Xavier Cortada is an artist and professor of practice at the University of Miami Department of Art and Art History, with secondary appointments in the School of Law and the Miller School of Medicine. Cortada uses art’s elasticity to work across disciplines to engage communities in problem solving. Particularly environmentally focused, his work generates awareness and action around climate change, sea level rise, and biodiversity loss. Over the past three decades, the Cuban-American artist has created art at the North and South poles and across 6 continents, including more than 150 public artworks and dozens of installations, collaborative murals, and socially engaged projects. He has been commissioned to create art for CERN, the White House, the World Bank, and Miami City Hall, among many other art, science, history, and government venues.

Marie Griesmar is a Swiss artist that lives and works in Zurich. She often evokes the dialectic between visible and invisible as well as the phenomenology of perception through installations, sculpture, paintings and publications. She is particularly interested in water ecologies; the practice of scuba-diving has regularly enabled her to use the element of water as a space of creation, production or interaction. Deploying a range of references that combine contemporary philosophy with marine biology and aspects of post-structuralist theory, she develops a polysemic work imbued with formal, ecological and narrative research. In 2020 with two marine biologists, Marie co-founded rrreefs, an association aiming at restoring coral reefs.

Mark SubbaRao leads NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio, a group tasked with visualizing NASA science results for public audiences. Before joining NASA, Mark spent 18 years at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, where he produced planetarium shows and designed museums. During 2019-2020 Mark served as President of the International Planetarium Society (IPS), where he spearheaded the “Data to Dome” initiative – an effort to prepare the planetarium community for the big data era. Before that he worked at the University of Chicago where he was part of a team that created the largest 3D map of the Universe, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Mark’s visualizations have been widely featured in print, TV, museums, and even projected on the sides of buildings. His work has received significant recognition including the NSF’s Vizzies, and the naming of an asteroid (170009 Subbarao).