Douglas Crimp was born in 1944 in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. He became an internationally recognized art historian, critic, AIDS activist, and scholar of queer studies. His highly influential essays of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, especially “Pictures” (1979) theorized postmodernism as a critique of desire and subjectivity in visual representation, helping to radicalize the discourse about contemporary art. In the late 1980’s, in response to the suffering caused by the AIDS epidemic, he became a militant AIDS activist and in 1987 edited an issue of the journal October on “AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism.” Published later as a book, the issue brought Douglas’s ideas about postmodernism to bear on AIDS, engaging in urgent struggles over representations of the disease and of homosexuality. Arguing against aestheticizing and “phobic” images of people with AIDS, Douglas said, “We don’t need to transcend the epidemic; we need to end the epidemic.” But the AIDS epidemic also led Douglas to revise some of his earlier aesthetic ideas. As he writes in the introduction to On the Museum’s Ruins, a collection of his postmodernism essays, “ultimately it was the specter of death that revealed to me the limits of my conception of postmodernism.” If radical art is going to become part of social praxis, he says, it must move outside the conventional institutions of artistic distribution and reception and change the way art functions in society. Following his departure as an editor of October, he became a professor of art history and of visual and cultural studies at the University of Rochester. He gave talks and wrote essays about the films of Andy Warhol, the dance of Yvonne Rainer, among many other topics. He married Yoshiaki Mochizuki. In 2016, he published Before Pictures, a memoir that weaves together his early artistic and sexual experimentation in downtown Manhattan. His collected essays about dance and about dance on film will be published in the spring by Dancing Foxes Press.

Ishmael Houston-Jones (curator): choreographer, author, performer, teacher, and curator. His improvised dance and text work has been performed in New York, across the US, and in Europe, Canada, Australia, and Latin America. He and Fred Holland shared a New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award for Cowboys, Dreams and Ladders. He was awarded his second “Bessie” Award for the revival of THEM, his 1985/86 collaboration with writer Dennis Cooper and composer Chris Cochrane. He curated Platform 2012: Parallels and Platform 2016: Lost & Found, both at Danspace Project. He has received a 2016 Herb Alpert, a 2015 Doris Duke Impact and a 2013 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Artists Awards. In 2017 he received a third “Bessie” for Variations on Themes from Lost and Found: Scenes from a Life and other Works by John Bernd.

Jerron Herman is an interdisciplinary artist who’s been featured with Heidi Latsky Dance at Lincoln Center, ADF, the Whitney Museum, and abroad in Athens. He’s been a principal member of HLD since 2011. Jerron serves on the Board of Trustees at Dance/USA and is also a part of the Executive Committee as Secretary. He has spoken on various panels and now regularly moderates discussion on the intersections of art and culture. As a model, Jerron has shot for Tommy Hilfiger Adaptive, consulted for a Nike-sponsored project, and the Jewelry Library. He’s been profiled in Buzzfeed for his dancing, The New York Post for his fashion, and was featured on Great Big Story. In 2018 he was a Snug Harbor PASS artist, a finalist for the inaugural Apothetae/Lark Play Development Lab Fellowship and was nominated for a Fellowship in Dance from United States Artists. His latest solos include Phys. Ed. and Relative – a crip dance party. Phys. Ed has also been taught as a workshop at Marlboro College. He premiered another solo at The Whitney Museum to commemorate the 29th Anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Jerron studied at Tisch School of the Arts and graduated from The King’s College. The New York Times has called him, “…the inexhaustible Mr. Herman.” Check out more at www.jerronherman.com

Molly Joyce’s music has been described as one of “serene power” (New York Times), written to “superb effect” (The Wire), and “impassioned” (The Washington Post). Her works have been commissioned by ensembles including the New World, New York Youth, Pittsburgh, and Milwaukee Symphony Orchestras, and New Juilliard, Decoda, and Contemporaneous ensembles. Additionally, her work has been presented at TEDxMidAtlantic, Bang on a Can Marathon, Classical:NEXT, VisionIntoArt’s FERUS Festival, and featured in Pitchfork, WNYC’s New Sounds, Q2 Music, I Care If You Listen, and The Log Journal. Also active as a performer, Molly often sings and plays with her vintage toy organ, an instrument she loves due to how it fits her impaired left hand. Her debut full-length album featuring such will be released on New Amsterdam Records in 2020. Molly has studied at The Juilliard School, Royal Conservatory in The Hague, and Yale School of Music. More information at mollyjoycemusic.com.