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Felipe Altenfelder Fora do Eixo, Brazil

Felipe Altenfelder works in the national man-agement of the Circuito Fora do Eixo, a social experiment to provide music and culture to the public and livelihoods to culture makers - by mutualizing the means of production for music. He was the manager of the regional net-work in Sao Paulo and he is founding member of Midia NINJA, a collective of citizen journal-ists keen to present an alternative narrative to the mainstream media by reporting live from the frontline. He was a speaker and audio op-erator in Rádio UFSCar, besides participating in the process of implementation of the FM and online station. He is one of the coordinators in the Grito Rock Festival, an integrated event that happens in more than 50 countries around the world.

Amis BoersmaHivos, The Netherlands

The Civic Explorations programme aims to explore, exchange knowledge on and experi-ment with new trends in citizen’s action. Amis focuses on linking change makers to one an-other in innovative ways and making insights available for the larger community. Her main interest lies in understanding what motivates people to become active in their societies, and she is speci!cally passionate about the connec-tion between the personal and the political, and the power of playfulness. Prior to working at Hivos, Amis started her own consultancy - NGO toolkit - to help NGO’s better understand-ing what the results of their work was and to deal with their donors (and reporting require-ments).

Michelle Co!eyLambent Foundation, United States

As Executive Director, Michelle Co"ey designs, implements and furthers the strategic agenda, leadership and vision of Lambent Founda-tion. Through innovative grant making and projects, Lambent Foundation supports the in-tersections of contemporary arts and culture as critical strategies for social change. Lambent’s global grant making provides critical general operating support for artist-centered organiza-tions in the visual, performance and alternative media !elds in New York, New Orleans and Nai-robi. Prior to the creation of Lambent Founda-tion in January 2009, Ms. Co"ey was Director of Starry Night Fund and Senior Philanthropic Advisor at Tides Foundation. With a global lens, her areas of focus included Human Rights, Women/Girls, Criminal Justice Reform, Arts and Culture and HIV/AIDS.

John EwingGhana Think Tank,

United States of America

John Ewing is a digital media artist creating public art with an emphasis on community participation. He works on large sustained projects that often last several years. He has ex-hibited at the National Museum of Wales, FACT, the Venice Biennale of Architecture, and ZKM. In 2006, he co-founded the Ghana ThinkTank, a growing network of think tanks from Ghana, Cuba, El Salvador, Mexico, Iran, Afghanistan, Serbia and the US prison system, who work to solve problems in the “developed” world. While initially developed as an art project, the Ghana ThinkTank has begin to have in#uence outside the art world as well.

George GacharaThe Nest, Kenya

George Gachara is a cultural activist, designer of learning programs in the !eld of social in-novation, a cyclist and the co-director at The NEST - a Kenyan multidisciplinary art space that serves as a functional playground for art-ists, thinkers and curious minds. George enjoys exploring the intersection of identity, history and power in order to !nd the human spaces in which to build resilient communities with sustainable ideas of living and being. George is the author of The Reverse Is True, a semi-auto-biographical book about his journey to !nd his place in society.

Gertrude Flentge Doen Foundation, the Netherlands

Since 2008, Gertrude Flentge is program man-ager of the international culture programme at DOEN foundation (www.doenculture.com), which focusses on supporting the arts in Afri-ca, Asia and Latin-America. From 2000 till 2004 Gertrude developed and coordinated the RAIN network for visual artists’ initiatives in Africa, Asia and Latin-America at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. In 2005 she ran the website www.thepowerofculture.org. From 2005 till 2007 she managed the culture program of Hivos in Central-Asia and Latin-America and initiated Arts Collaboratory (www. artscollaboratory.org) a funding and collaborative program for visual artists initia-tives throughout the world, set-up and funded by Hivos and DOEN Foundation.

