Nabil Ahmed is a researcher, writer, and educator working on environmental violence and forensic architecture. More recently he has been part of the “Anthropocene Project” (2013–14) at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin and is currently coleading the project “Nature, Labour, Land” in the Oslo Architecture Triennale 2016. His writings have appeared in academic journals, magazines, and various art and architecture publications such as Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth (Sternberg, 2014) and Architecture and the Paradox of Dissidence (Routledge, 2014).

Nairy Baghramian is a German artist, born in Isfahan in 1971. She lives and works in Berlin. Her solo exhibitions have recently been presented at the Art Institute of Chicago (2014); Museu Serralves, Porto (2014); and Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2015). International group exhibitions include the 54th Venice Biennale (2011) and the 8th Berlin Biennale (2014). Baghramian will open an exhibition at Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.), Gent later this year that will travel to Museum der Moderne, Salzburg, and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis in 2017. She has been awarded the Hector Prize (2012), the Arnold Bode Prize (2014), and the Zurich Art Prize (2016). 

Sotirios Bahtsetzis is a writer, curator, and educator based in Berlin and Athens, where he teaches at The American College of Greece and the Hellenic Open University. He currently codirects the Artistic Creative Agency of the European project “Artecitya: Envisioning the City of Tomorrow” (run by the Goethe-Institut Thessaloniki in collaboration with ArtBOX, Thessaloniki, 2014–18). He contributes to experimental, collective learning and research initiatives such as Avtonomi Akadimia and ’Yλη[matter]HYLE, and writes for publications such as e-flux journal and Afterimage.

Stefan Benchoam is an artist and exhibition-maker born in Guatemala City in 1983. He has had solo shows at The White Cubicle Toilet Gallery, London (2011); La Loseta, San Juan (2011); La Casa Encendida, Madrid (2013); and his work has featured in many group shows. He is cofounder of the Buró de Intervenciones Públicas (Bureau of Public Interventions, BIP), which develops projects in public spaces worldwide. He cofounded and directs Proyectos Ultravioleta, a multifaceted platform for contemporary art, is a founder of the Nuevo Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (NuMu), Guatemala’s first museum dedicated to contemporary art, and cofounder of the Joaquín Orellana Legacy Project.

Ross Birrell is an artist, filmmaker, writer, and lecturer at the Glasgow School of Art. His work revolves around place, politics, poetry, and music. In collaboration with David Harding he has exhibited at Americas Society, New York (2010); Portikus, Frankfurt/Main (2011); Kunsthalle Basel (2014); and Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh (2015). His “Envoy” project of site-specific interventions has been exhibited internationally, including at the 4th Gwangju Biennale (2002), and as part of Romantic Conceptualism at Kunsthalle Nürnberg and BAWAG Foundation, Vienna in 2007, and is published in An Envoy Reader (LemonMelon, 2014). He is represented by Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam.

Moyra Davey was born in Toronto and has lived and worked in New York since 1988. A photographer, filmmaker, and writer, Davey has produced six narrative videos including Hemlock Forest (2016), an inquiry into maternal identity and loss, the life and work of the late Chantal Akerman, and addiction. Her photographs and videos are in major public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, Guggenheim Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and Tate Modern, London.

Hendrik Folkerts is a curator of documenta 14. From 2010 to 2015 he was the curator of Performance, Film, and Discursive Programs at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. He writes regularly for such publications as Mousse Magazine, Artforum, The Exhibitionist, Metropolis M, Art & the Public Sphere, and for exhibition catalogs as well as artist books. He is the coeditor of the recent issue of Stedelijk Studies: The Place of Performance (Stedelijk Museum, 2016); the guest editor of The Shadowfiles #3: Curatorial Education (de Appel arts centre, 2013); and the coeditor of Facing Forward: Art & Theory from a Future Perspective (Amsterdam University Press, 2015).

