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Barry Bluestone is the Stearns Trustee Professor of Political Economy, the founding Director of the Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy, and the founding Dean of the School of Social Science, Urban Affairs, and Public Policy at Northeastern University in Boston. Before assuming these posts, Bluestone spent 12 years at the University of Massachusetts at Boston as the Frank L. Boyden Professor of Political Economy and as a Senior Fellow at the University's John W. McCormack Institute of Public Affairs. In 1982, he published The *Deindustrialization of America *(co-authored with the late Bennett Harrison) which analyzed the restructuring of American industry and its economic and social impact on workers and communities. A sequel published in 1988, *The Great U-Turn: Corporate Restructuring and the Polarizing of America*, also co-authored with Harrison, investigated how economic policies have contributed to growing inequality.

Dr. Rodney Brooks is a robotics entrepreneur and founder, chairman and CTO of Heartland Robotics, Inc. He is also a founder, board member and former CTO (1991 - 2008) of iRobot Corp and the Panasonic Professor of Robotics (on leave) at MIT. Dr. Brooks is the former director (1997 - 2007) of the MIT Artificial Intelliigence Laboratory and then the MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He received degrees in pure mathematics from the Flinders University of South Australia and a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1981. He held research positions at Carnegie Mellon University and MIT, and a faculty position at Stanford before joining the faculty of MIT in 1984. He has pubished many papers in computer vision, artificial intelligence, robotics, and artificial life. Dr. Brooks is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), a founding fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (AAAS), a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (the other AAAS), a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), a corresponding member of the Australian Academy of Science (AAS) and a foreign fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (ATSE). He won the Computers and Thought Award at the 1991 IJCAI (International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence). He has been the Cray lecturer at the University of Minnesota, the Mellon lecturer at Dartmouth College, and the Forsythe lecturer at Stanford University. He was co-founding editor of the *International Journal of Computer Vision* and is a member of the editorial boards of various journals including *Adaptive Behavior*, *Artificial Life*, *Applied Artificial Intelligence*, *Autonomous Robots* and *New Generation Computing*. He starred as himself in the 1997 Errol Morris movie *Fast, Cheap and Out of Control* named for one of his scientific papers, a Sony Classics picture.

She has traveled extensively, has written non-fiction on South African subjects and made TV documentaries, collaborating with her son Hugo Cassirer on the television film *Choosing Justice: Allan Boesak*. She was responsible for the script of the 1989 BBC film, *Frontiers*, and for four of the seven screenplays for a television drama based on her own short stories, entitled *The Gordimer Stories 1981-82*. She has also published, in forty languages, thirteen novels and ten short story collections. Her first short story was published at the age of fifteen in the liberal Johannesburg magazine, *Forum*, and during her twenties, her stories appeared in many local magazines. In 1951 the *New Yorker* took one of her short stories. Her short story collections include "A Soldier's Embrace" (1980); "Something Out There" (1984); and "Jump and Other Stories" (1991). *Loot* (2003), is a collection of ten short stories widely varied in theme and place. Nadine Gordimer's subject matter in the past has been the effect of apartheid on the lives of South Africans and the moral and psychological tensions of life in a racially-divided country, which she often wrote about by focusing on oppressed non-white characters. She was an ardent opponent of apartheid and refused to accommodate the system, despite growing up in a community in which it was accepted as normal. Her work has therefore served to chart, over a number of years, the changing response to apartheid in South Africa.

Ann Dumas, an independent scholar and curator based in London, is co-curator (with Timothy Standring) of Inspiring Impressionism. Her field of interest is 19th and early 20th century French painting. She is affiliated with the Royal Academy of Arts with whom she has curated a number of exhibitions, including Matisse: His Art and His Textiles, and 1900: Art at the Crossroads, and Paris: Capital of the Arts for which she was co-curator. For the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Dumas curated The Private Collection of Edgar Degas and From Czanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant Garde. Also a consulting curator for the Columbus Museum of Art, Dumas recently curated Renoirs Women and The Last Landscapes of Degas for that institution. She began her career as a research assistant at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, and worked as an associate curator at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Dumas studied the history of art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, England.

John McWilliams acquired his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. He is currently the Director of the Georgia State University School of Art and Design, and has been a part of the GSU faculty since 1969. McWilliams has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. While McWilliams is primarily a photographer, his current work incorporates drawing and bookmaking processes. His artwork is in a number of private and corporate collections including the Modern Museum of Art, New York, the Fogg Museum at Harvard University, and at the Smithsonian Museum of american Art. In addition, McWilliams has been published in numerous periodicals and books including Land of Deepest Shade: Photographs of the South as well as Sea Change: The Seascape in Contemporary Photography. Besides his personal and professional engagements as a photographer and educator, McWilliams is committed to a number of professional/civic activities. Most recently he was appointed to represent Georgia State University as a member of the Fulton County Arts Council. He has also served on the Board of Directors of the High Museum Photo Forum, Nexus Contemporary Arts Center as well as the Atlanta Photography Group.

Manthia Diawara is presently chair of the Africana Studies Department at New York University. Prof. Diawara received his PhD from Indiana University in 1985. His dissertation on the politics and aesthetics of African cinema formed the basis for African Cinema, published in 1985 by Indiana University Press. Since then, Dr. Diawara has edited the volume *Black American Cinema*, published by Routledge in 1993 in addition to publishing widely in journals.

Dr. Taylor's research focus is primarily in the areas of assessment of programs and curricula and the establishment of criteria for the evaluation of two- and four-year college and university academic programs. Reports which he has prepared include Assessing Music Industry Programs, Evaluative Standards in Music Industry Programs and Economic Impact of the Music Industry in Georgia. The focus of Dr. Taylor's research in the area of African-American music is on the elements of African culture that were retained, altered and adapted to New World conditions and that subsequently generated new African-American musical forms. Within this culture-derived context, he examines new theoretical frameworks and applied methodology, and analyzes New World Africanisms in the arts. His research seeks to open the field of African-American music to the testing of analytical and speculative hypotheses and cross-disciplinary studies involving dance, theater, poetry, literature, visual arts and Latin and Caribbean music.

Stan Woodard is an artist living and working in Atlanta, GA. He works primarily with found materials to create installations and objects. Multimedia regularly figures into his installation work and he produces stand-alone multimedia, video, audio, and interactive digital works as well. Taking an archeological approach to found materials he often comments on the histories of places and objects. Woodard is a recipient of the KBFUS (King Baudouin Fellowship US) award. Woodard has been exhibited in Atlanta, New York, Hong Kong and regionally.