Sophie LeferinkSenior advisor Arts & Culture, Hivos, The Hague

Sophie Leferink is senior advisor Arts & Culture at Hivos and in charge of developing a new Hivos policy in relation to the creative sector in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Graduated as a historian with a special focus on Russia, her !rst job as an intern was an exhibition of draw-ings from the Gulag Archipel followed by many international projects and programmes in the !eld of literature, media, performing- and vis-ual arts. She has been head of the programme department of the European Cultural Founda-tion, founder of The One Minutes junior video platform and director of The One Minutes foun-dation, a global platform for 1 minute video art. Since September 2013, she is working for Hivos and she initiated this Brain Grind session.

Enas Hamdy Metwally Ibrahim Harassmap,

Egypt

Enas graduated from the Faculty of Econom-ics and Political Science in 2008. In the same year, she started her work in one of the biggest research centers for demographic studies as a researcher assistant. As such, she worked on large scale research some of which Internation-al surveys. She also participated in research re-lated to development issues such as education, women’s welfare, and health. In October 2015, She made a switch to work for civil society and started as a researched at Harassmap.

Mthabisi Phili Voices in Colour, Zimbabwe

In 2011, Mthabisi Phili founded Voices in Col-our (VIC) to facilitate a platform for creative expression for artists and communities. Before taking on fulltime responsibility for curatorial and administration tasks as VIC, he was Exhibi-tion O$cer for the Visual Artists Association of Bulawayo (from 2007-2009). Mthabisi Phili is also still a practicing artist. His work is informed by Zimbabwe under Mugabe; his artworks are about critically questioning and re-interpreting the politics of the status quo and our impression on space as citizens. He was a highly recommended artist for Free-dom to Create Prize in 2010. His artworks have been exhibited in Mumbai, Sarajevo, New York, Cairo, and CCA-Lagos. As a writer, his writings and poems have been widely published.

Anna Overstrom-ColemanOpen Society Foundations,

United States of America

Anna Overstrom-Coleman works for the Open Society Foundations Documentary Photogra-phy Project (DPP), where she designs the stra-tegic agenda as well as implements the pro-gramming for DPP’s grant-making initiatives. Through the Audience Engagement Grant, DPP supports photographers, photo-based artists, and socially-engaged practitioners who seek partnerships and community participation when creating projects with goals for social change. As DPP is uniquely positioned at the intersection of human rights, the arts, media, and philanthropy, Anna works to facilitate mo-ments of knowledge sharing and learning be-tween these !elds, both for her grantees, her colleagues, and herself. She is continuously searching for ways to connect, collaborate, and better understand how creativity and collectiv-ity can foster change.

Laura RaicovichCreative Time, United States of America

Laura Raicovich joined Creative Time in 2012. As Director of Global Initiatives, she is responsi-ble for Creative Time Reports, the Creative Time Summit and Global Residency programs, all of which aim to expand and deepen the organi-zation’s international reach. Raicovich came to Creative Time following a decade at Dia Art Foundation, where she served as Deputy Direc-tor. Previously she worked at both the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Public Art Fund. Raicovich graduated from Swarthmore College and holds a Master’s Degree in Liberal Studies from the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. She lectures internationally, and is the author of At The Lightning Field, a lyric essay and parallel text to Walter De Maria’s re-nowned artwork, as well as A Diary of Mysteri-ous Di$culties, a novel based on spam which is being published serially in The Brooklyn Rail.

Christopher Robbins Ghana Think Tank,

United States of America

Christopher Robbins is an American Artist that focuses his art practice in the realm of Public Art and Social Sculpture. Robbins works inter-nationally, using physical and conversational processes to create interactions between stran-gers in order to build community and problem-solve. He has exhibited at the National Museum of Wales, FACT, the Venice Biennale of Archi-tecture, and ZKM. In 2006, he co-founded the Ghana ThinkTank, a growing network of think tanks from Ghana, Cuba, El Salvador, Mexico, Iran, Afghanistan, Serbia and the US prison sys-tem, who work to solve problems in the “devel-oped” world. While initially developed as an art project, the Ghana ThinkTank has begin to have in#uence outside the art world as well.

