Terry Smith, FAHA, CIHA, is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh, and Distinguished Visiting Professor, National Institute for Experimental Arts, College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales. In 2010 he was named Australia Council Visual Arts Laureate by the Australian Government, and won the Mather Award for art criticism conferred by the College Art Association (USA). He is the author of Making the Modern: Industry, Art and Design in America (University of Chicago Press, 1993; inaugural Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Book Prize 2009); Transformations in Australian Art, volume 1, The Nineteenth Century: Landscape, Colony and Nation, and volume 2, The Twentieth Century: Modernism and Aboriginality (Craftsman House, Sydney, 2002); The Architecture of Aftermath (University of Chicago Press, 2006), What is Contemporary Art? (University of Chicago Press, 2009), Contemporary Art: World Currents (Laurence King and Pearson/Prentice-Hall, 2011), and Thinking Contemporary Curating (Independent Curators International, 2012).

Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy is Curator of the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros in New York. Previously, she was the Director of the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City since 2009 and was Curator and Programs Manager at Art in General from 2003-2008, where she developed a New Commissions Program. Originally from Mexico, she graduated from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in 2000. In the past decade, she has worked at Art in General, Americas Society and CCS Bard; curated exhibitions for Kadist Art Foundation in Paris, the Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires (MALBA), and the Center for Contemporary Art in Vilnius, Lithuania; and worked closely on projects with a number of artists, including Allora & Calzadilla, Alejandro Cesarco, Mario García Torres, Andrea Geyer, Sharon Hayes, and Judi Werthein. She lectures regularly on contemporary art, and publishes frequently in exhibition catalogs, art magazines and in her blog Sideshows.org. She is a board member of Kunstverein, Amsterdam, and an agent of the upcoming Documenta 13.

Curator, author and researcher into the politics of aesthetics and artistic practices, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev was Artistic Director of dOCUMENTA (13), which took place in Kassel, Germany, from June 9 – September 16, 2012. Previously, she was Chief Curator at the Castello di Rivoli Museum for Contemporary Art from 2002–08, and interim director for 2009. She was Senior Curator at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center – a MoMA affiliate, New York, from 1999–2001. Her publications include William Kentridge (Bruxelles, 1998), Arte Povera (London, 1999), and the 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts series (Kassel, 2011–2012). Her exhibitions include The Moderns, Turin (2003), Faces in the Crowd, London and Turin (2004), the first edition of the Turin Triennale (2005), and in 2007–08 she was Artistic Director of the 16th Biennale of Sydney: Revolutions - Forms That Turn (2008).

Jens Hoffmann is Director of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco. He has curated over three-dozen exhibitions since the late 1990s. He was Director of Exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London from 2003 to 2007. Hoffmann is an adjunct professor at the California College of the Arts, San Francisco, a guest professor at the Nuova Accademia de Belle Arti, Milan, and a faculty member at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He was the co-curator for the 12th Istanbul Biennial in fall 2011.

Mary Jane Jacob is currently Professor and Director of Exhibitions at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has been exploring art outside the museum context since 1990 organizing groundbreaking programs that have tested the boundaries of public space and the relationship of contemporary art to audience. Jacob is a curator and author noted for her work on the national and international art scene. Two anthologies for which she is co-editor are Learning Mind: Experience Into Art (University of California Press, Fall 2009) and The Studio Reader (University of Chicago Press, Spring 2010). Jacob’s current major program is “Living Modern Chicago,” a collaboration of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Mies van der Rohe Society/Illinois Institute of Technology, in partnership with other cultural institutions in Chicago.

Julian Myers is an art historian whose writing has appeared in Documents, October, Afterall, Frieze, Fillip, Artforum, Tate Papers, and elsewhere. His interests are focused on sculpture and spatial politics of the 20th century, the social and political dynamics of consumer society, and the socio-historical frameworks for contemporary art and exhibitions. Recent publications include Hopelessness Freezes Time, a study of earthworks, drawing, Detroit, urban warfare and guerrilla historiography, co-authored with artist Edgar Arceneaux (Kunstmuseum Basel, 2011); and “Earth Beneath Detroit,” an essay for the catalogue Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974 (Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2012); and “Attitudes and Affects,” on the 1969 exhibition When Attitudes Become Form (CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco, 2013). He holds a doctorate in the history of art from the University of California, Berkeley (2007). In 2009 he received an Arts Writers Grant from Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation. He is an associate professor at California College of the Arts, a member (with Joanna Szupinska) of the curatorial collaboration grupa o.k., and is on the editorial board of The Exhibitionist.