Liza Sylvestre is a transdisciplinary artist and a Research Assistant Professor within the College of Fine and Applied Arts at UIUC where she has co-founded the initiative Crip*––Cripistemologyand the Arts (Crip*). Her work has been shown internationally at venues including the Plains Art Museum (Fargo), Weisman Art Museum (Minneapolis), Roots & Culture (Chicago), Soap Factory (Minneapolis), Soo Visual Arts Center (Minneapolis), John Hansard Gallery (Southampton, UK), ARGOS (Brussels), MMK (Frankfurt, Germany), MIT List Visual Arts Center (Cambridge), Collective (Edinburgh, Scotland), and Marta Herford (Herford, Germany). Sylvestre has been the recipient of both an Artists Initiative and an Arts Learning grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, a fellowship through Art(ists) on the Verge, and most recently she has been named a 2021 Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellow and a 2022 Louis Comfort Tiffany Fellow. She has been artist-in-residence of the Weisman Art Museum and the Center for Applied and Translational Sensory Science (CATSS). In 2019 she received a Citizens Advocate Award from the Minnesota Commission of the Deaf, DeafBlind, and Hard of Hearing (MNCDHH). Sylvestre work has been written about in Art in America, Mousse Magazine, OculaMagazine, Art Monthly, SciArt Magazine and others.

Rotem Tamir is an artist from Israel who migrated to the United States in 2011. Currently she serves as Assistant Professor in Sculpture at the Department of Art at the University of Minnesota. Her work has been exhibited at venues including Locust Projects, Miami, FL; the Harn Museum, Gainesville, FL; Kav 16 Community Gallery for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv; BCA Center, Burlington, VT; Artists’ House, Tel Aviv, among others. Tamir has been awarded residencies at Sculpture Space, Utica, NY; Seven Below Arts Initiative, Burlington, VT; Art OMI International Arts Center, among others. She received the Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship award; the Artis Exhibition Grant from artiscontemoprary.org, New York, NY, and she is 2021 McKnight Fellow.

Christopher Robert Jones is an artist, writer, and Research Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). They are the co-founder of Crip*—Cripistemology and the Arts (Crip*), a transdisciplinary initiative that is housed within the College of Fine and Applied Arts. Their recent Blue Description Project, made in collaboration with Liza Sylvestre and Sarah Hayden, will be screening this Spring and Summer at Gene Siskel Film Center (SAIC), MIT List Visual Arts Center, Whitney Museum of American Art, Personal Space Gallery, Weatherspoon Art Museum, and BFI Southbank Center.

Jessica A. Cooley (she/hers) is a scholar-curator working at the intersection of curatorial and museum studies, disability studies and crip theory, and Modern and contemporary art. Cooley holds a PhD in art history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her first book project centers on what she calls “crip materiality” and will forward a new methodology to address how ableism affects the understanding and valuation of the very fibers of art materials within curatorial and conservation discourses. Cooley was a guest curator for the Ford Foundation Art Gallery in NYC from 2020 – 2022 where she co-curated a multi-year online and physical exhibition titled Indisposable. From 2006–2010, she was the assistant curator at Davidson College’s Van Every/Smith Galleries where she curated numerous exhibitions including RE/FORMATIONS: Disability, Women, and Sculpture. Currently, Cooley is the ACLS Emerging Voices Fellow at the University of Minnesota’s Liberal Arts Engagement Hub.