Sophia Al Maria is an artist and writer based in London, UK. Her memoir, The Girl Who Fell to Earth (Harper Collins, 2012), was published in Arabic by Bloomsbury Qatar in Summer 2015. In 2014, she had her first solo show, ‘Virgin with a Memory’, at Cornerhouse, Manchester, UK. She is the recipient of a 2015 Sundance Institute Screenwriting Fellowship and has written many scripts for film and TV. In 2016, she will be mounting her first solo museum show in North America with the premiere of a new series of videos at the Whitney Museum.

Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi is a United Arab Emirates­ based columnist whose articles have appeared in The Financial Times, The Independent, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, The New York Times Room for Debate, Foreign Policy, Open Democracy, and The Globe and Mail, as well as other notable publications.

Al Qassemi is an MIT Media Labs Director’s Fellow, and in 2014, Arabian Business placed Al Qassemi in its list of World’s 100 Most Powerful Arabs under the Thinkers category. He continues both to write and tweet about the Arab world both from his home in Sharjah, as well as while giving lectures internationally.

Al Qassemi is also the founder of the Barjeel Art Foundation, an independent initiative established to contribute to the intellectual development of the art scene in the Arab region by building a prominent and publicly accessible art collection in the United Arab Emirates. Barjeel Art Foundation currently has exhibitions at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, and the Whitechapel Gallery in London.

Nasser Rabbat is the Aga Khan Professor and the Director of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT. An architect and a historian, his scholarly interests include the history and historiography of Islamic architecture, urban history, modern Arab affairs, contemporary Arab art, and post-colonial criticism. Professor Rabbat has published more than 100 scholarly articles and several books. His most recent book is al-Naqd Iltizaman: Nazarat fi-l Tarikh wal ‘Ururba wal Thawra (Criticism as Commitment: Viewpoints on History, Arabism, and Revolution) (Beirut, 2015), which deals with the roots and consequences of the "Arab Spring." He regularly contributes to a number of Arabic newspapers such as ­al-Hayat and al-‘Arabi al-Jadid on current political and cultural issues and consults with international design firms on projects in the Islamic World.

Amr Al Azm was educated in the UK, reading Archaeology of Western Asiatics at the University College, London and graduated with a doctoral degree in1991. He was the Director of Scientific and Conservation Laboratories at the General Department of Antiquities and Museums (1999-2004) and taught at the University of Damascus until 2006. From 2006-2009 he became a visiting Assistant Professor at Brigham Young University. Currently he is an Associate Professor of Middle East History and Anthropology at Shawnee State University in Ohio. Whilst working in Syria Amr Al-Azm was a first hand observer and sometime participant of the reform processes instigated by Bashar Al-Assad thus gaining insights into how they were enacted and why more often than not they failed. Furthermore he is a keen follower and commentator on current events in Syria and the Middle East in general and an active member of the Syrian opposition. Amr Al-Azm is a founder and board member on the Day After Project (TDA) and currently chairs the Syrian Heritage Task Force (SHTF) for cultural heritage protection.

Jeffrey Shaw has been a leading figure in new media art since its emergences in the 1960s to its present day technology-informed and virtualized forms. In a prolific career of widely exhibited and critically acclaimed work he has pioneered the creative use of digital media technologies in the fields of expanded cinema, virtual and augmented reality, immersive visualization environments, navigable cinematic systems and interactive narrative. Shaw is currently Endowed Chair Professor of Media Art at City University Hong Kong, and in 2015 he was awarded the Ars Electronica Golden Nica for Visionary Pioneer of Media Art.

Ryan Merkley is a national leader in public policy, open government, and digital communications. He is the incoming Chief Executive Officer of Creative Commons, the global nonprofit that enables the sharing and use of creativity and knowledge through free legal tools. Ryan was Chief Operating Officer of the Mozilla Foundation, the nonprofit parent of the Mozilla Corporation, creator of the world’s most recognizable open-source software project and internet browser, Firefox. At the Mozilla Foundation Ryan led development of programs like Webmaker and Lightbeam, and in 2012 he presented Mozilla’s multimedia remixing platform Popcorn at TED Global. He also established Mozilla’s successful individual fundraising program, raising over $1.8 million from 44,000 new donors.

Ryan previously worked as Director of Corporate Communications for the City of Vancouver for the 2010 Winter Games, and acted as a Senior Advisor to Mayor David Miller in Toronto, where he initiated Toronto’s Open Data project. Most recently, Ryan was Managing Director and Senior Vice President of Public Affairs at Vision Critical, a Vancouver-based SaaS company and market research firm. He studied Political Science and Economics at Waterloo University.

Ryan is passionate about social causes, digital media, and open government and data. He is an avid cyclist, an amateur barista, and a father. He resides in downtown Toronto.

Markos Kounalakis is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Center for Media, Data and Society at Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. He is president and publisher emeritus of the Washington Monthly and is currently researching the geopolitics of global news networks.

Kounalakis is a print and network broadcast journalist and author who covered wars and revolutions, both civil and technological.

He reported the overthrow of communism for Newsweek in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria and the outbreak of ethnic strife and war in Yugoslavia. He was based in Rome and Vienna and ran the magazine’s Prague bureau.

After Newsweek, he worked as the NBC Radio and Mutual News Moscow correspondent covering the fall of the Soviet Union as well as the war in Afghanistan. Kounalakis has written for The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, the International Herald-Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Dallas Morning News, The Miami Herald, and many other regional and international newspapers and magazines. He is currently a foreign affairs columnist for the The Sacramento Bee and McClatchy-Tribune News