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Yael Farber is an award-winning director and playwright of international acclaim. She worked extensively at the famous Market Theatre in Johannesburg, winning three BEST DIRECTOR awards in her native South Africa. In 2003 she was named ARTIST OF THE YEAR in recognition of the body of work she had created. She is renowned for socio-politically hard-hitting, powerful works of high artistic standard. Her original texts are published by Oberon Books (London, UK), and the productions have toured across the USA, the UK (including runs in the West End and at the Barbican Theatre), Canada, Australia, Japan, Europe and Africa. She has won a SCOTSMAN FRINGE FIRST AWARD, THE ANGEL HERALD AWARD and A SONY GOLD AWARD. She has been nominated for A DRAMA DESK AWARD in USA; a TMA BEST DIRECTOR AWARD in UK. She is a past invitee of Lincoln Theatre Directors' Workshop, has been a resident artist at Mabou Mines Theatre Company in New York, created a new piece on commission for Haus de Kulttur in der Wereld in Berlin and developed an original text at the Sundance Theatre Laboratory. She is currently Head of the Directing Program at the National Theatre School in Montreal, Canada. Her commissioned adaptation of THE RAMAYANA will play at The Culture Project (NY) next year, as will MOLORA - her radical reworking of the Oresteia Trilogy. Ms. Farber is presently Playwright-in-Residence for Nightwood Theatre (Toronto, Canada) creating an adaptation of Iphigenia, look at Honor Killings. She will take up a short residency at University of Maryland next year, to initiate her adaptation of a King Lear set in the Middle East. Ms. Farber's productions (past, current and upcoming) are created and toured under her company The Farber Foundry.

Michael Fitzpatrick is the recipient of the Prince Charles Award for Outstanding Musicianship conferred by H.R.H. the Prince of Wales. He has worked musically with His Holiness the XIVth Dalai Lama for the past fourteen years on COMPASSION RISING, the East-West music collaboration filmed and recorded inside Mammoth Cave, the largest cave in the world. Based in Los Angeles, he performs as soloist around the world.

Dinh Q. Le was born in Ha-Tien, Vietnam. He received his BA in Art studio at UC Santa Barbara and his MFA in Photography and Related Media at The School of Visual Arts in New York City. In 1993, Le returned to Vietnam and in 1996 Le settled down in Ho Chi Minh City. Le's work has been exhibited worldwide. His recent solo exhibitions include, A Tapestry of Memories: The Art of Dinh Q. Le at the Bellevue Art Museum, Washington State; Destination for the New Millennium, The Art of Dinh Q. Le, at the Asia Society, New York. He currently has an exhibition, Project 93: Dinh Q. Le, at MoMA, New York. He was also included in the 55th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, 2009 City Visions Festival, Mechelen, Belgium; 2008 Singapore Biennale; Thermocline of Art exhibition at ZKM in Germany; the 5th Asia Pacific Triennial at Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane Australia; The Gwangju Biennial 2006, Korea; Infinite Painting, Villa Manin, Italy; Only Skin Deep at the International Center for Photography, New York; Delays and Revolutions, Venice Biennale 2003. His work is in the collections of Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Portland Art Museum; The Bronx Museum, New York; The Queensland Gallery of Modern Art; Singapore Art Museum; Fukuoka Asian Art Museum. Besides being an artist, Le also co-founded Vietnam Art Foundation-VNFA based in Los Angeles, an organization that supports Vietnamese artists and promotes artistic exchange between cultural workers from Vietnam and around the world. Through VNFA, Le and three other artists co-founded San Art, a not for profit gallery in Ho Chi Minh City. He is currently on the Arts Network Asia Peer Panel and Asia Society Global Council.

