Charlie Kaufman wrote the screenplays for Being John Malkovich, Human Nature, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, for which he won an Academy Award for best screenplay.

Kip Thorne is the Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics, Emeritus, at Caltech. He was the co-founder (with Rai Weiss and Ron Drever) of the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory) Project and he chaired the steering committee that led LIGO in its earliest years.

Oliver Sacks, a physician and author, has been called “the poet laureate of medicine” by The New York Times. His books and essays, including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and An Anthropologist on Mars, are used in schools and universities around the world.

Fabien Cousteau is an ocean explorer, the third generation to carry on the tradition of adventure pioneered by his grandfather Jacques Cousteau. His Natural Entertainment company works to raise environmental awareness through television and other media.

Marcela Carena is an internationally renowned expert on revolutionary ideas in particle physics, ideas about to be tested at the Large Hadron Collider. She has worked closely with experimental physicists at the Fermilab and CERN laboratories developing strategies for discovery at the world’s highest-energy particle colliders.

Debra Fischer is a planet hunter who has discovered hundreds of worlds orbiting other stars, most of them gas giants, like Jupiter or Saturn. She is currently working to detect lower mass, Earth-like planets.

Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Philip Glass is a graduate of the University of Chicago and the Juilliard School. In the early 1960s, Glass spent two years of intensive study in Paris with Nadia Boulanger and while there, earned money by transcribing Ravi Shankar’s Indian music into Western notation.

John Lithgow’s many Broadway appearances include The Changing Room, My Fat Friend, Trelawney of the Wells, Comedians, Anna Christie, Once in a Lifetime, Spokesong, Bedroom Farce, Beyond Therapy, Requiem for a Heavyweight, The Front Page, M. Butterfly, and Sweet Smell of Success.

Buzz Hays is one of the pioneers in the field of 3D production, who in recent years was responsible for overseeing the adaptation of standard-release feature films into three-dimensional stereoscopic versions for the IMAX 3D and Real D platforms.

Liev Schreiber is considered one of the finest actors of his generation with a repertoire of resonant, humanistic and often-times gritty portrayals that have garnered him with praise in film, theater, and television. He most recently appeared in the contemporary action thriller Salt with Angelina Jolie from director Phillip Noyce.

Kelli O’Hara recently starred in the Tony Award-winning revival of South Pacific at Lincoln Center, enrapturing audiences and critics alike with her interpretation of Nellie Forbush, garnering a third Tony-nomination in the process.

Seth Shostak is an astronomer, lecturer and the author and editor of several books, including the 2009 Confessions of an Alien Hunter: A Scientist’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (National Geographic). For much of his career, he conducted radio astronomy research on galaxies.

Lawrence Weschler was for over 20 years a staff writer at The New Yorker, where his work shuttled between political tragedies and cultural comedies. He is a two-time winner of the George Polk Award, for Cultural Reporting in 1988 and Magazine Reporting in 1992, and was also a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award.

Since 2001 AL Holmes and AL Taylor have created an award winning body of films commissioned by Animate, Arts Council England, BFI, Channel 4 television, Cornerhouse Cinema, FACT gallery, Film London, MuHKA, Southbank Centre and the World Science Festival, exhibiting internationally in galleries, site specific installations, film festivals, television and concert halls.

Robert Anderson has a message that resonates with audiences as he talks of building the smallest team to ascend Everest’s largest face, without oxygen.

Over the course of his career, Harrison Ford has become one of the most popularly acclaimed actors of our time. His body of work includes 41 feature films, eleven of which have exceeded $100 million each at the box office.

Danny Burstein is a native New Yorker who got his Equity card at 19 and has been working ever since in summer stock, regional theatre, movies, television and on and off Broadway.

Emmy, Golden Globe and Tony Award-winning actress Glenn Close is best known for her riveting performances of complex women. The star of Damages for FX, Close’s portrayal of the high-stakes litigator Patty Hewes won her both an Emmy Award as “Best Actress in a Drama Series” and a Golden Globe for “Best Actress in a TV Drama.”

