George Andrew Romero Jr. was an American-Canadian film director, writer, editor and actor. His Night of the Living Dead series of films about a zombie apocalypse began with the original Night of the Living Dead (1968) and is considered a major contributor to the image of the zombie in modern culture. Other films in the series include Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Day of the Dead (1985).
Johannes Birringer is an independent media choreographer and artistic director of AlienNation Co., a multimedia ensemble that has collaborated on various site-specific and cross-cultural performance and installation projects since 1993. He lives and works in Houston and London.
Bruce LaBruce is a Canadian artist, writer, filmmaker, photographer, and underground director based in Toronto.
David Hanson Jr. is an American roboticist who is the founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Hanson Robotics, a Hong Kong–based robotics company founded in 2013.
John Tempesta is an American drummer known for his work in hard rock and heavy metal. He has been a member of British band the Cult since 2006. He is the brother of guitarist Mike Tempesta, who also had worked together in several projects.
Eiko Otake and Takashi Koma Otake, generally known as Eiko & Koma, are a Japanese performance duo. Since 1972, Eiko & Koma have worked as co-artistic directors, choreographers, and performers, creating a unique theater of movement out of stillness, shape, light, sound, and time. For most of their multi-disciplinary works, Eiko & Koma also create their own sets and costumes, and they are usually the sole performers in their work. Neither of them studied traditional Japanese dance or theater forms and prefer to choreograph and perform only their own works. They do not bill their work as Butoh though Eiko & Koma cite Kazuo Ohno as their main inspiration.
Walter John Learning was a Canadian theatre director, actor, and founder of Theatre New Brunswick.
A zombie is a mythological undead corporeal revenant created through the reanimation of a corpse. In modern popular culture, zombies are most commonly found in horror genre works. The term comes from Haitian folklore, in which a zombie is a dead body reanimated through various methods, most commonly magical practices in religions like Vodou. Modern media depictions of the reanimation of the dead often do not involve magic but rather science fictional methods such as fungi, radiation, gases, diseases, plants, bacteria, viruses, etc.
Ratan Thiyam is an Indian playwright and theatre director, and the winner of Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 1987, one of leading figures of the "theatre of roots" movement in Indian theatre, which started in the 1970s. Also known as Thiyam Nemai, Ratan Thiyam is known for writing and staging plays that use ancient Indian theatre traditions and forms in a contemporary context. A former painter, and proficient in direction, design, script and music, Thiyam is often considered one of leading contemporary theatre gurus.
Tony Gardner is an American makeup designer, special effects designer and puppeteer. He has designed and created effects for many feature films, including the films Zombieland, 127 Hours, Smokin' Aces, Hairspray, Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa, The Addams Family, Seed of Chucky,Shallow Hal and There's Something About Mary. Gardner helped create the signature helmets for Daft Punk, as well as an animatronic robot for their "Technologic" music video. He wrote and directed Daft Punk's music video for the song "The Prime Time of Your Life," which also, his two daughters were in and associate produced and populated a world full of robots for the duo's feature-length directorial debut, Daft Punk's Electroma. Beyond the film-making arena, Gardner's special effects company Alterian, Inc. has also designed and created the popular GEICO Cavemen characters as well as the current iteration of Smokey Bear. Alterian's makeup effects for Johnny Knoxville's character in Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa were nominated for an Academy Award as well as a Makeup Artist & Hair Stylist Guild Award, and won the Makeup Artist & Hair Stylist Guild Award for Best Special Makeup Effects in the Feature Film category for 2014.
Katrina Jane Mitchell is an English theatre director.
Liza Lim is an Australian composer. Lim writes concert music as well as music theatre and has collaborated with artists on a number of installation and video projects. Her work reflects her interests in Asian ritual culture, the aesthetics of Aboriginal art and shows the influence of non-Western music performance practice.
3OH!3 is an American hip hop duo from Boulder, Colorado, consisting of American rappers Sean Foreman and Nathaniel Motte. They are best known for their single "DONTTRUSTME" from their album Want, which reached number seven on the Billboard Hot 100. Their second single, a remix of "Starstrukk" featuring Katy Perry from Want, was a top ten hit in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Finland, Poland, and Australia. They gained further recognition by featuring Kesha on the song "My First Kiss", which was made the lead single from their album Streets of Gold. The album later peaked at number seven on the Billboard 200.
Blast Theory is an artists' group that specializes in work that mixes interactive media, digital broadcasting and live performance.
The Lords of Salem is a 2012 supernatural horror film written, produced, and directed by Rob Zombie. It stars Sheri Moon Zombie, Bruce Davison, Jeff Daniel Phillips, Ken Foree, Patricia Quinn, Dee Wallace, María Conchita Alonso, Judy Geeson, and Meg Foster. The plot focuses on a troubled female disc jockey in Salem, Massachusetts, whose life becomes entangled with a coven of ancient Satan-worshipping women.
Simon Steen-Andersen is a Danish composer, performer, director and media artist.
Andy Thompson is a Canadian actor, theatre artist, filmmaker and teacher.
Mona Kasra is a media artist, projection designer, and interdisciplinary scholar. She is Associate Professor of Digital Media Design at the University of Virginia.
Michael Counts is an American stage director and designer of theater, opera and immersive performance events and a creator and producer of large-scale public art installations and digital platforms. He has been described in The New York Times as a "mad genius" and "a master of immersive theater" and in Variety as having the "grandest ambitions" of leading pioneers of immersive theater in New York City. Counts' former New York theatre company, GAle GAtes, was documented and published in a 2022 Routledge monograph titled "The Immersive Theatre of GAle GAtes.
Ghislaine Boddington is a British artist, curator, presenter and director specialising in body responsive technologies, immersive experiences and collective embodiment, pioneering it as 'hyper-enhancement of the senses' and 'hyper-embodiment' since the late 80s.