Carroll Smith-Rosenberg is the Mary Frances Berry Collegiate Professor of History, American Culture and Women's Studies, Emerita, University of Michigan. Her two best known books are: Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America and This Violent Empire: The Birth of an American National Identity. This Violent Empire traces US racism, violence and paranoia to the formation of the new American nation and the adoption of the Federal Constitution. While at the University of Michigan she founded and directed the University's Atlantic Studies Initiative, 1999-2008. The Atlantic Studies Initiative has three principal starting points: (1) that modernity, as we understand it, took form through Atlantic connections: the emergence of an imperial Europe; global capitalism, traced back to the beginnings of the Atlantic slave trade and plantation slave economies in "the New World;" the modern, mobile and fragmented subject; the novel, etc. etc. (2) that events in one part of the Atlantic are intricately connected to events in other parts of the Atlantic and (3) the North Atlantic cannot be understood in isolation from the South Atlantic of Africa, South America and the Caribbean. Her present book project, Atlantic Citizenship, traces the origins of modern citizenship to the Revolutionary Atlantic of the late 18th and early 19th centuries and sees it as the product of complex interactions among the four violent Atlantic events: The US, French, Haitian Revolutions and efforts in the 1790s to establish an Irish Republic. It asks how did these new republics constitute the modern citizen. What rights could the citizen claim and most critically, who could claim citizenship? Who had "the right to have rights?" It focuses on the complex triangulation of race, slavery and gender, using them to examine the contradictions and ambivalence lying at the heart of both citizenship and liberal thought more generally. The coexistence of slavery with Enlightenment liberal celebrations of the "transcendent and equal dignity of all persons" is only the most obvious example of such contradictions. A second lies even closer to the conundrum citizenship poses. Enlightenment thinkers celebrated the universal principles of man's equality and inalienable rights. But do these rights depend on membership in a republican body politic or, transcending the geopolitical state, do they reside in a person's inherent humanity? But what if states refuse to recognize a person's inalienable rights? Does "the people's" right to control who belongs to their body politic trump the claims to inalienable rights of those excluded? Popular sovereignty/ universal rights, twin concepts of the Enlightenment, counter one another. Atlantic Citizenship takes this conundrum back to its origins and asks what effect the Haitian Revolution had upon the development of citizenship in the "white Atlantic" -- not only the violence of the slave revolt itself but the very fact of an independent, self-governing black republic. Robin Blackburn claims that the Haitian Revolution instilled "a permanent panic" in the White Atlantic. Does that panic continue to inform exclusionary visions of citizenship in the US, Europe and Great Britain?

Mark Danner is a writer and reporter who for twenty-five years has written on politics and foreign affairs, focusing on war and conflict. He has covered Central America, Haiti, the Balkans, Iraq and the Middle East, among many other stories. Danner is Professor of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley and James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs, Politics and the Humanities at Bard College. Among his books are Stripping Bare the Body: Politics Violence War, Torture and Truth, The Secret Way to War, and The Massacre at El Mozote. Danner was a longtime staff writer at The New Yorker and is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. His work has appeared in Harper's, The New York Times, Aperture, and many other newspapers and magazines. He has co-written and helped produce two hour-long documentaries for the ABC News program Peter Jennings Reporting, and his work has received, among other honors, a National Magazine Award, three Overseas Press Awards, and an Emmy. In 1999 Danner was named a MacArthur Fellow. He speaks and lectures widely on foreign policy and America's role in the world.

Emmanuelle Ertel is an Assistant Professor of French literature and of translation at New York University. Her translations of American novels into French include Louis Begley’s The Man Who Was Late and As Max Saw It, Rick Moody’s The Black Veil, and Tom Perrotta’s Little Children. Her current work focuses on North African and Caribbean fiction and poetry, and more broadly, on the poetics of biculturalism, bilingualism, and diglossia.

David Taylor earned an MFA from the University of Oregon and a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University. His photographs, multimedia installations, and artist's books have been exhibited in group and solo exhibitions at venues that include the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College, Chicago, Illinois; and The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut. Taylor's work is in the permanent collections of, Fidelity Investments, Boston; and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Palace of the Governors/New Mexico History Museum among others. The New Yorker Magazine Online, The Los Angeles Times, Orion Magazine, PREFIX PHOTO, and the Mexico/Latin America Edition of Esquire Magazine have all featured his images. Taylor has completed recent major commissions for artwork that is installed in the U.S. Border Patrol Station in Van Horn, Texas and the United States Federal Courthouse in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Taylor's ongoing examination of the U.S. Mexico border was supported by a 2008 Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and a monograph of Working the Line has just been released by Radius Books.