Colin McGinn is a professor and Cooper Fellow at University of Miami. In 2006, he joined the UM philosophy department, having taught previously at University of London, University of Oxford, and Rutgers University.

Mia Barron is a theater, film and television actress. Her stage credits include Springtime for Henry and Heartbreak House, She Stoops to Comedy and Hedda Gabler. She appeared in 27 Dresses with Katherine Heigl and also has a recurring role as the voice of Molotov in the cartoon network’s The Venture Brothers.

Emily Levine has recently upgraded herself to Emily 3.0. Emily 1.0 was a stand-up comedian, appearing in comedy clubs and on Dave Letterman’s Late Night TV show, among others. Emily 2.0 was a television writer/producer, working on shows such as Designing Women, Love and War, and Dangerous Minds. She has created and produced pilots for ABC, NBC, CBS, and HBO.

Kurt Andersen is the author of two novels, the critically acclaimed bestsellers Heyday and Turn of the Century. His forthcoming book is called Reset: How This Crisis Can Restore Our Values and Renew America. He is also host and co-creator of the Peabody Award-winning public radio program Studio 360.

Peter Galison is the Pellegrino University Professor of the History of Science and of Physics at Harvard University. He is a leading historian of science whose research explores the interaction …

Anthony LaPaglia is the Tony, Emmy and Golden Globe-winning actor currently starring as FBI Missing Persons investigator Jack Malone in CBS’s popular television crime drama, Without a Trace. LaPaglia has appeared in a number of films, including Summer of Sam, Sweet and Lowdown, The House of Mirth, and Lantana.

Doug Liman is an American film director and producer, whose credits include The Bourne Identity (2002), The Bourne Supremacy (2004), and The Bourne Ultimatum (2007).

James Schamus is CEO of Focus Features, and an associate professor at Columbia University’s School of the Arts in New York City, where he teaches film history and theory.

After graduation from Oxford in 1964, Michael York joined the National Theatre company, making his film debut in The Taming of the Shrew. His more than 60 other screen credits include Romeo and Juliet, Cabaret, Jesus of Nazareth, The Three Musketeers, Logan’s Run, Murder on the Orient Express, Conduct Unbecoming, The Omega Code and all three Austin Powers movies.

Anna Ziegler is a playwright, whose plays have been developed at The Sundance Theatre Lab, O’Neill Playwrights Conference, Williamstown Theatre Festival, New York Stage and Film, and Soho Rep, among others, and are published by Dramatists Play Service. An upcoming collection will be published by Oberon Books. She is a graduate of Yale and holds an M.F.A. in dramatic writing from Tisch.

Recognized for his contributions to sleep research, Carlos H. Schenck has helped identify a wide range of extreme sleep behaviors known as parasomnias and therapies to treat them, as well as their potential forensic consequences.

Heather Knight is an electrical engineer and social roboticist who runs Marilyn Monrobot in New York, where she and her cohort create “charismatic machine performances,” as well as founding the world’s first Robot Film Festival. Knight is currently conducting her doctoral research at the intersection of robotics and entertainment at Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute.

Mathematician, researcher, writer and radio presenter Marcus du Sautoy has contributed to the Times, Daily Telegraph, Independent and the Guardian. For several years, he wrote a regular column in the Times called Sexy Science. He is also a frequent commentator on BBC radio and television.

Since a young age, Mike Cahill would experiment with filmmaking on Fisher Price and VHS camcorders. He began working for National Geographic, first as an intern, but within a few months, he became the youngest field producer, editor, and cinematographer on the NG staff.

Brit Marling is a rising actress, writer, and producer, whose emerging talent made a mark at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival as the first female multi-hyphenate to have two films premiere side by side.

Rob Morrow is an actor, writer, and restaurant owner who is best known for his portrayal of Joel Fleishman in the hit TV series Northern Exposure. In the course of his career, he has been nominated multiple times for Golden Globe and Emmy Awards; he was most recently seen in the Rob Reiner film The Bucket List.

