Steven Heller is the co-chair (with Lita Talarico) of the MFA Design / Designer as Author + Entrepreneur program and the SVA Masters Workshop in Rome. He writes the Visuals column for The New York Times Book Review, a weekly column for The Atlantic online and The Daily Heller / Imprint online. He has written more than 140 books on graphic design, illustration and political art, including The Design Entrepreneur (with Lita Talarico), Paul Rand, Merz to Emigre and Beyond: Avant Garde Magazine Design of the Twentieth Century, Design Literacy: Understanding Graphic Design, Citizen Designer, Iron Fists: Branding the 20th Century Totalitarian State. He is a contributing editor for Print, Baseline, Design Observer, and Eye. Heller is the recipient of the Art Directors Club Special Educators Award, the AIGA Medal for Lifetime Achievement, the School of Visual Arts’ Masters Series Award and the 2011 National Design Award for “Design Mind.”

Adam Harrison Levy is a writer and freelance documentary film producer and director. He specializes in the art of the interview. For the BBC he has conducted interviews with a wide range of actors, writers, musicians and film-makers including Meryl Streep, Harry Belafonte and Gay Talese. He was the U.S. producer for “Selling the Sixties,” a cultural history of advertising in New York in the early 1960s and he was the U.S. producer of “Close Up,” about the artist Chuck Close. Levy is currently a contributing writer for Design Observer. He wrote the catalog essay for “Hiroshima: Ground Zero 1945,” an exhibition at the International Center for Photography (2011), and “Saul Leiter: Retrospective” at the Deichtohallen, Hamburg (spring 2012). His writing has also appeared in The Guardian Weekend Magazine and his radio commentaries have aired on NPR station WAMC.

Paul Lukas is a storyteller whose work has appeared in The New York Times, GQ, Fortune, Gourmet, Saveur, the Wall Street Journal, ESPN The Magazine, Spin, and The Financial Times, among many other publications. He currently works as a columnist for ESPN.com, where he writes “Uni Watch,” a column devoted to uniform design. He also maintains a daily Uni Watch blog, hosts the monthly Open Mic Show-and-Tell events at the City Reliquary, performs as one half of the lecture/slideshow act the Forewords, and is the man behind the Permanent Record project. Lukas has been described as “a minutiae fetishist” and “an obsessive esotericist,” and has used this sensibility to create media projects about food, travel, consumer culture, marketing, business history, music, and design. He has also appeared on TV and radio (including two appearances on Late Night with Conan O’Brien), authored a book, produced a museum exhibit and web project devoted to some super-cool fiberglass structures.

Ellen Lupton is a writer, curator, and graphic designer. As curator of contemporary design at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, she has produced numerous exhibitions and books, including Mechanical Brides: Women and Machines from Home to Office (1993), Mixing Messages: Graphic Design and Contemporary Culture (1996), Letters from the Avant-Garde (1996), and Skin: Surface, Substance + Design (2002). Her book Thinking with Type (2004) is used by students, designers, and educators worldwide. She is director of the Graphic Design MFA program at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore, where she also serves as director of the Center for Design Thinking. Lupton’s most recent project is the exhibition and book “Graphic Design: Now in Production,” organized in collaboration with Andrew Blauvelt at Walker Art Center and opening in New York City in summer 2012.

Geoff Manaugh is the author of BLDGBLOG and The BLDGBLOG Book, former senior editor of Dwell magazine, and a contributing editor at Wired UK. His work has appeared in Contemporary, Space & Culture, Blend, Lumpen, Inhabitat, WorldChanging, the Oyster Boy Review, the Urban Design Review, Subtopia, Vector, and things magazine, among others. Along with Nicola Twilley, Manaugh organized and co-curated “Landscapes of Quarantine,” a design studio and exhibition at New York’s Storefront for Art and Architecture in 2010, and organized an exhibition for the Nevada Museum of Art called “Landscape Futures.” In addition to lecturing on a broad range of topics, from urban sustainability to the use of science fiction in architectural design, at museums and universities around the world, he has taught design studios at Columbia University, the Pratt Institute, the University of Technology, Sydney, and USC.