Lisa Armstrong is an award winning journalist and professor at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism and has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Texas Tribune, The Atlantic, The Intercept, The Daily Beast, and Rolling Stone.
Amir Aziz, a documentary and news photographer based in Oakland, California, is dedicated to the intersection of social impact and community-driven storytelling. Grounded in his upbringing in Oakland, Amir utilizes photography and documentary filmmaking as tools for truth-telling, seeking to raise awareness within and beyond his community.
Judith Butler is the author of many books, including Gender Trouble, Precarious Life, and The Force of Nonviolence. They have been the recipient of numerous grants and prizes and helped to build Critical Theory at UC Berkeley. They taught for many years in the Department of Comparative Literature and they are currently Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School at UC Berkeley. Their forthcoming book is Who's Afraid of Gender?
Maurya Kerr is a Bay Area-based choreographer, poet, performer, educator, filmmaker, and the artistic director of tinypistol. Much of her work is focused on black and brown people reclaiming their birthright to both wonderment and the quotidian. Maurya was a member of Alonzo King LINES Ballet for twelve years, and was recently named ODC's Resident Curator for 2024/25.
Ronald Rael is the Eva Li Memorial Chair in Architecture in the Department of Architecture in the College of Environmental Design, and is also a member of the art faculty in the Department of Art Practice. His research interests connect indigenous and traditional material practices to contemporary technologies and issues and he is considered to be a design activist, author, and thought leader within the topics of additive manufacturing, borderwall studies, and earthen architecture.
Claudia Rankine is a New York based poet and playwright. Among her numerous awards and honors, Rankine is the recipient of the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, the Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the National Endowment of the Arts. A former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Claudia Rankine joined the NYU Creative Writing Program in Fall 2021.
Luanne Redeye is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art Practice and a portrait and figurative artist working at the intersection of autobiography and community. Whether her art touches on the native experience, identity, or resiliency, Luanne’s work is always created through a native lens sharing her experiences, knowledge, and perspective of navigating a modern world as a native woman.
Boots Riley is a director, activist, screenwriter, producer, poet, rapper, and speaker. His directorial debut Sorry to Bother You premiered to strong critical acclaim at the Sundance Film Festival. By embedding messages regarding economic and class critique as well as politically progressive movement building into dystopian science fiction satire, Sorry To Bother You brought issues surrounding income inequality into wide public discussion in the United States and abroad.
Julie Rodrigues Widholm, Executive Director, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA).
Debarati Sanyal is Professor of French and director of UC Berkeley's Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry. Her books include The Violence of Modernity: Baudelaire, Irony and the Politics of Form and Memory and Complicity: Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance. She is completing a book titled Arts of the Border: Fugitive Bodies at the Edges of Europe.
Darieck Scott is a professor of African American Studies at UC Berkeley. Scott is the author of Keeping It Unreal: Black Queer Fantasy and Superhero Comics (NYU Press, 2022), which won the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ+ Studies.