Yevgeniy Fiks was born in Moscow in 1972 and has lived and worked in New York since 1994. As a “post-Soviet artist,” his works build on research into Cold War narratives to explore the dialectic between Communism and “the West,” addressing the Red and Lavender Scares during the McCarthy era, Communism in Modern Art, and African, African American, and Jewish diasporas in the Soviet Union. His artists books include Lenin For Your Library? (ante projects), Communist Guide to New York City (Common Books), Moscow (UDP), Soviet Moscow’s Yiddish-Gay Dictionary (Cicada Press), and Monument to Cold War Victory (The Cooper Union). His work has been shown at the Biennale of Sydney, Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art, and Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art and has received reviews in The New York Times, ARTFORUM, and other periodicals.

Kate Baldwin is Professor of English at Tulane University. Her books include Beyond the Color Line: Reading Encounters between Black and Red, 1922-63 (Duke University Press) and The Racial Imaginary of the Cold War Kitchen: From Sokolniki Park to Chicago’s South Side (Dartmouth University Press).

Jonathan Flatley is professor of English at Wayne State University. He is the author of Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism (Harvard University Press) and Like Andy Warhol (University of Chicago Press).  He is currently working on a book called Black Leninism: How Revolutionary Counter-Moods Are Made.

Joy Gleason Carew is a Professor of Pan-African Studies who retired from the University of Louisville in 2020 after 20 years of teaching. She holds a PhD in Linguistics and her research focuses on African Diaspora Studies, along with the intersections of identity,  language, race, gender and social class. With a background in Russian and French studies, she has traveled in Russia (both during and after the Soviet period) where she studies Black-Russian relations. She is the author of Blacks, Reds, and Russians: Sojourners in Search of the Soviet Promise (Rutgers University Press) and Episodes in My Life: The Autobiography of Jan Carew (Peepal Tree Press).

Lewis Gordon is a philosopher who has written extensively on race and racism, postcolonial phenomenology, Africana and black existentialism, and on the works and thought of W. E. B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon. His most recent book is What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction To His Life And Thought (Fordham University Press). He teaches at the University of Connecticut.

Raquel Greene is Associate Professor of Russian at Grinnell College, where she teaches Russian language and literature. Her research focuses on the construction of race in Russian literature and culture. She is especially interested in depictions of race in Soviet children’s literature.

Douglas Kearney’s six books of poetry include Sho (Wave Books) and Buck Studies (Fence Books), which won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Award and the CLMP Firecracker Award for Poetry, as well as Mess and Mess and (Noemi Press) and the collection of libretti, Someone Took They Tongues (Subito). He has received a Whiting Writer’s Award, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Cy Twombly Award for Poetry, and fellowships from Cave Canem, The Rauschenberg Foundation, and others. He teaches Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota.

Christina Kiaer is a professor at Northwestern University, specializing in Russian and Soviet art, the politics of realism and the avant-garde, Comintern aesthetics, the visual culture of anti-racism, and feminist theory. She is the author of Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism (MIT Press). She has co-edited Everyday Life in Early Soviet Russia: Taking the Revolution Inside (Indiana University Press) with Eric Naiman, an interdisciplinary volume of essays on Soviet cultural history. Her book Collective Body: The Lyrical Prospects of Socialist Realism is forthcoming from University of Chicago Press, and she is at work on a new project, An Aesthetics of Anti-racism: African Americans in Soviet Visual Culture.

Maxim Matusevich is Professor of History at Seton Hall University where he also directs the Russian and East European Studies Program. He is the author of No Easy Row for a Russian Hoe: Ideology and Pragmatism in Nigerian-Soviet Relations, 1960-1991 (Africa World Press) and editor of Africa in Russia, Russia in Africa: Three Centuries of Encounters (Africa World Press). He is writing a new book on the history of African American sojourns in the Soviet Union. Matusevich also writes fiction and occasional journalistic pieces. His short stories and a novella have appeared in the Kenyon Review, New England Review, The Bare Life Review, and other publications.

