David Levi Strauss is the author of Co-Illusion: Dispatches from the End of Communication (2020), Words Not Spent Today Buy Smaller Images Tomorrow: Essays on the Present and Future of Photography (2014), From Head to Hand: Art and the Manual (2010), Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics, with an introduction by John Berger (2003/2012), and Between Dog & Wolf: Essays on Art and Politics (1999). To Dare Imagining: Rojava Revolution, edited by Strauss, Dilar Dirik, Michael Taussig, and Peter Lamborn Wilson, was published by Autonomedia in 2016. Strauss was a Guggenheim fellow in 2003, and received the Infinity Award for Writing from the International Center of Photography in 2007. He is chair of the graduate program in art writing at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

Simon Critchley has published books on a wide expanse of ethical and philosophical subjects, including the bestselling The Book of Dead Philosophers, his cult novel Memory Theatre and his memoir-analysis of David Bowie - On Bowie (for Serpents Tail).

He is Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York, and series moderator of 'The Stone', a philosophy column in The New York Times. He comes from a Liverpool family and watches his team, devotedly, each weekend, 3306 miles away from Anfield.

Ariela Aisha Azoulay is a professor of Comparative Literature and Modern Culture, and Media at Brown University, as well as a curator and documentary filmmaker. Her many books include The Civil Contract of Photography and Civil Imagination- A Political Ontology of Photography, and she has curated exhibits for galleries and museums around the world.

Alva Noe is professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is a member of the Center for New Media, the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences, and the Program in Critical Theory.

His many books include Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature and Learning to Look: Dispatches from the Art World.

Blake Gopnik is an art critic who has served as art and design critic at Newsweek, chief art critic of The Washington Post, and fine-arts editor at The Globe and Mail, among other posts. In 2014, Gopnik was named a resident biography fellow at the Leon Levy Center for Biography at City University of New York and he was a recipient of a Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library in 2017. He is a regular contributor to the New York Times.