Robert Shaye is a businessman, film producer, and director. He is also the founder of New Line Cinema that, following an early success with the classic horror movie A Nightmare on Elm Street, went on to back numerous highly successful films.

Louie Psihoyos (rhymes with Sequoias) has been widely regarded as one of the top photographers in the world. He was hired directly out of college to shoot for National Geographic and created images for the yellow-bordered magazine for 18 years.

Bob Balaban recently received an Emmy nomination for directing Joan Allen and Jeremy Irons in Georgia O’Keeffe (Lifetime). He received three 2008 Emmy Award nominations, two for directing and producing the HBO film Bernard and Doris, and the third for his performance in Recount.

Known internationally for presenting work of exceptional inventiveness and physical beauty, MOMIX is a company of dancer-illusionists under the direction of Moses Pendleton. In addition to stage performances world-wide, MOMIX has worked in film and television, recently appearing in a national commercial for Hanes underwear and a Target ad that premiered during the airing of the 67th Annual Golden Globe Awards.

Allison Janney was nominated for Best Supporting Actress at the 2011 Independent Spirit Awards for her role in Todd Solondz’s film Life During Wartime. In addition, she has completed production on the independent feature The Oranges alongside Catherine Keener and Hugh Laurie.

David Morse has long been recognized as an actor of great talent and versatility in film, television, and theater. His most recent film credits include Drive Angry opposite Nicholas Cage, Passengers with Anne Hathaway and the Oscar-winning film The Hurt Locker directed by Kathryn Bigelow.

John Leventhal is a Grammy-winning musician, producer, songwriter, and recording engineer who has produced albums for Michelle Branch, Rosanne Cash, Marc Cohn, Shawn Colvin, Rodney Crowell, Jim Lauderdale, Joan Osborne, Loudon Wainwright, The Wreckers, and many others.

Brent Sexton was born in St. Louis, Missouri. Prior to settling in Los Angeles to pursue a career in Film and Television, he spent four and half years touring theatrically throughout Europe and the United States. Sexton played Harry Manning on HBO’s critically acclaimed series, Deadwood and he is also known for playing Officer Bobby Stark on the NBC series, Life.

Mike Daisey has been called “the master storyteller” and “one of the finest solo performers of his generation” by The New York Times for his groundbreaking monologs, gonzo journalism, and unscripted performance to tell hilarious and heartbreaking stories that cut to the bone.

Maggie Gyllenhaal was most recently seen on stage in Austin Pendleton’s production of Three Sisters at the Classic Stage Company in New York City. Her other stage credits include Uncle Vanya, also at CSC, Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul at BAM and the Mark Taper Forum, and Patrick Marber’s award-winning Closer at the Mark Taper Forum and Berkeley Rep.

In 1998, Julie Taymor became the first woman to win the Tony® Award for Best Direction of a Musical, and also won a Tony® for Best Costumes, for her landmark production of The Lion King. The musical has won three Molière Awards including Best Musical and Best Costumes, garnered Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle and Drama League awards for Taymor’s direction.

Mike Francis portrays Galileo and the Stargazer’s Apprentice using over thirty years of professional acting experience on stage, film, and television.

Lynette Wallworth is an Australian artist whose immersive video installations reflect on the connections between people and the natural world.

Jeffrey Eugenides grew up in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, and attended Brown and Stanford Universities. His novel Middlesex was the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Ambassador Book Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, France’s Prix Medicis, and the Lambda Literary Award.

Tim McHenry, the program producer at New York City’s Rubin Museum of Art, presents theater-going audiences with what the Huffington Post has called “some of the most original and inspired programs on the arts and consciousness in New York City.”

LeVar Burton has been capturing the admiring attention of both audiences and his industry peers for three decades and continues to enjoy longevity truly rare within the industry. His deftness in avoiding stereotype continues to be a hallmark of an incredibly diverse career.

David Brancaccio is a correspondent for the radio program Marketplace produced by American Public Media. He hosted Marketplace for ten years after serving as a London-based correspondent for the program.

