Gökçe Günel is Associate Professor in Anthropology at Rice University. Her latest book Spaceship in the Desert: Energy, Climate Change and Urban Design in Abu Dhabi (Duke University Press, 2019) focuses on the construction of renewable energy and clean technology infrastructures in the United Arab Emirates, more specifically concentrating on the Masdar City project. Currently, she is at work on a second book project provisionally titled Energy Accumulation. Dr. Günel co-authored “A Manifesto for Patchwork Ethnography” (2020), and co-leads Patchwork Ethnography.

Imani Jacqueline Brown is an artist, activist, writer, and researcher from New Orleans, based between New Orleans and London. Her work investigates the “continuum of extractivism,” which spans from settler-colonial genocide and slavery to fossil fuel production and climate change. In exposing the layers of violence and resistance that form the foundations of settler-colonial society, she opens space to imagine paths to ecological reparations. Among other things, she is currently a PhD candidate at Queen Mary, University of London, a research fellow with Forensic Architecture, and an associate lecturer in MA Architecture at the Royal College of Arts.

Les Cenelles is a contemporary string ensemble who explores the Creole diaspora through melody and memory to honor cultural ancestors and preserve the plurality of their experiences through a prismatic and contemporary lens.

Theodossis (Theo) Issaias is an architect and educator. He is associate curator at the Heinz Architectural Center at the Carnegie Museum of Art and Special Faculty at the Carnegie Mellon University School of Architecture. His PhD dissertation, “Architectures of the Humanitarian Front” at Yale University, explored the nexus of humanitarian organizations and architecture and their relation to conflict, displacement, and the provision of shelter. Since 2009, he has been practicing as a founding member of Fatura Collaborative, an architecture and research collective.

Ala Tannir is an architect and curator from Beirut. She is the inaugural Curatorial Research Fellow at the Carnegie Museum of Art’s Heinz Architectural Center, and currently teaches at the Carnegie Mellon University School of Architecture. She was part of the curatorial team and Managing Editor of Publications for the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale (2021), and co-organized the XXII Triennale di Milano, Broken Nature (2019). Her upcoming project utilizes exhibition-making as a process to record and rehabilitate a 1930s coastal house in Beirut to transform it into a research and cultural platform for the study of the Mediterranean landscape.

Eliza Evans’ work has been exhibited by NEW INC/New Museum at LaMama Gallaria, New York NY, the Bronx Museum, Missoula Art Museum, Austin Peay State University, Clarksville TN, Thomas Erben Gallery, New York, NY, Alexey von Schlippe Gallery, University of Connecticut, Edward Hopper House Museum, Nyack, NY, and BRIC, Brooklyn, and has appeared in the New York Times, Art in America, Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, and Dissent Magazine. A law review article on her work is forthcoming in the Cardozo Arts and Entertainment Law Journal. Residencies include the LMCC Art Center, the Art Law Program, National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, UC Santa Barbara, and Bronx Museum AIM. She is currently a member of NEW INC, the New Museum’s cultural incubator. She holds an MFA in visual art from SUNY Purchase and a PhD in economic sociology from the University of Texas at Austin. Evans was born in a rustbelt steel town and raised in rural Appalachia.

Cooking Sections examines the systems that organize the world through food. Using site-responsive installation, performance and video, they explore the overlapping boundaries between art, architecture, ecology and geopolitics. Established in London in 2013 by Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe, their practice uses food as a lens and a tool to observe landscapes in transformation. They have worked on multiple iterations of the long-term site-responsive CLIMAVORE project since 2015, exploring how to eat as humans change climates. In 2016 they opened The Empire Remains Shop.

Aviva Rahmani is a pioneering ecological artist that has devoted many years of her working life to teaching, inspiring, and leading others through her art to a renewed focus on ecological restoration as artmaking. Rahmani is at the forefront of her field in ecological art and exhibits, publishes, and presents internationally. She currently lives and works in Manhattan and Maine and has recently completed a residency with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council on Governors Island, New York.

 Mari Margil serves as the Executive Director of the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights (CDER) (centerforenvironmentalrights.org) and as program manager for CDER’s International Center for the Rights of Nature. In 2008, she served as a consultant to Ecuador’s national Constituent Assembly, helping to draft the world’s first rights of nature constitutional provisions. She is widely viewed as one of the leading global voices for the recognition of legally enforceable rights of ecosystems and nature. She is co-author of The Bottom Line or Public Health (Oxford University Press, 2010) and Exploring Wild Law: The Philosophy of Earth Jurisprudence (Wakefield Press, 2011).

