Julian Brave NoiseCat is a writer, filmmaker and student of Salish art and history. His first documentary, SUGARCANE, directed alongside Emily Kassie, premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival where NoiseCat and Kassie won the Directing Award in the U.S. Documentary Competition. NoiseCat is concurrently finishing his first book, We Survived the Night, which will be published by Alfred A. Knopf in North America, Profile Books in the United Kingdom and Commonwealth, Albin Michel in France and Aufbau Verlag in Germany. NoiseCat’s journalism has appeared in dozens of publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post and The New Yorker and has been recognized with many awards including the 2022 American Mosaic Journalism Prize. 

Tyler Green is an award-winning historian and critic who has produced and hosted The Modern Art Notes Podcast since 2011. Green is the author of Carleton Watkins: Making the West American (University of California Press, 2018), which won a 2019 California Book Award gold medal, and Emerson’s ‘Nature’ and the Artists (Prestel, 2021). Green’s next book, tentatively titled Claiming Yosemite: The Civil War, the California Genocide, and the Invention of National Parks is planned for 2025-26. He is also the co-founder (with Dr. Kelli Morgan) and director of The Darkwater Project, which contributes to the construction of an anti-racist US art history. 

Candice Hopkins is a citizen of Carcross/Tagish First Nation and lives in Red Hook, New York. Her writing and curatorial practice explore the intersections of history, contemporary art, and Indigeneity. She is Executive Director of Forge Project, Taghkanic, NY and Fellow in Indigenous Art History and Curatorial Studies, Bard College. Hopkins has curated several major exhibitions at the Hessel Museum of Art and Miller ICA, as well as serving as the Senior Curator for the inaugural 2019 and 2022 editions of the Toronto Biennial of Art and part of the curatorial team for the Canadian Pavilion at the fifty-eighth Venice Biennale. 

J. Drew Lanham is an ornithologist, naturalist, writer, poet, and an Alumni Distinguished Professor of Wildlife Ecology and Master Teacher in the Forestry and Environmental Conservation Department at Clemson University where he received a B.A. (1988), M.S. (1990), and a Ph.D. (1997). Lanham’s research and teaching focuses on the impacts of forest management on birds and other of the Audubon-Toyota Together Green initiative and a member of the advisory board for the North American Association of Environmental Education. He is the author of The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature (Milkweed Editions, 2016) and Sparrow Envy: Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts (Hub City Press, 2021). 

Xaviera Simmons (American, b. 1974) is an artist whose work spans photography, performance, video, sound, sculpture, and installation. She defines her studio practice as rooted in an ongoing investigation of experience, memory, abstraction, and history. Her work has been shown internationally at the ICA Boston, SFMOMA, The Phillips Collection (D.C.), National Museum of Women in the Arts (D.C.), Barnes Foundation, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Public Art Fund, and many others. She a visiting lecturer and the inaugural 2019 Solomon Fellow at Harvard University and was awarded The Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters from bard College in Summer 2020. 

Venus Williams With 7 Grand Slam titles, 5 Wimbledon championships and 4 Olympic gold medals, tennis champion Venus Williams is arguably one of the most accomplished and inspiring women in the history of sports. Beginning her rise to the top at the age of 14, Venus quickly took the world of tennis by storm, rising to the top-ranked position, breaking countless records, and winning numerous championships.