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One of today’s most prolific performance artists, Laurie Anderson is renowned as a
musician, inventor, and filmmaker. Her performance practice is diverse,
ranging from riveting monologues to sophisticated multimedia events that
combine and harmonize visual and aural elements. At once experimental
and entertaining, Anderson’s work resists categorization, as the
novel-inspired performance Songs
and Stories for Moby Dick
(1999–2000) illustrates. The impact of Anderson’s creative work has been
acknowledged by NASA, which named her its first artist-in-residence in
2004. A traveling retrospective of Anderson’s visual work, The Record of the Time: Sound in the
Work of Laurie Anderson, was
organized by the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Lyon in 2003. Recently
Anderson released the album Homeland (her first in ten years) and
premiered the new performance work Delusion at the Vancouver 2010 Cultural
Olympiad.

Hailing from Baltimore, Animal Collective is a decade-old group of musicians
composed of childhood friends Avey Tare (Dave Portner), Panda
Bear (Noah Lennox), Geologist (Brian Weitz), and Deakin (Josh Dibb).
Known for their experimental sound and mysterious, psychedelic, and
sometimes disorienting live performances, the band has produced eight
studio records, one live record, and a variety of critically acclaimed
side projects while touring extensively nationally and internationally.

Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, director Darren Aronofsky won the Director’s
Award at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival and an Independent Spirit Award
for Best First Screenplay for his first feature, π. In 2000 Aronofsky premiered Requiem for a Dream at the Cannes International Film
Festival. The film was named to more than 150 Top Ten lists, including
those of the New York Times, Rolling
Stone, Entertainment
Weekly, and the American Film
Institute. His third feature, The
Fountain, a science-fiction
romance that he wrote and directed, starred Hugh Jackman and Rachel
Weisz. Aronofsky’s most recent film, The
Wrestler, premiered in 2008 at
the Venice International Film Festival, where it won the Golden Lion,
making it only the third American film in history to win this prize.
Among his honors, the American Film Institute has awarded Aronofsky the
prestigious Franklin J. Schaffner Alumni Medal, and the Stockholm Film
Festival presented him the Golden Horse Visionary Award. His next
release, Black Swan, is a horror film set in the world of
ballet that stars Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis, forthcoming in late
fall 2010.

Scottish-born artist Douglas Gordon utilizes a variety of mediums, including
installation, video, and photography, to investigate memory and time.
For his landmark video 24 Hour
Psycho (1993), he slowed Alfred
Hitchcock’s 1960 film to last an entire day; the tension of this famous
thriller was heightened by the mesmerizing, protracted action. In 2006,
Gordon collaborated with artist Philippe Parreno on Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, a film that presents the movements
of French soccer star Zinedine Zidane in real time over the course of a
single match to create a complex study of portraiture and mediated
spectacle. Exhibited globally, Gordon's work has been the subject of
considerable critical attention. Gordon received the 1996 Turner Prize,
the Duemila Prize for best young artist at the 1997 Venice Biennale, and
the 1998 Hugo Boss Prize. In 2008 he received the Roswitha Haftmann
Prize and served as an International Juror at the 65th Venice
International Film Festival.

Ryan McGinley is a photographer whose work celebrates raw youth, with all its connotations of revolt, hedonism, and subversion. Subjects have
ranged from fans of the musician Morrissey (in the series Irregular Regulars,
2004–07), to nude young men and women playing and living in nature (I Know Where the Summer Goes, 2007–08) or captured in intimate
studio portraiture (Everybody
Knows This Is Nowhere, 2010). In
2003, at the age of twenty-five, McGinley became the youngest artist to
have a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art. McGinley has
been the recipient of two important photographic prizes, the ICP
Infinity Award for best young photographer from the International Center
of Photography in 2007 and American
Photo magazine’s Photographer
of the Year award in 2003. In addition to projects in which he documents
his own friends and community, McGinley has created editorial
portfolios for such publications as Index, Esquire, and the New
York Times Magazine, for which
he has photographed athletes at the 2004 summer and 2010 winter Olympic
games, 2007 Oscar nominees, and the singer M.I.A.