David Kuhn, a musician, singer, songwriter, performer was one of the original musicians chosen for both the development and Broadway productions of Pete Townshend’s Tony Award-winning rock opera The Who’s Tommy.

Debra Monk has starred on Broadway in Curtains, Chicago; Reckless; Thou Shalt Not; Ah, Wilderness!; Steel Pier; Company; Picnic; Redwood Curtain; Nick and Nora; Pump Boys and Dinettes. Off-Broadway, she has appeared in Love, Loss, and What I Wore; Show People; The Seagull; The Time of the Cuckoo; Death-Defying Acts; Three Hotels; Assassins; and Oil City Symphony.

Drew Gehling was an original cast member of the revival of the classic musical On A Clear Day You Can See Forever where he played the role of Warren to critical acclaim alongside the incomparable Harry Connick, Jr.

From Broadway and regional theatre to television and films, James Naughton has won critical acclaim in dramas, comedies, and musicals. Naughton has appeared on-screen in The Devil Wears Prada, Childless, Factory Girl, and Suburban Girl.

Todd Ellison is one of the most accomplished music directors on Broadway, having worked on productions of Annie, Spamalot, Cats, and more. His international credits include directing Jerry Hadley, Dawn Upshaw, and the Dublin Film Orchestra.

Abbey O’Brien can be seen on stage and film alike, appearing in Pal Joey and TV’s SMASH. She was notably part of the original, Tony Award winning cast of Spamalot.

Eitan Grinspun is associate professor of computer science at Columbia University, and Director of the Columbia Computer Graphics Group. His research seeks to discover connections between geometry, physics, and computation.

The Babycastles story has been one of opening new cultural territory for independent video games by inserting them aggressively into new spaces. This includes DIY punk-houses, Brooklyn music culture, art galleries, wearable games dance parties, and the Museum of Modern Art.

James Casey is a Brooklyn-based conservation biologist. Currently, Casey is an Adjunct Laboratory Instructor in the Department of Biology at Barnard College of Columbia University and the Screenings Director for Wicked Delicate Films LLC—a documentary film and advocacy company.

Laura Allen is the editorial producer of the American Museum of Natural History’s Science Bulletins program, which produces video and visualization for exhibition at the museum and other public spaces that highlight cutting-edge scientific research and issues.

A graduate of the University of Minnesota/Guthrie Theater B.F.A. actor training program, Michael Roush moved to New York City to act with the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival. Following that season, he worked to bring We Happy Animals, a new play by Andrew Kramer, to the Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Festival where he originated the role of Ben.

Gregory Hildreth has appeared in Broadway shows such as Cinderella, Peter and the Starcatcher, and Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson. His Off-Broadway credits include roles in Peter and the Starcatcher (New York Theatre Workshop), and Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson (The Public Theatre).

Santino Fontana was raised on the west coast, went to school in the Midwest, and currently lives in New York. After graduating from the Guthrie Theater/University of Minnesota’s Actor Training Program he played the title role in Hamlet at the Guthrie at 23.

Clarke Thorell is currently playing Rooster Hannigan in the Broadway revival of Annie. He made his Broadway debut in The Who’s Tommy, and originated the roles of Corny Collins in Broadway’s Hairspray and Jim Farrell in Titanic.

David Chase has been a Music Director, Supervisor and/or Arranger for over 25 Broadway productions, including Cinderella, Nice Work If You Can Get It, How To Succeed In Business…, Anything Goes, Billy Elliot, Evita, Elf, Promises, Promises, The Little Mermaid, Curtains, and The Pajama Game.

Musa Syeed is a writer and director. His first feature, Valley of Saints won the World Cinema: Dramatic Audience Award and the Alfred P. Sloan Film Prize at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. The film will have a theatrical release later this summer. He previously co-produced the award-winning documentaries, Bronx Princess and A Son’s Sacrifice.

Peter Staley has been a long-term AIDS and gay rights activist, first as a member of ACT UP New York, then as the founding director of TAG, the Treatment Action Group. He served on the board of the American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR) for 13 years.

