Pamela Karimi is an architect and historian whose work bridges the Middle East and the wider world. She earned her Ph.D. from MIT and has taught at Cornell, the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, Brandeis, NYU, and Wellesley.

Her research explores how art, architecture, and environmental change intersect with social and political life. Her current book, Survival by Design, looks at desert architecture and environmental transformation in arid regions from the Cold War to today. Her award-winning Alternative Iran (2022) examines how Iranian artists and designers navigate restrictive state regulations, while her forthcoming book documents the grassroots art of Iran’s 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom uprising.

Karimi’s work travels well beyond Iran, from preserving cultural heritage in the Middle East to reimagining post-industrial cities in North America. She has coedited The Destruction of Cultural Heritage: From Napoleon to ISIS, and curated the acclaimed Black Spaces Matter exhibition.

Featured by NPR, BBC, The Washington Post, and more, Karimi brings scholarship into public conversation — connecting past and present, local and global, to reframe how we see art, design, and the spaces we share.

Mark Jenkins is a celebrated American artist known for his hyperrealistic street sculptures that transform urban spaces into theatrical stages. Working primarily with packing tape and plastic wrap, he casts lifelike human figures and places them in unexpected environments—such as dumpsters, rooftops, and fountains—inviting city dwellers to become active participants in his works. These provocative installations often spark confusion, surprise, and even police responses.

Jenkins’s projects have garnered global exposure, with displays across the U.S., Brazil, Europe, Russia, South Korea, and beyond; his work appears in prestigious venues like the Centre Pompidou, Kunsthalle Wien, and Beirut Art Center. Notable highlights include the Greenpeace collaboration Plight of the Polar Bears (2008), the impactful Project84 suicide awareness installation (2018), and partnerships with brands like Balenciaga.

Blurring the line between reality and illusion, Jenkins invites viewers to question perception and join the narrative—making the street his stage, and the public his cast.

Shannon Jackson is an arts and humanities scholar whose work moves fluidly between performance, visual culture, and social practice. She is the Cyrus and Michelle Hadidi Professor of the Arts & Humanities and Chair of History of Art at UC Berkeley, where she also leads the Environmental Arts & Humanities Initiative.

Her writing and projects explore how artists work across disciplines and how the arts engage public life. She’s the author of Back Stages: Essays Across Art, Performance, and the Social and The Human Condition: Media Art from the Kramlich Collection, along with landmark books on art, institutions, and social change. Shannon has collaborated with museums, festivals, and civic groups worldwide, shaping projects that range from online platforms for experimental performance to site-specific dialogues on art and landscape.

A Guggenheim Fellow, she’s spoken at venues from Tate Modern and MoMA to the Venice Biennial, and has worked closely with cultural partners across the Bay Area. She also directs programs for the Kramlich Collection, advises Tippet Rise Art Center, and is a founding board member of the Minnesota Street Project Foundation.

Harmen de Hoop is a conceptual and street artist renowned for his anonymous, often unauthorized interventions in public spaces. He uses humor, surprise, and bold ingenuity to challenge how urban rules, signage, and architecture shape daily life. De Hoop’s sharp-edged interventions reveal hidden tensions between civic control and spontaneous human expression by recontextualizing everyday objects or altering familiar environments — inviting passersby to view their surroundings in a fresh, questioning light.

Since the late 1980s, he’s shifted from indoor interloping to thoughtful, site-specific street actions that disrupt routines and provoke new perspectives. De Hoop meticulously scouts locations, then executes interventions that are both playful and politically charged — whether it’s chalk murals, altered street signage, or spontaneous performances — later documenting them in exhibitions and publications.

His work has been exhibited globally, from the São Paulo Architecture Biennale and the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal to festival platforms like Nuart in Norway. It’s been featured in international art journals and catalogues, and he frequently lectures on art, urban theory, and civic space.

Lily H. Chumley is an anthropologist and Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University’s Steinhardt School, where she brings linguistic curiosity and semiotic insight to the dynamics of creativity in contemporary China. Her award-winning book Creativity Class: Art School and Culture Work in Postsocialist China (Princeton University Press, 2016) draws on over two years of fieldwork to explore how Chinese art students navigate institutional pressures, aesthetic self-styling, and the promise of creative futures.

Chumley’s research spans semiotics, education, and the cultural economy, with publications in Anthropological Quarterly and Anthropological Theory. Before joining NYU, she earned her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, where her dissertation—on creativity and structural aesthetics in post‑socialist China—won the Richard Saller Prize  .

Engaging with students, activism, and academic networks, she has co‑organized research collectives like Oikos: Gender, Kinship, Money, Economy, connecting theory with real-world social forms