Gauri Gill is a photographer who lives and works in New Delhi. Her practice often addresses marginalized communities in rural Rajasthan, examining the twinned Indian identity markers of class and community as determinants of mobility and social behavior. Her work has been exhibited widely, including at Whitechapel Gallery, London; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; JNU School of Art and Aesthetics, New Delhi; and the National Gallery of Art, Warsaw. In 2011 Gill was awarded The Grange Prize, Canada’s foremost award for photography. Her series “Fields of Sight” is a collaboration with renowned folk artist Rajesh Chaitya Vangad, combining the contemporary language of photography with the ancient one of Warli drawing. 

Natasha Ginwala is a curator, researcher, and writer. She is curator of the 8th Contour Biennale (2017). Recent projects include My East Is Your West at the 56th Venice Biennale (2015) and Corruption: Everybody Knows ... as part of the e-flux journal project SUPERCOMMUNITY. She was part of the artistic team of the 8th Berlin Biennale (2014), and from 2013 to 2015 she led the curatorial project “Landings” with Vivian Ziherl, presented at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, and the David Roberts Art Foundation, London, among other collaborating institutions. She is a curatorial adviser for documenta 14.

Gordon Hookey is an Indigenous Australian artist who belongs to the Waanyi people. He is a member of the Brisbane-based Aboriginal arts group proppaNOW. He is currently working on a major project series called “MURRILAND!,” a visual history of Queensland from a Murri perspective. Hookey’s work is held in the public collections of most major Australian galleries as well as public collections internationally.

Tshibumba Kanda Matulu (1947–1981) was a painter from Lubumbashi, in the former Zaire, who is best known for his series of 101 canvases, painted from 1973 to 1974, telling the story of Congolese histories and revolutions, in its colonial and postcolonial periods. Part of the Zaire School, these paintings are collected in the book Remembering the Present: Painting and Popular History in Zaire (University of California Press, 1996) by anthropologist Johannes Fabian. The artist was reported missing after leaving Lubumbashi in 1981.

Christos Karakepelis is a filmmaker who was born in Serres, Greece in 1962. ΗHe studied Social Sciences at the Panteion University, Athens, and Film Direction at the Stavrakos Film School. After working in advertising for many years directing commercials, he began writing scripts for documentaries and directing documentary series for Greek television. The House of Cain (2000) was his first feature film; his documentary Raw Material was released in 2011.

Lala Rukh is an artist, feminist activist, and educator who lives and works in Lahore. Lala’s solo exhibitions include Drawings 2010, Koel Gallery, Karachi (2010). She had major survey exhibitions at Zahoor ul Akhlaq Gallery, Lahore, and VM Art Gallery, Karachi, in 2004. Her recent group exhibitions include In Order to Join, Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach (2013); The Importance of Staying Quiet, Yallay Gallery, Hong Kong (2014); and Approaching Abstraction, Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai (2015). Her work has also been presented at Sharjah Biennial (2015); National Art Gallery, Islamabad; Pacific Asia Museum, Pasadena; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and in the 1st Yinchuan Biennale (2016).

Quinn Latimer is a poet, critic, and editor-in-chief of publications for documenta 14. Her books include Rumored Animals (Dream Horse Press, 2012); Sarah Lucas: Describe This Distance (Mousse Publishing, 2013); Film as a Form of Writing: Quinn Latimer Talks to Akram Zaatari (Wiels/Motto Books, 2014); Stories, Myths, Ironies, and Other Songs: Conceived, Directed, Edited, and Produced by M. Auder (Sternberg Press, 2014); and Live from the West (Mousse Publishing, 2016). Her writings and readings have been presented widely, including at REDCAT, Los Angeles; Chisenhale Gallery, London; Serpentine Galleries, London; Kunsthalle Zürich; Qalandiya International, Ramallah; and the Venice Biennale of Architecture.

Tina Modotti (1896–1942) was an Italian photographer, actress, model, and revolutionary political activist. At the age of sixteen, she emigrated from Italy to San Francisco, where she began acting in plays and silent films; she would eventually move to Los Angeles, where she pursued a film career. At the beginning of the 1920s she moved to Mexico City with her partner and photography teacher Edward Weston. There she quickly became affiliated with the artistic and political avant-garde, and became a leading member of the Mexican Communist Party and a photographer of the Mexican mural movement. After being exiled from Mexico, she joined Communist efforts in Germany, Spain, and Russia. She died on her return to Mexico in 1942. 