Vladimir Paperny received his MA in design from the Stroganov Art Academy in Moscow, and his PhD in Cultural Studies from the Russian State University for the Humanities. He is the author of Architecture in the age of Stalin. Culture Two (Cambridge University Press) and several collections of essays. He co-edited The Architecture of Great Expositions (Ashgate) and his writing appears in appears in Architectural Digest, Project Russia, Speech, and other journals. His Russian-language novel Schultz’s Archive (AST/Elena Shubina) was nominated for the 2021 Bol’shaia Kniga (Big Book) award. He teaches at UCLA and works in graphic design, architectural photography, and video production.

Meredith Roman is the author of Opposing Jim Crow: African Americans and the Soviet Indictment of U.S. Racism, 1928-1937 (University of Nebraska Press), which examines the history of studying and exploiting American race relations among officials in Moscow. Her work on Soviet anti-racism and the African American struggle for human rights has appeared in edited collections and academic journals including The Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics, Race & Class, International Labor and Working-Class History, Critique: A Journal of Socialist Theory, Spectrum: A Journal on Black Men, and Cold War History. She is Associate Professor of History at the State University of New York (SUNY), College at Brockport, and her current research compares dissent and state repression in the United States and Soviet Union during the Cold War.

Jonathan Shandell is a theater historian whose writings focus on race and integration on the American stage in the mid-20th Century. He is author of The American Negro Theatre and the Long Civil Rights Era (University of Iowa Press), and co-editor of Experiments in Democracy: Interracial and Cross-cultural Exchange in American Theatre, 1912-1945 (Southern Illinois University Press). Other publications include chapters in The Cambridge Companion to African American Theatre (Cambridge), and Authentic Blackness/“Real” Blackness: Essays on the Meaning of Blackness in Literature and Culture (Peter Lang). He is Associate Professor and co-Director of the Theater Arts program at Arcadia University, and a past president of the Black Theatre Association.

Christopher Stackhouse is a writer, artist, curator, and teacher. His books include the poetry collection Plural (Counterpath Press), and an image/text collaboration with John Keene Seismosis (1913 Press). His work has been published in several literary journals and arts periodicals including Hambone, Modern Painters, Art in America, and The Brooklyn Rail. He is an advisory board member at Fence Magazine and a contributing editor at BOMB Magazine. He has taught at the New York Center for Art & Media Studies, Naropa University, and at the Maryland Institute College of Art, among other institutions.

Marina Temkina is a poet-artist whose multi-genre work embodies her immigrant experiences. Her books include the poetry collection What Do You Want? (UDP), the artists book Who Is I? (Content), two books in collaboration with artist Michel Gerard, four books of poetry in Russian, and a forthcoming volume of her collected Russian poems (NLO). Temkina has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture among others. In her work as a psychotherapist, she specializes in refugee resettlement, cultural differences, and gender and identity.

MaryLouise Patterson was born in Chicago, grew up in Brooklyn, New York. She earned her medical degree at Patrice Lumumba Friendship University in Moscow, USSR and a Master’s in Public Health from the University of California, Berkeley. She has been a member of the IFCO/Pastors for Peace medical committee for the Latin American Medical School, ELAM, and is a board member of NY Metro PNHP (Physicians for a National Health Program). With her childhood friend, Evelyn Louise Crawford, she is the co-editor of Letters from Langston: From the Harlem Renaissance to the Red Scare and Beyond (University of California Press), a book which compiles the almost 40-year correspondence their parents had with Langston Hughes.

Denise Milstein is a writer and researcher whose work develops a relational, historically grounded perspective at the intersection of art and politics, and culture and the environment. She has written on songs and urban imaginaries, the impact of repression on artistic careers, political engagement and counter-culture, and artistic innovation. Current projects examine urban dwellers’ access to nature in New York City public spaces; the interactions of artists and archivists with near-obsolete technologies in marginal spaces of cultural production and reproduction; and building a narrative and oral history archive of New Yorkers’ experiences with the Covid-19 pandemic. She is a member of the Ensayos collective, based in Tierra del Fuego, where she contributes as a researcher, writer, and performer to practices interweaving art, social science, and environmental research. She teaches sociology at Columbia University; is co-director of the NYC COVID-19 Oral History, Narrative and Memory Archive; and edits Dispatches from the Field, a series dedicated to publishing collections of ethnographic data fresh from the field.