Rabbi Irwin Kula is Co-President of Clal–The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership a do-tank committed to making Jewish a Public Good. A thought leader on the intersection of innovation, religion, and human flourishing, Irwin has worked with leaders from the Dalai Lama to Queen Noor and with organizations, foundations, and businesses in the United States and around the world to inspire people to live with greater passion, purpose, creativity and compassion. Named one of the leaders shaping the American spiritual landscape, he received the 2008 Walter Cronkite Faith and Freedom Award for his work “toward equality, liberty and a truly inter–religious community” and has been listed in Newsweek for many years as one of America’s “most influential rabbis.” He is the Co-founder and Executive Editor of The Wisdom Daily. A popular commentator in both new and traditional media, Irwin is the author of the award-winning book, Yearnings: Embracing the Sacred Messiness of Life (2006), creator of the acclaimed film, Time for a New God (2004), and the Public TV series Simple Wisdom (2003), and is co-founder with Craig Hatkoff and Clay Christensen of the Disruptor Foundation.

Shirin Neshat, is an Iranian born artist/filmmaker whose work addresses the complex social and religious forces shaping the identity of Muslim women. Neshat was recognised for her portraits of women overlaid with calligraphy in the Women of Allah series. She also directed several video installations, among them are: Rapture (1999), and Turbulent (1998), which won her the International Award at the 48th Venice Biennial. Her solo museum exhibitions include shows at the Whitney Museum, New York; The Museum of Contemporary Arts, Athens; The Serpentine Gallery, London; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin and Musee d'Art Contemporain de Montreal. Women Without Men is her feature directorial debut.

Mary Louise Pratt received her B.A. in Modern Languages and Literatures from the University ofToronto in 1970, her M.A. in Linguistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana in 1971, and her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Stanford University in 1975. Pratt has received numerous honors and awards during her 27 years in academia including Guggenheim Fellowships, Pew Foundation Fellowships, and NEH grants. She served as the President of the Modern Language Association in 2003. Pratt's arc of expertise extends through Latin American Literature and Latin American Studies, into comparative literature, linguistics, postcolonial studies, feminist and gender studies, anthropology and cultural studies. Her seminal publications within these disciplines include: Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (1992), an explanation on the discursive formation of Latin America and Africa as formulated by metropolitan writers; it has been called one of the most widely influential works of the last decade. Her other publications include the article "Humanities for the Future: Reflections of the Stanford Western Culture Debate," which was reprinted three times. Another article, "Arts of the Contact Zone" had nine reprints and has been dubbed a contemporary classic by scholars within the field. Her 1977 single authored text, Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse established Pratt as leader in the field of culture criticism. Professor Pratt's most recent work as a critic and scholar broach the most vital and important questions shaping the present and the future of humanities, in specific, Pratt stresses the dynamic relations between high culture and popular movements, between gendered narratives and official legends, between national politics and global markets. She is a firmly grounded Latin Americanist, comparatist and linguist with an interdisciplinary and imaginative breadth of knowledge.

Kurt Shickman is the Director of Research for EFC. He received his Masters degree with a focus on Energy Policy and Economics in 2007 from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). Prior to SAIS, Mr. Shickman worked in consulting and corporate finance for several international firms including Royal Ahold, MCI Worldcom, and Federal Realty Investment Trust.

Raffi Freedman-Gurspan is the Legislative and Policy Staffer for the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition. She is also the LGBT Liaison for the City of Somerville, and works part-time at the Women's Studies Program at Boston University. Adopted from Central America and raised in the Greater Boston area, Raffi has a strong multicultural background and has worked continuously since high school on human rights issues, including LGBT matters. A graduate of St. Olaf College Northfield, Minnesota in Political Science, she hopes to pursue a career in public policy-making.