Teju Cole is an essayist, photographer, curator, and the author of Open City (2011) and Blind Spot (2017), among other books. His honors include the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Internationaler Literaturpreis, the Windham Campbell Prize, the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His photography has been the subject of solo exhibitions in Milan, Berlin, Zürich, and New York, and he has given several distinguished lectureships. Originally trained as an art historian, he has written the “On Photography” column for The New York Times Magazine since 2015. Born in the US and raised in Nigeria, Cole is currently the Gore Vidal Professor of the Practice of Creative Writing at Harvard University.

Hal Foster (b. 1955) has been a force in American art criticism since the late seventies, bringing psychoanalytic and poststructural theory to bear on contemporary art and its historical precedents. In 1983 he edited the anthology The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, which helped frame postmodernism within the arts. Foster began to write for Artforum in 1978 and was a senior editor at Art in America (1981–1987) before becoming a coeditor of the journal October in 1991, and contributes frequently to Artforum, October, and the London Review of Books. He is the Townsend Martin, Class of 1917, Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University.