Sarah Robertson is an independent wildlife and science documentary producer and director specializing in the Arctic for 20 years. In 2007, Robertson was awarded the Lowell Thomas Award in recognition of excellence in exploring climate change.

Scott McVay is founding executive director of the Robert Sterling Clark and Geraldine R. Dodge Foundations, and the 16th president of the Chautauqua Institution. A graduate of Princeton, he discovered and documented the six-octave song of the Humpback whale and, with Roger Payne, published a cover article in Science.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is a retired American professional basketball player. He is the NBA’s all-time leading scorer, with 38,387 points. During his career with the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks and the Los Angeles Lakers, Abdul-Jabbar won six NBA championships and a record six regular season MVP Awards.

Garth Stevenson is a Brooklyn-based film composer and double bassist. Raised in the mountains of Western Canada, nature became his primary inspiration and the common thread between his life and music. He has released two full-length solo albums, informed by his experiences carrying his 150-year-old double bass to the woods, the beach, and the desert.

Maia Guest trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama, London, and has worked in theater, television and film in London, New York, Los Angeles, and throughout the United States. She can be currently seen playing a scientist in BYUtv’s new period scripted drama, Granite Flats, and has appeared on shows on PBS, VH1, BBC, MTV.

Joel and Ethan Coen direct, produce and write their films and are among today’s most honored and respected filmmakers.

Carter Burwell has composed the music for many feature films written, directed, and produced by the Coen Brothers, including Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Miller’s Crossing, Barton Fink, Fargo, The Man Who Wasn’t There, No Country for Old Men, Burn After Reading, A Serious Man, and True Grit.

Alec Baldwin has appeared in more than 40 films, including Beetlejuice, Working Girl, Miami Blues, The Hunt for Red October, Glengarry Glen Ross, Malice, The Juror, The Edge, Ghosts of Mississippi, State and Main, The Cat in the Hat, The Cooler, The Aviator, The Departed, and It’s Complicated.

The Metropole Orchestra is the world’s largest professional pop and jazz orchestra. Renowned for its wide-ranging abilities, the Metropole Orchestra performs anything from chansons to World-music, film-scores, Rock- or Pop-tunes as well as high-octane jazz.

Siu-Lan Tan is Professor of Psychology at Kalamazoo College. She served as primary editor of The Psychology of Music in Multimedia published by Oxford University Press 2013.

Carolyn Porco is the leader of the imaging science team on the Cassini mission presently in orbit around Saturn, a veteran imaging scientist of the 1980 Voyager mission to the outer solar system, and an imaging scientist on the New Horizons mission on its way to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt.

Dana Karwas is a media artist and educator working in video installation, architecture, live data visualization, and experimental film. She is an Instructor of Integrated Digital Media at NYU’s Polytechnic School of Engineering.

Hilary Peddicord is a science educator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Her work supports the Science On a Sphere program, which uses a massive globe and projection system to explain storms, climate change, and other atmospheric patterns.

R. Luke DuBois is the director of the Brooklyn Experimental Media Center at the NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering, and is on the Board of Directors of the ISSUE Project Room. He holds a doctorate in music composition from Columbia University, and has lectured and taught worldwide on interactive sound and video performance.

Victoria Weeks is a filmmaker and the founder of Verglas Media, a production company focused on inspiring audiences through the partnership of art and science. Spending over a decade as a science media producer for NASA, Weeks specialized in spherical filmmaking and was the editor of Footprints, the original film for Science On a Sphere (SOS).

Before embarking on his film career, Mark Levinson earned a doctoral degree in particle physics from the University of California at Berkeley. In the film world, he became a specialist in the post-production writing and recording of dialogue known as ADR (Automated Dialog Replacement).

Francesca Faridany can currently be seen in NBC’s hit series Manifest as Dr. Fiona Clarke and she also appears in the movie Black Panther. Other credits include Broadway: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, Macbeth, Man and Boy, The 39 Steps, The Homecoming.

