2025 Participants
July 29–August 1, 2025
Life As No One Knows It brings together a diverse group of artists, thinkers, and cultural leaders from fields spanning art, performance, philosophy, literature, science, and technology. Through dynamic keynotes, collaborative exchanges, and site-specific commissions across multiple mediums, participants critically engage with art’s role in representing and shaping our shared reality.
Adrián Villar Rojas
Artist whose large-scale, site-specific sculptures and environments explore questions of deep time, future ruins, and the conditions of a humanity at risk.
Matthew Barney
Artist renowned for provocative explorations of the body and sexuality across sculpture, installation, film, performance, and drawing.
Okwui Okpokwasili
Artist, performer, choreographer, and writer known for multidisciplinary performances merging dance, theatre, and installation.
Sophia Al-Maria
Artist, writer, and filmmaker whose work envisions revisionist histories and alternative narratives about the future.
Rafiq Bhatia
Musician, producer, Academy Award-nominated composer, and member of the experimental music project, Son Lux.
Paul Chan
Multidisciplinary artist whose work spans animation, video, drawing, writing, publishing, performance, and sculpture.
Aria Dean
Artist, writer, and filmmaker whose work investigates structures of race, power, and representational systems.
Álvaro Enrigue
Award-winning novelist, essayist, and short story writer best known for his speculative fiction.
Frida Escobedo
Architect renowned for her inventive use of everyday materials and simple geometric forms.
José Esparza Chong Cuy
Curator, writer, and Executive Director and Chief Curator at Storefront for Art and Architecture.
Johanna Fateman
Writer, musician, and Co-Chief Art Critic at CULTURED known for her feminist art criticism, zine-making, and cultural commentary.
Thelma Golden
Director and Chief Curator at The Studio Museum in Harlem.
Werner Herzog
Filmmaker, actor, director, author, and producer, considered a pioneer of New German Cinema.
Zoë Hitzig
Zoë Hitzig is a poet, economist and technologist who works on building algorithmic systems that protect human values.
Francis Kéré
Architect recognized for his communal approach to design and innovative construction techniques.
Glenn Ligon
Conceptual artist best known for text-based works that challenge constructions of race, gender, and sexuality.
Maya Lin
Artist and architect renowned for large-scale environmental artworks, architectural works, and memorials.
Cannupa Hanska Luger
Multidisciplinary artist known for monumental works that communicate urgent stories of 21st Century Indigeneity.
Courtney J. Martin
Art historian, curator, and Executive Director of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.
Jota Mombaça
Multidisciplinary artist whose work is shaped by the sonic and visual materiality of language, anti-colonial critique, and gender disobedience.
Mimi Park
Interdisciplinary artist known for site-specific installations of kinetic sculptures.
Caroline Polachek
Singer, producer, and songwriter.
Anil Seth
Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex and leading expert on perception and consciousness.
P. Staff
Interdisciplinary artist whose work across video installation, sculpture and poetry explores biopolitics, queer and trans theory, and disability.
Sara Imari Walker
Author, astrobiologist, theoretical physicist, and Associate Professor at the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University.
Jamieson Webster
Psychoanalyst, professor, and writer whose work combines psychoanalytic theory with philosophy, literature, film, and cultural criticism.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Award-winning filmmaker and artist renowned for his poetic and surreal approach to storytelling.
Issy Wood
Artist and musician whose paintings blend classical techniques with cynical humor to explore consumerism’s impact on women.