Not An Alternative (NAA, est. 2004) is an art collective with a mission to affect popular understandings of events, symbols, institutions, and history. Through engaged critical research and design, the group produces interventions that disrupt and remodel material and immaterial space, bringing together tools from art, activism, architecture, and exhibition design. In the context of intensifying ecological crises, NAA created The Natural History Museum (NHM, 2014-present), a traveling, pop-up ‘museum for the movement’. Unlike traditional museums, NHM highlights the socio-political forces that shape the natural and built environment. The collective is represented here by co-founders Beka Economopoulos and Jason Jones, and Steve Lyons.

Nida Rehman is a Pakistani-born urban geographer and architect, and Assistant Professor of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University. She researches uneven histories, politics, and ecologies of urban landscapes and how people engage urban nature to create possibilities for change. Her recent publications include articles in IJURR, Antipode, Planning Perspectives, and Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. She is the co-founder of the South Asian Urban Climates collective and recipient of the 2022 SOM Foundation Research Prize and the 2019 Urban Studies Foundation seminar series award.

Edith Abeyta lives in Braddock, Pa. and has been active for many years in the fight against unlawful pollution from the nearby U.S. Steel Edgar Thomson Plant. She is a member of a residents advocacy group, North Braddock Residents for Our Future, which actively fought against a plan to put gas wellpads in close proximity to more than 1,000 residents.

Archbishop Marcia Dinkins, executive director of Black Women Rising, launched the Black Appalachian Coalition (BLAC) on June 18, 2021, as an initiative to ensure accurate and inclusive accounts are being told. In addition to her roles at Black Women Rising and BLAC, Archbishop Dinkins serves as the part-time executive director for Ohioans for Sustainable Change (formerly Ohio Interfaith Power and Light). Archbishop Dinkins brings a wealth of knowledge to this work, with a background in community organizing related to domestic violence, health and safety, education, climate, environment, employment and criminal justice. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Interdisciplinary and Women and Gender Studies (University of Toledo) and a Master of Arts in Criminal Justice and Policy (Youngstown State University). Currently, Archbishop Dinkins is a Ph.D. candidate at Union Institute and University focusing on Public Policy and Social Change.

Hilary Flint is a mission-driven leader with experience in community engagement, fundraising and communications. As a cancer survivor and affected resident, she’s determined to protect others from corporate greed and the health harms generated by the petrochemical industry. Hilary is Director of Communications and Community Engagement at Beaver County Marcellus Awareness Community and Vice President of Unity Council for the East Palestine Train Derailment.

Shaun Slifer is a multi-disciplinary artist, nonfiction author, and museum professional based in Pittsburgh. His creative practice fundamentally investigates memory, directly challenging the oppression of currently-dominant historical narratives, both social and ecological. He has worked as the Creative Director at the award-winning West Virginia Mine Wars Museum since 2015. Shaun is a founding member of the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative, and an original member of the now-disbanded Howling Mob Society. In 2022, he worked as the lead designer with the community-based public memory project Courage in the Hollers, part of Monument Lab’s 2022 Re:Generation cohort. His investigative people’s history book, So Much To Be Angry About: Appalachian Movement Press 1969-79, was released on West Virginia University Press in March, 2021.

Pep Avilés is Assistant Professor at the Department of Architecture, College of Arts and Architecture, Penn State University. His academic research explores the impact media had in the redefinition of materials in modernism after World War II. Avilés taught previously at Columbia University, The Cooper Union, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, and the Barcelona Institute of Architecture, where he was appointed head of graduate studies. He is the editor of the Spanish edition of Siegfried Ebeling’s 1926 publication Der Raum als Membran, (2015), the journal Faktur: Documents and Architecture, and founding principal of the experimental architectural platform The Fautory.

Laia Celma is an architect and co-founder of The Fautory, a collaborative architectural platform with ongoing projects in Chile, Barcelona, and New York. She is Assistant Teaching Professor of Architecture at the Department of Architecture, College of Arts and Architecture, Penn State University. She worked at Foreign Office Architects from 2004 to 2008, and at Snøhetta from 2010 to 2016, where she developed the design of the Environmental Science Museum in Guadalajara, Mexico, the Far Rockaway Library in New York, and the Queen’s University Performance Centre, in Canada, among other projects. In 2010, she was awarded the FAD “Professional en Incubacio” award, in Barcelona, Spain.

Rania Ghosn is Associate Professor of Architecture and Urbanism at the MIT School of Architecture and Planning and founding partner, with El Hadi Jazairy, of the studio DESIGN EARTH. Her practice engages the speculative project as a medium to make public the climate crisis and the technological systems that underpin it. The work of DESIGN EARTH is in the New York Museum of Modern Art permanent collection and has been widely exhibited. Ghosn is co-author of Climate Inheritance (2023), Geostories: Another Architecture for the Environment (3rd ed. 2022; 2018), The Planet After Geoengineering (2021), and Geographies of Trash (2015). She is founding member of the journal New Geographies and editor-in-chief of its issue titled Landscapes of Energy (2010).