Cynthia Nixon made her film debut in Little Darlings at 12 years old and her Broadway debut at 14 in The Philadelphia Story. Since then she’s appeared in over 40 plays, countless films and television shows, and received Emmy, Grammy, and Tony Awards.

Jim Dwyer is a columnist with The New York Times, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for commentary, and a finalist for the National Book Award. He is the author or co-author of six books. His latest, False Conviction: Innocence, Guilt & Science is an electronic book using video, animations, and text to explore the science behind errors in criminal investigations.

Graham Moore is a screenwriter and author, best known for his New York Times best-selling debut novel The Sherlockian, published in 2010. The Alan Turing biopic The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and based upon an adapted screenplay by Moore was released in November 2014.

Rebecca Skloot is an award-winning science writer who contributes to The New York Times Magazine; O, the Oprah Magazine; NPR’s RadioLab; and others. Her debut book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, took more than a decade to research and write, then instantly hit The New York Times Best Seller list, where it has remained for four years.

Steve Wolf has been producing film, TV and live events for 25 years. He is the President of Special FX International, and founder of Science in the Movies Inc., an organization that teaches physics and chemistry through stunt demonstrations.

Kyle Patrick Alvarez is a Los Angeles–based director, writer, producer, and editor. The Stanford Prison Experiment marks his third film as a director. It premiered earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival where it won two awards and will be released in theaters this summer through IFC Films.

Jeff Beal is an American composer of music for film and the concert hall. With musical beginnings as a jazz trumpeter and recording artist, his works are infused with an understanding of rhythm and spontaneity.

Michael Winther has appeared on Broadway in 33 Variations, Mamma Mia, 1776, Artist Descending a Staircase, The Crucible, and Damn Yankees. His recent credits include “Bruce standby” Fun Home National Tour, “Albert Einstein” in physicist Brian Greene’s Light Falls in New York and Princeton, Australia.

Dean A. Haycock is the author Murderous Minds: Exploring the Criminal Psychopathic Brain: Neurological Imaging and the Manifestation of Evil, The Everything Health Guide to Adult Bipolar Disorder, and The Everything Health Guide to Schizophrenia.

Matt Brown is the writer & director of The Man Who Knew Infinity starring Dev Patel, Jeremy Irons, Devika Bhise, Stephen Fry, and Toby Jones. The film was released domestically by IFC, and was produced by Edward R. Pressman of Pressman Film. It is the true story of a friendship that forever changed mathematics.

Pilobolus has created and toured over 120 pieces of repertory to more than 65 countries and currently performs its work each year for over 300,000 people across the U.S. and around the world. In 2015, Pilobolus was named one of the Dance Heritage Coalition’s “Irreplaceable Dance Treasures.”

Lars Jan is a director, writer, visual artist, and founder of Early Morning Opera, a genre-bending performance and art lab whose works explore emerging technologies, live audiences, and unclassifiable experience. His works have been presented by The Whitney Museum, Sundance Film Festival, and BAM Next Wave Festival.

Early Morning Opera (EMO) is a genre-bending performance and art lab whose works explore emerging technologies, live audiences, and unclassifiable experience, while reflecting artistic director Lars Jan’s background in progressive activism.

Writer and Director Peter Livolsi is a graduate of the American Film Institute and a Sundance Screenwriters Lab alum. Livolsi’s feature film debut The House of Tomorrow premiered in competition at the San Francisco International Film Festival in April 2017. The Hollywood Reporter calls it “A confident and perfectly cast debut feature.”

Ellen Burstyn’s illustrious sixty-year acting career encompasses film, stage, and television. In 1975 she became only the third woman in history to win both the Tony Award and the Academy Award in the same year for her work in Same Time, Next Year on Broadway and in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore for which she also received a Golden Globe nomination and a British Academy Award for Best Actress.

Ting (C.-ting) Wu is a Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School. She is also Director of the Consortium for Space Genetics and Director of the Personal Genetics Education (pgEd.org) Project. She received her B.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University and is a recipient of the NIH Director’s 2012 Pioneer Award for her laboratory’s work on genome organization and inheritance.

