The Hawai'i International Film Festival (HIFF) is an annual film festival held in the United States state of Hawaii.
Oscar Bluemner, born Friedrich Julius Oskar Blümner and after 1933 known as Oscar Florianus Bluemner, was a Prussian-born American Modernist painter.
Denise Scott Brown is an American architect, planner, writer, educator, and principal of the firm Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates in Philadelphia.
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 Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville, also known as MOCA Jacksonville, is a contemporary art museum in Jacksonville, Florida, funded and operated as a "cultural institute" of the University of North Florida. One of the largest contemporary art institutions in the Southeastern United States, it presents exhibitions by international, national and regional artists.
Angelika Amon was an Austrian American molecular and cell biologist, and the Kathleen and Curtis Marble Professor in Cancer Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Amon's research centered on how chromosomes are regulated, duplicated, and partitioned in the cell cycle. Amon was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017.
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.
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.
Valeria Luiselli is a Mexican-American author. She is the author of the book of essays Sidewalks and the novel Faces in the Crowd, which won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Luiselli's 2015 novel The Story of My Teeth was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Best Translated Book Award, and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Best Fiction, and she was awarded the Premio Metropolis Azul in Montreal, Quebec. Luiselli's books have been translated into more than 20 languages, with her work appearing in publications including, The New York Times, Granta, McSweeney's, and The New Yorker. Her book Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. Luiselli's 2019 novel, Lost Children Archive won the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.
Andrew John Bolton is a British museum curator and current head curator of the Anna Wintour Costume Center at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
Yaa Gyasi is a Ghanaian-American novelist. Her work, most notably including her 2016 novel Homegoing and 2020 novel Transcendent Kingdom, features themes of lineage, generational trauma, and Black and African identities. At the age of 26, Homegoing won Gyasi the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Award for Best First Book, the PEN/Hemingway Award for a first book of fiction, the National Book Foundation's "5 under 35" honors for 2016 and the American Book Award. She was awarded a Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Literature in 2020. As of 2019, Gyasi lives in Brooklyn.
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.
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.