Joaquín Orellana was born in Guatemala in 1930. He studied violin and composition at the National Conservatory of Music in Guatemala, and studied and composed at Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales (CLAEM) at the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires. Orellana has composed more than fifty works and has included electroacoustic media in his music since the early 1960s. His work reflects an engagement with the social situation of Guatemala’s poorest class, focusing on the traditional folk culture, local expression, and the sound environment. In the 1970s he developed his “sound utensils”—one-of-a-kind instrument-sculptures that are used for his most emblematic compositions.

Neni Panourgiá teaches anthropology at the New School for Social Research, New York; she is also Research Fellow at the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University, New York; and through the Psychology Department/Prison Program at Columbia University teaches at Sing Sing Correctional Facility. Her books include Fragments of Death, Fables of Identity: An Athenian Anthropography (University of Wisconsin Press, 1995); with George E. Marcus, Ethnographica Moralia: Experiments in Interpretive Anthropology (Fordham University Press, 2008); and Dangerous Citizens: The Greek Left and the Terror of the State (Fordham University Press, 2009). She is currently at work on a book that explores Lee Miller’s work in Greece in collaboration with the Lee Miller Archives.

Synnøve Persen is a Sámi poet and visual artist. She was born in Porsanger, Finnmark, in 1950, and she was nominated for the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize in 1993 and 2008. She received the Biret Elle Memorial Prize in 2000 and the Saami Council’s Prize for Literature in 2006. Her books include Alit lottit girdilit (Blue birds fly, 1981); Biekkakeahtes bálggis (Windless path, 1992); Ábiid eadni (The ocean’s mother, 1994); and Meahci sˇuvas bohciidit ságat (Tales spring up from nature’s rush, 2005). She created a Sámi flag in 1977, and was part of the seminal Sámi Artists Group, known as the Máze-Group, from 1978 to 1983. 

Pope.L is a visual and performance-theater artist and educator. His solo exhibitions include Colored Waiting Room, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York (2013); Gold People Shit in their Valet, Galerie Catherine Bastide, Brussels (2014); and William Pope.L: Trinket, Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles (2015). He recently participated in The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2015); and was curator of Flux This!, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2011). In 2016, Pope.L participated in the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo; his most recent online project was The Limner Performance with Triple Canopy in 2014.

Gene Ray is Associate Professor of Critical Studies in the CCC Research-based Master’s Program at Geneva School of Art and Design (HEAD – Genève). He is the author of Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). His essays on the intersections of art, radical politics, and ecology have appeared in Third Text, Brumaria, Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, Historical Materialism, Left Curve, and Yale Journal of Criticism, as well as other journals and edited books.

Lisa Robertson is a Canadian poet. Her nine books of poetry include, most recently, Cinema of the Present (Coach House, 2014) and 3 Summers (Coach House, 2016), both featuring cover and interior art by Hadley+Maxwell. Her architectural essays are collected in Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture (1993; repr., Coach House, 2011), and other essays on soundscapes, Lucretius, porn, and video are collected in Nilling (BookThug, 2012). She has held residencies at the University of Cambridge, University of California, Berkeley, Princeton University, and California College of the Arts. She lives in France.

Glauber Rocha (1938–1981) was a Brazilian filmmaker, actor, and writer. He is one of the most prominent representatives of Latin American Cinema and laid the theoretical groundwork of Cinema Novo of the 1960s with his text “The Aesthetics of Hunger.” His award-winning films include Terra em Transe (1967), Antonio das Mortes (1969), and the short film Di Cavalcanti (1977). 

Dieter Roelstraete is a curator of documenta 14. From 2012 until 2015 he was the Manilow Senior Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, where he curated The Way of the Shovel: Art as Archaeology (2013); The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now (2015); and Kerry James Marshall: Mastry (2016). From 2003 to 2011 he was a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp (MuHKA). A former editor of Afterall and cofounder of the journal F. R. DAVID, Roelstraete has published in Artforum, e-flux journal, Frieze, Mousse Magazine, and Texte zur Kunst.

