Jan Verwoert is a Berlin based art critic and curator. He is a member of the advisory board of the Munich Kunstverein and has been a guest professor of Contemporary Art and Theory at the Academy of Umeå, Sweden, and the Royal College of Art, London. Since 2005 he has been a tutor and leader of the Imagined Communities seminar at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam. Verwoert is a contributing editor to Frieze magazine and also writes regularly for Afterall, Metropolis M, and Springerin. In 2001 he was awarded the art criticism prize of the German Kunstvereine.

Peter Halley is a New York artist. Exhibiting since the 1980s, Halley has presented surveys of his work at the CAPC Musée d'art Contemporain, Bordeaux (1991), The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1997), the Folkwang Museum, Essen, Germany (1998), and the Louisiana Art and Science Museum (2005). Halley has also written extensively on art and culture. His writings have been published in Collected Essays 1981-87 (1988), Recent Essays 1990-96 (1997), and Selected Essays 1981-2001 (2013). In 2001 he received the Frank Jewett Mather Award for art criticism from the College Art Association. From 1996 to 2006 he was the publisher of Index magazine.

Midori Matsui is anart critic, independent curator and scholar who has written extensively on Japanese and Western art and culture. She was a contributing author to Wolfgang Tillmans (Phaidon, 2002), Painting at the Edge of the World (Walker Art Center, 2001), and Takashi Murakami: The Meaning of the Nonsense of the Meaning (Abrams, 2000).

Wolfgang Tillmans (Remscheid, Germany, 1968) is an artist and a photographer based in Berlin. The intimate nature of his work is reflected in his writings, which include excerpts from early and most recent interviews and a personal discussion of his video piece, Lights/Body (2002), as well as examples of his many influential artist's books.

Johanna Burton is Director and Curator of Education and Public Engagement at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. Formerly Director of the Graduate Program at the center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and Associate Director of the Whitney Independent Study Program, Burton has curated a number of exhibitions as well as contributing catalogue essays for artists such as Cindy Sherman, Marilyn Minter and Anish Kapoor.