Felipe Ribeiro is a visual artist and independent curator, currently based in Switzerland. He is a visiting researcher at HKB – Bern Academy of Arts, he has been a visiting scholar in the Transdisciplinarity Master’s program at ZHdK – Zurich University of the Arts since 2022, where he teaches performance art, decoloniality, and global south perspectives. Ribeiro is also an Associate Professor in the Graduate Programs of Dance Studies and Performing Arts at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

His academic background includes a Master’s degree in Cinema Studies from NYU, and a PhD in Visual Arts from Rio de Janeiro State University, partially completed at NYU’s Performance Studies Department. His research, “Revolving Actions,” merges durational performance, image-making, and land art, stemming from his early work in experimental filmmaking.

Ribeiro’s performances have been featured in major festivals across South America, as well as in Hamburg, Zurich, and Lisbon. From 2009 to 2013, he developed Trilogy of the Image, a series of staged works combining video, essayist texts, and performance. In 2018, he had his first solo exhibition in Rio de Janeiro, and in 2022, he presented [not] here, a duo exhibition at Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire in collaboration with Swiss artist Sarah Burger. His collaborative projects include artists such as Simone Aughterlony, Eleonora Fabião, Denise Stutz, and Vinicius Arneiro.

Felipe Ribeiro is also a founding member and artistic director of Atos de Fala, an international festival dedicated to speech acts and performance, which has been held annually in Rio de Janeiro since 2011. In 2019, the festival collaborated with zurich moves! festival, supported by Pro Helvetia and Swissnex Brazil and co-curated and co-produced with Marc Streit, Head of Arts and Creative industries at Swissnex in Boston and New York.

In addition to his curatorial and performance work, Ribeiro is the author of Ruminations: Performance Art in Between Pleasure and Resistance, published in Brazil in 2022 and soon to be re-released in Portugal.

Simone Aughterlony is an independent artist based in Zurich and Berlin, working predominantly in dance, performance and visual art contexts. They have been devising queer-spirited choreographic works over the last sixteen years. Engaging with alternative forms of kinship inside their process, new constellations emerge as possibilities for reconfiguring a culture of togetherness that foster both familiar and unknown quantities. Their works playfully compose with representation and its saturation, seeping into and embracing the phenomenology of mis-recognition and the absurd. Aughterlony approaches art making as an experiential practice where they navigate the contradiction between the domination of desire alongside the agency of all elements. They regularly teach at academic institutions such as ZHdK – Zurich University of the Arts, Manufacture in Lausanne and DAS Art Amsterdam amongst others as well devising and facilitating laboratory formats and frames for sharing and producing knowledge. In 2020 together with Marc Streit they founded Imbricated Real, an independent structure for contemporary art practice.

Jack Halberstam is the David Feinson Professor of The Humanities at Columbia University. Halberstam is the author of seven books including: Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Duke UP, 1995), Female Masculinity (Duke UP, 1998), In A Queer Time and Place (NYU Press, 2005), The Queer Art of Failure (Duke UP, 2011), Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (Beacon Press, 2012) and, a short book titled Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variance (University of California Press). Halberstam’s latest book, 2020 from Duke UP is titled Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire. Places Journal awarded Halberstam its Arcus/Places Prize in 2018 for innovative public scholarship on the relationship between gender, sexuality and the built environment. Halberstam is now finishing a book titled Anarchitecture AMer Everything, which will be published by MIT Press in 2026. Halberstam was recently named a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow.

Jen Rosenblit makes performances based in Berlin after over a decade of working in NYC. Rosenblit invests in the problems that arise inside agendas of being together, often chipping away inside seemingly impossible spaces. Rosenblit hosts complex narratives of intimacy and autonomy, allowing for content to be emergent rather than determined as the body negotiates repetition, disruption, meaning and memory as we encounter others. Rosenblit’s performance work departs from preciousness and sentimentality in hopes of locating a more potent relevance for how we read and relate to constellations of things happening over time. Reaching for a heightened subtlety of experience by engaging sensation with visual information, the multiplicity of the body as an experiential culture unfolds. Rosenblit builds space for the viewer to experience indentation, for eyes that find molding and packaging, or the revealing and concealing of information to suggest utility as the poetic. The work exists out of bounds, off center, aligning itself to phenomenology rather than images. This research takes time, to perceive things, to relate and re-relate to all things as mattering.

A.K. Burns is an interdisciplinary artist and educator, working at the nexus of language and materiality. The process of coming to matter is set in relief against that which is prescribed to not matter: redacted histories, waste and subordinated beings. It is this generative space of ‘non-mattering’ that Burns’ amplifies with criticality and humor—parsing the systemic assessment, assignment and maintenance of valuation and its resulting hierarchies.

A.K. Burns has recently exhibited a solo survey exhibition in 2023 at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio and at the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA in 2024. Additionally, Burns has exhibited internationally including Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, UK; Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France; MMK Museum of Modern Art, Frankfurt, Germany; FRONT International: The Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art, Cleveland, OH; and The Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA. A.K. Burns is a 2023 Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin; 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, was a recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters 2021 Art Purchase Program, was a 2018 NYSCA/NYFA Fellow in Interdisciplinary Art, a 2016 Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University, and a 2015 Creative Capital Foundation Visual Arts Award recipient. A frequent collaborator; Burns was a founding member of W.A.G.E (Working Artists in the Greater Economy) in 2008—an artists’ advocacy group that remains active as a non-profit certification organization for Arts Institutions nationally. A.K. Burns is an Associate Professor and MFA Co-Director at Hunter College, Department of Art & Art History. Burns is currently represented by Michel Rein Gallery, Paris/Brussels, and Video Data Bank, Chicago.

Ryan McNamara is a Brooklyn-based artist who works in performance, video, photography, drawing and sculpture. His work has been featured at MoMA PS1, The Guggenheim New York, Dallas Symphony Orchestra, ICA Boston, Perez Art Museum Miami, ICA London, The Garage Moscow, The Power Plant Toronto, the Athens Biennale and The High Line New York. He teaches performance in the Hunter College MFA program and his work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

Avgi Saketopoulou is a Cypriot and Greek psychoanalyst practicing in NYC. She serves on the faculty of the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis and her publications have received numerous prizes. Her interview on psychoanalysis is in the permanent holdings of the Freud Museum (Vienna) and her monograph, Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia (NYU Press, 2023) braids psychoanalysis with performance studies, philosophy, and queer of color critique to explore consent’s erotics, the vicissitudes of overwhelm, and the aesthetics of repetition. She is co-author, with Ann Pellegrini, of Gender Without Identity (UIT Press, 2023), and in critical conversation with Dominique Scarfone in The Reality of the Message: Psychoanalysis in the Wake of Jean Laplanche (UIT Press, 2023). She is currently working on her next book project provisionally titled The Offer of Sadism. Her love of psychoanalysis and of queers is rivaled only by her love of motorcycles.