Artist Marilyn Minter merges high art with commercial imagery throughout her practice, which includes painting, video, and photography. Minter’s work
frequently focuses on the female body, creating hyperrealistic artworks
that offset sensuality with lurid colors. Her second video work, Green Pink Caviar
(2009), has been screened in locations around the world, including
Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, Times Square in New York, Madonna’s
2009 European tour, and, at present, the lobby of the Museum of Modern
Art, New York. The manipulation of glamour and desire, recurrent themes
for Minter, converged in her appropriation of Pamela Anderson’s iconic
pin-up image in a 2007 series of photographic portraits. Minter has
exhibited internationally, with notable solo shows organized by the San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2005); Center for Contemporary Art,
Cincinnati (2009); and La Conservera, Centro de Arte Contemporáneo,
Murcia, Spain (2009).

World-renowned Japanese artist Takashi Murakami blurs the boundaries between East and West, past and present, in his paintings, sculptures, and videos.
Influenced by such varied traditions as Japanese manga, anime, and
classical nihonga painting and Western Pop art, Murakami has developed a
unique practice that situates the artist at the cusp of high art and
mass culture. In his work as a curator, Murakami has organized such
seminal exhibitions of contemporary Japanese art and culture as Superflat
(2000) and Little Boy: The Art
of Japan’s Exploding Subcultures
(2005). As an entrepreneur, he promotes emerging artists through his
art production and management company Kaikai Kiki Co. Having exhibited
widely throughout the world, Murakami is currently preparing for an
exhibition at the Château de Versailles in September 2010.

Shirin Neshat is an Iranian-born artist/filmmaker living in New York. Neshat’s early photographic works, including the Unveiling (1993) and Women
of Allah (1993–97) series,
explored notions of gender in relation to Islamic fundamentalism and
militancy. Her subsequent video works departed from overtly political
content or critique in favor of more poetic imagery and narratives.
Neshat recently directed her first feature-length film, Women without Men,
which received the Silver Lion Award at the 66th Venice International
Film Festival in 2009. Neshat has been the subject of numerous solo
exhibitions at galleries and museums internationally, including the
Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Serpentine Gallery in London,
Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and
the Musee d’Art Contemporain de Montreal.

Stefan Sagmeister is one of today’s most innovative and influential graphic designers. His conception and application of graphic design goes above and beyond
traditional notions of the practice, taking it to the realm of
performative, conceptual, and installation-based art. Sagmeister is most
widely known for his album cover artwork for bands like the Rolling
Stones, Talking Heads, and Lou Reed, and for books like Mariko Mori’s Wave UFO
for the Kunsthaus Bregenz, which function as sculptural objects.

Working in both feature-length and short forms, Apichatpong Weerasethakul plays with
various narrative devices and nonlinear structures in his profoundly
expressive, lyrical films, which are produced in his native Thailand.
Exploring memory, political oppression, and spiritual quests, the works
blend naturalism with stylized, dreamlike sequences. Weerasethakul’s Syndromes and a Century was the first Thai film to be
selected for the Venice International Film Festival, where it premiered
in 2006 at the 63rd festival. Recent screenings and exhibitions of his
films and installations include Phantoms
of Nabua, Wexner Center for the
Arts, Columbus, Ohio; Moderne de la Ville de Paris/ARC (2009); and at Life on Mars,
55th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (2008–09), at which he was
awarded the inaugural Fine Prize. His feature films have won several
prizes from the Cannes International Film Festival, including the Prix
Un Certain Regard (2003), the Prix du Jury (2004), and for his most
recent film, Uncle Boonmee Who
Can Recall His Past Lives, the
prestigious Palme d’Or (2010).

Nancy Spector is the Deputy Director and Chief Curator of the Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum, where she oversees the acquisition strategy for the permanent
collection and the global exhibition calendar for the institution and
its affiliates. She has organized exhibitions on conceptual photography,
Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Richard Prince, Tino Sehgal, and Matthew
Barney’s Cremaster cycle. She was adjunct curator of the
1997 Venice Biennale and co-organizer of the first Berlin Biennale in
1998. She has contributed to numerous books on contemporary visual
culture with essays on artists such as Maurizio Cattelan, Luc Tuymans,
and Lawrence Weiner.