KAWS is a Brooklyn-based contemporary artist who has achieved widespread recognition for his graphic style and iconic characters. Born in 1974, in Jersey City, New Jersey, KAWS received his B.F.A. from the School of Visual Arts New York in 1996. He began his career as a graffiti artist on the East Coast of the United States, where he developed some of the forms that would later become part of his signature iconography. Working in a wide range of mediums, including painting, sculpture, drawing, installation, and product design, KAWS’s practice transgresses borders between “high” and “low” culture, questions the conventional hierarchies of the art world establishment, and seeks to democratize the way art is experienced for a new generation. Fulfilling the promise of predecessors such as Duchamp and Warhol, KAWS has reinvented that legacy for the 21st century and taps into the zeitgeist of contemporary life.

Liz Munsell is the Barnett and Annalee Newman Curator of Contemporary Art at the Jewish Museum in New York, and co-founder of Museums Moving Forward, a Ford and Mellon-funded grant to advance equity in the museum sector. Previously, she served as the inaugural Lorraine and Alan Bressler Curator of Contemporary Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where she organized over a dozen exhibitions, including Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation, co-curated with Greg Tate (2020-21); Bouchra Khalili: Poets and Witness(2019); and Cecilia Vicuña: Disappeared Quipu (2018-19), co-curated with Catherine Morris and presented at the MFA and the Brooklyn Museum. Beginning in 2012, Munsell worked to establish the MFA as one of the first encyclopedic museums in the U.S. to fully integrate performance art into its exhibitions and permanent collection. Between 2012-17, she held a visiting curator post at Harvard University’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, where she organized exhibitions abroad and at Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. A Fulbright Scholar to Chile in 2006, Munsell holds a BA in International Letters and Visual Studies from Tufts University and a Masters in Cultural Studies from the Universidad de Chile.

Natasha Schlesinger is an award-winning art historian, art advisor and curator who has worked in the art field for over 25 years. Beginning as a specialist at Christie’s auction house in New York, in 2003 Schlesinger founded Artmuse to provide art guidance, curation and advisory services to private and corporate clients as well as collaborations with brands. She has served as the Art Curator of The Surrey Hotel and since 2018 Schlesinger has curated numerous group exhibitions and charity auctions at various galleries, the Baryshnikov Arts Center andCore Club. She frequently lectures, participates on panels and has taught at the graduate program of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, and New School. In 2020 she co-founded a curatorial platform Space2Curate and in 2021 she has launched a new digital art marketplace called Artmuse Collector that bridges the gap between traditional artists and collectors and the digital art world.