Alice Neel was born in 1900 in Merion Square, Pennsylvania, and died in 1984 in New York. With a practice spanning from the 1920s to the 1980s, Neel is widely regarded as one of the foremost American painters of the twentieth century. Based in New York, Neel selected her sitters from among her family members, friends, neighbors, and a variety of New Yorkers, and her eccentric portraits are thus a portrayal of, and dialogue with, the city in which she lived. Although she showed sporadically early in her career, from the 1960s onward her work was exhibited widely in the United States. In 1974, she had her first retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Hilton Als is a writer with focus in theater criticism. He became a staff writer at The New Yorker in 1994, a theater critic in 2002, and chief theater critic in 2013. His book White Girls (2013) discusses various narratives around race, identity, gender, and sexuality, and was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism.

Alex Fialho (he/they) is an art historian, curator, and PhD candidate in Yale University’s Combined PhD program in the History of Art and African American Studies. Fialho’s writing has been published in exhibition catalogs for the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, Socrates Sculpture Park, and the Andy Warhol Museum, among others.

Evan Garza is a curator, scholar, and a Curatorial Exchange Initiative Fellow at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts. Their writing on the work of global contemporary artists has been published in several books and monographs and by IMMA, The Drawing Center, Flash Art, ART PAPERS, Hyperallergic, and Artforum.

Wayne Koestenbaum—poet, critic, fiction-writer, artist, and filmmaker—has published over twenty books, including The Queen’s Throat, Camp Marmalade, Humiliation, and Hotel Theory. He is a distinguished professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center.