Roee Rosen is an artist, writer, and filmmaker. His latest books are Maxim Komar-Myshkin: Vladimir’s Night (Sternberg Press, 2014), The Blind Merchant, 1989–1991 (Sternberg Press, 2016), and a collection of shorter writings, Live & Die as Eva Braun and Other Intimate Stories (Sternberg Press, forthcoming). Rosen is a professor at HaMidrasha School of Art at Beit Berl College, and at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, both in Israel.

Julio Santos was born in Guatemala in 1959. He is a professor of percussion at the National Conservatory of Music, Guatemala; founder and director of the Victoria Choir and Club Centro Español Choir; director of the Normal School for Music Education Teachers; and principal timpanist and guest conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra of Guatemala. Maestro Santos has participated in numerous international tours, and has been working and collaborating with Maestro Joaquín Orellana for more than twenty-five years.

Savitri Sawhney is a pediatrician and writer who was born in Guadalajara in 1938 and is now based in New Delhi. She gave up her private practice in New Delhi to dedicate herself full time to writing and disseminating the story of her father, Pandurang Khankhoje, and his achievements as a political activist in India and agricultural scientist in Mexico. She published I Shall Never Ask For Pardon: A Memoir of Pandurang Khankhoje with Penguin Books in 2008. The book was later translated to Marathi and recently published as Mee Kadhee Mafi Magnar Nahi (Mehta Publications, 2016).

Monika Szewczyk is a curator of documenta 14. She was previously Visual Arts Program Curator at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, University of Chicago (2012–14), where she also lectured in the departments of visual arts and art history. Her last exhibition at the Logan Center, Szalon (2014), combined the heterogeneous spaces of the studio and the salon to foreground oral technologies and traditions. An author and editor, Szewczyk was Head of Publications at the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam (2008–11), while her writings have appeared in numerous catalogs as well as journals such as Afterall, Artforum, The Exhibitionist, and e-flux journal.

Adam Szymczyk is the artistic director of documenta 14. He was the director and chief curator of Kunsthalle Basel from 2003 to 2014, and co-curator 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, Houston.

Alejandro Torún was born in Guatemala in 1977. He is a member of the board of directors of the Sistema de Orquestas de Guatemala, for which he acted as president from 2009 to 2016. Torún studied economics and literature at the University of Texas at Austin, where he participated in Liliana Heker’s writing workshop. Torún currently directs the social enterprise Baobab, which he founded in 2013, and is cofounder of the Joaquín Orellana Legacy Project.

Rajesh Chaitya Vangad is a traditional Warli artist. A resident of Dahanu, in the Thane district of Maharashtra, Vangad is largely self-taught. The Warli are an Indigenous people who originate from Maharashtra, and Warli painting finds its roots in traditions that are said to go back to 2500 BCE. Vangad has exhibited his work widely across India, as well as in Kalpa Vriksha: Contemporary Indigenous and Vernacular Art of India, in the 8th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, and in Sakura, Japan, at the Wall Art Festival. His illustrated books include My Gandhi Story, with Ankit Chadha and Nina Sabnani (Tulika Publishers, 2014).

Cecilia Vicuña is a poet, artist, filmmaker, and activist who was born in Santiago de Chile. Her work has been shown at the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Vicuña has published many books of art and poetry, including Cloud-Net (Art in General, 1999); Spit Temple: The Selected Performances of Cecilia Vicuña (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2012); and Kuntur Ko (Torn Sound, 2015). Her Selected Poems is forthcoming from Kelsey Street Press in 2017. 

Vivian Ziherl is a critic and curator from Brisbane, currently living and working in Amsterdam. In 2015 she established the art and research project “Frontier Imaginaries.” Through exhibitions, conferences, and publishing it seeks to map the ongoing significance of frontier formation in the global era. She also works with the performance platform If I Can’t Dance I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution, and is a PhD candidate in curatorial practice at Monash University, Melbourne.