Dubbed “The Last Leading Man” by the New York Times, Brian Stokes Mitchell has enjoyed a rich and varied career on Broadway, television, film and recordings, along with appearances in the great American concert halls.

Anna Gunn starred as “Skyler White” on the Emmy Award-winning series Breaking Bad on AMC, earning an Emmy Award, an AFI Award, and the prestigious Peabody Award. She previously starred in the role of “Martha Bullock” in the iconic HBO series Deadwood.

Aneesh Chaganty is a write and director whose two minute short film, a Google Glass spot called “Seeds”, became an internet sensation after garnering more than 1 million YouTube views in 24 hours. He is a recipient of the Future of Storytelling Fellowship.

Sev Ohanian is a screenwriter and producer native to Los Angeles. Since graduating from USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, he has been a producer on over a dozen feature films. Four of his films have been Sundance Film Festival Official Selection.

Hannah Elless made her Broadway debut singing “Bless the Lord” in the revival of Stephen Schwartz’s Godspell. She was most recently seen Off-Broadway at Classic Stage Company in Tennessee William’s Summer and Smoke.

Michelle Wilson is best known for her Tony nominated performance in the Pulitzer-Prize winning play Sweat. Wilson played long-time factory worker Cynthia, a role she originated off-Broadway at the Public …

Ingrid Michaelson is best known for earworm, platinum-selling singles like “Girls Chase Boys” and “The Way I Am,” but it’s her focus on giving back that she’s most proud of. …

Tony Award winner, Alice Ripley is an actor, singer, songwriter, and mixed media artist. She is best known for her roles on Broadway musicals, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Next to …

Actor Maria Dizzia’s New York credits include: If I Forget, The Layover, Belleville (2013 Drama Desk Nomination), Uncle Vanya, Cradle and All, In the Next Room (2010 Tony Award nomination), The Hallway Trilogy, and more. Dizzia portrayed Polly on two seasons of Netflix’s Orange is the New Black.

Mariska Hargitay is an actress, director, producer, and advocate, who has used her Emmy award-winning role as Olivia Benson on NBC’s Law & Order: SVU to shed light on sexual assault, domestic violence, and child abuse. In 2004, she took her commitment to a higher level by founding the Joyful Heart Foundation.

Anjali Chadha is a rising Senior at duPont Manual High School, a Math Science Technology Magnet school in Louisville, Kentucky. She has a deep passion for technology and innovation and has been developing a novel IoT based 3D printed arsenic sensor for the past 2 years.

Ana Nogueira is an actor, playwright and screenwriter who lives in Brooklyn, NY. Her Off-Broadway appearances include: Engagements, Mala Hierba (Second Stage Uptown), and Knives and Other Sharp Objects (The Public).

Drew Dollaz is a pioneer of flexing, a Brooklyn-based genre of street dance also referred to as bone breaking, which is characterized by rhythmic contortionist movements. A self-taught dancer, Dollaz is known for blending flexing with other styles including ballet to create a transcendent hybrid of movement artistry.

Brian Avers’ Broadway credits include American Son, The Father (opposite Frank Langella), Rock N’ Roll by Tom Stoppard, Travesties (Stoppard), and The Lieutenant of Inishmore by Martin McDonagh.

When he isn’t saving strangers from certain death, Chad Lindsey is an actor, director, and artist based in New York. He is the co-artistic director of Hook & Eye Theater, helms The Mark O’Donnell Theater at The Actors Fund Arts Center in downtown Brooklyn–a modern black-box theater, dance, film and rehearsal space. 

Marlee Matlin’s first film Children of a Lesser God garnered her the Academy Award for Best Actress. At 21 she became the youngest recipient and only one of four actresses to receive the honor for a film debut.

Tristan is Co-Founder & Executive Director of the Center for Humane Technology (CHT), a nonprofit organization whose mission is to align technology with humanity’s best interests.He regularly briefs heads of …

Ian McEwan is a prolific British author whose novels have established him as one of the leading voices in contemporary English-language literature. Winner of the 1998 Booker Prize for Amsterdam, he …