Susana RochnaHivos, Costa Rica

Susana is a Chilean Anthropologist who left Chile in 1990 for Canada where she obtained a Masters Degree in Social Science at the Univer-sity of Regina. Before leaving Chile, she worked as an Anthropologist working on Indigenous political rights and on Human Rights –during Pinochet’s dictatorship—with a particular em-phasis on Easter Island, where she had lived in the mid 80’s. In 1998, she joined Hivos’ Regional O$ce in Central America, based in Costa Rica, where she has worked ever since in charge of two portfolios: Human Rights and Arts & Cul-ture. Recently, she has been in charge of the co-ordination of a regional program called Actors for Change, funded by SIDA, which combines cultural activists (“art-itivist”), human rights de-fenders and media workers.

Sally Szwed Creative Time, United States of America

Sally Szwed has contributed to Creative Time’s programs since 2008, joining the team full time in January 2012. She organizes the annual Creative Time Summit and manages the Global Residency Program. Previously, she served as Program Manager of EFA Project Space, at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, in New York City, where she produced exhibitions, work-shops, and other events. Sally has organized numerous public programs, including a series of parties welcoming new artists to the city, ex-perimental wine tastings, and recent projects for Open Engagement and Flux Factory. She holds a BFA in Sculpture from Syracuse Univer-sity, and an MA in Curatorial Practice from Cali-fornia College of the Arts.

Nato Thompson Creative Time,

United States of America

Since January 2007, Nato Thompson has or-ganized major projects for Creative Time in-cluding the annual Creative Time Summit, Liv-ing as Form (2011), Paul Ramirez Jonas’s Key to the City (2010), Jeremy Deller’s It is What it is with New Museum curators Laura Hoptman and Amy Mackie (2009), Democracy in Ameri-ca: The National Campaign (2008), Paul Chan’s acclaimed Waiting for Godot in New Orleans (2007) and Mike Nelson’s A Psychic Vacuum with curator Peter Eleey. Previously, he worked as Curator at MASS MoCA where he completed numerous large-scale exhibitions including The Interventionists: Art in the Social Sphere (2004) with a catalogue distributed by MIT Press. His writings have appeared in numerous publications including BookForum, Frieze, Art Journal, Art Forum, Parkett, Cabinet and The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest. The College Art Association awarded him for distinguished writing in Art Journal in 2004.

Rebeca Eunice VargasSomos Guerreras, Guatemala

Rebeca Eunice Vargas (1984), also known as Re-beca Lane, is a poet, an actress and a rapper. As a poet, she’s been committed to her liberation as a woman, discussing the heterosexual roles imposed on her body, and the colonization and militarization of the land she’s been born in, Guatemala. Rebeca is a theater actress in role plays on social topics, such as sexual diversity, feminism, violence and hip hop. She started to record rap songs in 2012 as a poetry exercise without foreseeing what would come out of it. Her rap lyrics are about her experience having a female body and about the struggle of wom-en against sexism. She speaks out about social problems in Guatemalan society, such as the consequences of war and the lack of justice. Rebeca is the founder of “Somos Guerreras”, a movement that builds a community of women that like hip hop culture and want to transform it to become more equal and not sexist.

Photocredit: The photograph was taken by Carlos Euler, 2014. It’s a role play and Hip Hop musical called “La Eskina”.

Wisnu Wisdantio Lifepatch,

Indonesia

Born in an urban area, Wisnu Wisdantio has witnessed how rapid development brings both urban problems and environmental is-sues. These issues drove him to become active as an urban planner after !nishing his studies in architecture in 2007. Beside this, he is chief editor for www.landscapeindonesia.com since 2010, which is a platform for natural landscape and environmental issues using travel writ-ing and visual documentation. Starting with a contribution to Lifepatch’ project ‘Jogja River Project’, Wisnu joined the team in January 2013. Lifepatch is a community-based organi-zation working on the creative and appropriate application in the !eld of art, science and tech-nology. Nowadays, Lifepatch is Wisnu’s second home where he evokes community conversa-tions about architecture, urban design and landscape photography through discussion, workshops, and other events.