Dr. Ksenia M. Soboleva is a New York based writer and art historian specializing in queer art and culture. She holds a PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, with a dissertation titled “Fragments: Art, AIDS, and Lesbian Identity in the United States.” Her writings have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, BOMB Magazine, Hyperallergic, art-agenda, and various exhibition catalogues. She has curated exhibitions at Candice Madey Gallery, La MaMa Galleria, and Assembly Room. Soboleva was the 2020-2021 Vilcek Curatorial Fellow at the Guggenheim Museum, where she assisted in organizing the Gillian Wearing: Wearing Masks exhibition. She is currently the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Gender and LGBTQ+ History at the New York Historical Society.

Rachel Stern (b. 1989, NYC) is a photographer whose work considers the intersection of beauty and power. Stern turns to the tableaux and the proscenium in order to create a strong dialogue between the histories and uses of kitsch and leftist aesthetics. Using materials culled from strip malls and thrift stores she creates images which ask art and visual culture to enter into a discourse of accessibility and, in the spirit of ‘bread and roses’,  demand immediate access to beauty. Her work images a world that might be, built out of the world that is. It is a kitsch paradise, a queer-washed history, and an attempt at hope. She received her BFA in Photography and the History of Art and Visual Culture in 2011 from the Rhode Island School of Design, attended Skowhegan in 2014, and graduated from Columbia University in 2016 with an MFA in Visual Arts. Her work has been featured in BOMB, The Boston Globe, The New York Times, ArtFCity, Hyperallergic, and Matte Magazine.

Le’Andra LeSeur is a multidisciplinary artist whose work encompasses a range of media including video, installation, photography, painting, and performance. LeSeur’s body of work, a celebration of Blackness, queerness, and femininity, seeks to dismantle systems of power and achieve transcendence and liberation through perseverance. Through the insertion of her body and voice into her work, she provides her audience with an opportunity to contemplate themes such as identity, family, Black grief and joy, the experience of invisibility, and what it means to take up space as a queer Black woman—a rejection of the stereotypes which attempt to push these identities to the margins.

Paul Legault is the author of, most recently, The Tower (Coach House Books, 2020). His previous books include The Madeleine Poems (Omnidawn, 2010), The Other Poems (Fence, 2011), a Lambda Literary Award Finalist, The Emily Dickinson Reader: An English-to-English Translation of the Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (McSweeney’s, 2012), Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror 2 (Fence, 2016), and Lunch Poems 2 (Spork, 2018). He also co-edited The Sonnets: Translating and Rewriting Shakespeare (Nightboat, 2012).