.

Brandon Shimoda is the author of several books—including Evening Oracle (Letter Machine Editions, 2015), Portuguese (Octopus Books/Tin House, 2013), and O Bon (Litmus Press, 2011)—and the coeditor, with Thom Donovan, of To Look at the Sea Is to Become What One Is: An Etel Adnan Reader (Nightboat Books, 2014). Born in California, he has lived most recently in Tucson, Arizona, Taiwan, and Marfa, Texas.

Adam Szymczyk is the artistic director of documenta 14. He was the director and chief curator of Kunsthalle Basel from 2003 to 2014, and cocurator of the 5th Berlin Biennale in 2008. He was a founder of Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw, and in 2011 he was the recipient of the Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement from the Menil Foundation.

Françoise Vergès was born in Paris and grew up in Réunion and Algeria. She is the Chair of Global South(s) at the Collège d’Études Mondiales, Paris. She received a Ph.D. in political theory at University of California, Berkeley, and was president of the French Committee for the Memory and History of Slavery from 2009 to 2012. For the 2012 Paris Triennial, she curated the program “The Slave in Le Louvre.”

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie is a writer based in Beirut and New York. A contributing editor for Bidoun, she writes regularly for Artforum, Frieze, and the Lebanese newspaper The Daily Star. She was a 2007 fellow in the Annenberg Getty Arts Journalism Program in Los Angeles, and she teaches at the American University of Beirut (AUB).

Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) was an Austrian writer. His many books include Three Masters (1920), about Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky; The Tide of Fortune (1928); Beware of Pity (1938); and Chess Story (1942).