Marisa received her BA from Vassar College and her Ph.D. from Columbia University, with a focus on American Art and the History of Photography. Marisa Kayyem is an Associate Professor at Christie’s Education, where she is the Director of the Short Courses and leads the continuing education offerings. She has taught at several institutions, including George Washington University, Columbia University, Rutgers University and the International Center of Photography before joining Christie’s Education. She has lectured on a variety of subjects including Contemporary Photographers, Themes in Contemporary Art, and Emerging Photographic Practices at a variety of museums and institutions. Marisa’s expertise also includes Art Business. She has lectured globally on such topics as The Power of Today’s Collector, The Value of Contemporary Art, and The Auction House as a Business.

With a background as a visual artist, Irene Tsatsos is recognized as an artist-centered curator with a practice oriented toward artistic collaboration and production. She is currently the Gallery Director / Chief Curator at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, CA, a position she has held since 2010. From 1997 until 2005, Tsatsos was the executive director of Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE). Prior to that, she worked at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York where she coordinated the 1997 Biennial. Between LACE and her Armory appointment, Tsatsos maintained an independent curatorial and writing practice, collaborating with individual artists and renowned institutions such as the Getty, the Annenberg Foundation, The Fowler Museum at UCLA, and The California Community Foundation.

Tsatsos is exploring her ongoing interest in social spaces generated by alternative art practices through her research for a forthcoming exhibition and publication entitled Aesthetic Experiments and Social Agents: Renegade Art and Action in Mexico in the 1990s, which she developed in conjunction with the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative.

Seb Patane was born in Catania, Italy in 1970; Today he lives and works in London. Patane’s research, between abstraction and figuration, moves between the fascination for narration and its shape as a fragment. The artist uses a variety of sources, from cinema to literature, from news to the history of art in order to assemble and reconstruct images, through video, photographs, sculptures and installations, where the layering of different materials expresses the ambiguity of the archetype, with all its symbolic power.

His most recent solo exhibitions include: Abdomen, Galleria Fonti, Naples, Italy (2014/2015); The Foreigners stand still, Fondazione Giuliani, Rome, Italy (2013); Year of Corn, International Art Objects, Los Angeles, USA (2011); 400 Sonnets in Reverse, Together, Kunsthalle Mulhouse, France (2011); Seb Patane, Maureen Paley, London, UK (2009); So this song kills fascists, Art Now, Tate Britain, London, UK (2007).

Achieving unprecedented success as the youngest curator in China, Xiaoyun Zhang vision is to represent the younger generation of artists on the international art scene. Mentored and deeply influenced by Won-il Rhee, Xiaoyun assisted the great curator in preparing for, as well as curating the Nanjing Biennale in 2008. Since then, she had managed multiple curatorial projects in both Nanjing and the United States, including the Sinamerica I (2015), Interaction (2014), New Fountain of Ink (2013) and others. Xiaoyun Zhang is the founder and president of Arts Without Borders Foundation, a non-profit organization focused on promoting art and culture across borders.

Holly Myers is a writer, critic and curator currently based in New Mexico. Her art writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the LA Weekly, the New York Times, Art Review, Art + Auction and Modern Painters, among other publications. She is the co-editor of Rabble, an imprint of Insert Blanc Press that aims to foster innovative critical writing. Her fiction has appeared in the Antioch Review, Zyzzyva and Joyland. Her story “The Guest House” was anthologized in New California Writing 2012 (Heyday) and an excerpt of her first novel was published in “Gen F: An Anthology of Short Stories for the Comic Tragedies of Our Times.” A collection of her stories and other short works is forthcoming in 2016, through Insert Blanc Press.