The Hawai'i International Film Festival (HIFF) is an annual film festival held in the United States state of Hawaii.
Rudolf Jaenisch is a Professor of Biology at MIT and a founding member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. He is a pioneer of transgenic science, in which an animal’s genetic makeup is altered. Jaenisch has focused on creating genetically modified mice to study cancer, epigenetic reprogramming and neurological diseases.
Oscar Bluemner, born Friedrich Julius Oskar Blümner and after 1933 known as Oscar Florianus Bluemner, was a Prussian-born American Modernist painter.
Jan T. Vilček is a Slovak-American biomedical scientist, educator, inventor and philanthropist. He is a professor in the department of microbiology at the New York University School of Medicine, and chairman and CEO of The Vilcek Foundation. Vilček received his M.D. degree from Comenius University Medical School in Bratislava in 1957; and his Ph.D. in Virology from the Institute of Virology, Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava, in 1962.
Barbara Haskell is an American art historian and a museum curator. She is currently a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where she has worked since 1975. She has previously worked at the San Francisco Museum of Art and Pasadena Museum. She has a BA (1969) from the University of California, Los Angeles.
The Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art is an accredited art museum on the campus of Auburn University in Alabama. When it opened on October 3, 2003, the museum contained six exhibition galleries within its 40,000 square feet (3,700 m2) of interior space.
Nari Ward is an American artist based in New York City. He is a distinguished professor and head of studio art at Hunter College. His work is often composed of found objects from his neighborhood, and "address issues related to consumer culture, poverty, and race". His awards include the Vilcek Prize in Fine Arts in 2017, and the Rome Prize in 2012.
Xiaowei Zhuang is a Chinese-American biophysicist who is the David B. Arnold Jr. Professor of Science, Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, and Professor of Physics at Harvard University, and an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She is best known for her work in the development of Stochastic Optical Reconstruction Microscopy (STORM), a super-resolution fluorescence microscopy method, and the discoveries of novel cellular structures using STORM. She received a 2019 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for developing super-resolution imaging techniques that get past the diffraction limits of traditional light microscopes, allowing scientists to visualize small structures within living cells. She was elected a Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019 and was awarded a Vilcek Foundation Prize in Biomedical Science in 2020.
Theaster Gates is an American social practice installation artist and a professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago. He was born in Chicago, Illinois, where he still lives and works.
Massimiliano Gioni is an Italian curator and contemporary art critic based in New York City, and artistic director at the New Museum. He is the artistic director of the Nicola Trussardi Foundation in Milan as well as the artistic director of the Beatrice Trussardi Foundation. Gioni was the curator of the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013.
Ruth Lehmann is a developmental and cell biologist. She is the Director of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. She previously was affiliated with the New York University School of Medicine, where she was the Director of the Skirball Institute of Biomolecular Medicine, the Laura and Isaac Perlmutter Professor of Cell Biology, and the Chair of the Department of Cell Biology. Her research focuses on germ cells and embryogenesis.
Yaa Gyasi is a Ghanaian American novelist. Her work, most notably her 2016 debut novel Homegoing and her 2020 novel Transcendent Kingdom, features themes of lineage, generational trauma, and Black and African identities. At the age of 26, Gyasi won the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Award for Best First Book, the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel, the National Book Foundation's "5 under 35" honors for 2016 and the 2017 American Book Award. She was awarded a Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Literature in 2020. As of 2019, Gyasi lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Nanfu Wang is a Chinese-born American filmmaker. Her debut film Hooligan Sparrow premiered at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival and was shortlisted for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2017. Her second film, I Am Another You, premiered at SXSW Film Festival in 2017 and won two special jury awards, and her third film, One Child Nation, won the Grand Jury Prize for Documentary Feature at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. Wang is the recipient of a 2021 Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Filmmaking, from the Vilcek Foundation.
Houra Merrikh is an Iranian-American microbiologist. She is a full professor at Vanderbilt University in the Department of Biochemistry. Her field of work is antibiotic resistance and bacterial evolvability.
Jenny Xie is an American poet and educator. She is the author of Eye Level, winner of the 2018 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets and a finalist for the National Book Award in 2018, and of The Rupture Tense, a finalist for the National Book Award in 2022.
Ibrahim I. Cissé is a Nigerien-American biophysicist. He is currently director of the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics. Previously, Cissé was at the California Institute of Technology as Professor of Physics and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as Professor of Physics and Biology. He has won several awards for his work, including in 2021 the MacArthur Fellowship.
Carmen C. Bambach (1959) is an American art historian and curator of Italian and Spanish drawings at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art who specializes in Italian Renaissance art. She is considered one of the world's leading specialists on Leonardo da Vinci, especially his drawings.
Sun Hur is a South Korean-born scientist. She is an Oscar M. Schloss Professor at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children's Hospital and an investigator in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Marica Vilcek is an American art historian and philanthropist. She has worked with museums and arts institutions in both Czechoslovakia and the United States, and is known for working with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York University Institute of Fine Arts, and the Vilcek Foundation, and for her philanthropic work on the boards of the New York Youth Symphony and the Foundation for a Civil Society.
Michel Kouakou is an Ivorian choreographer and dancer, recognized for his international contributions to contemporary dance. He is the founder and artistic director of Daara Dance and the recipient of the 2012 Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Dance and the Carnegie Corporation Great Immigrants Award.
