Jennifer Doyle is a Professor of English and Co-Chair of the LGBIT Studies Minor at University of California, Riverside, where she directs Queer Lab. Her newest book, Hold it Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art (2013), explores some of contemporary art’s most contentious works. Doyle shows how controversy in art is used to question our assumptions about identity, intimacy, and expression; and, she considers emotion as an artist’s medium in the works of such artists as Ron Athey, Carrie Mae Weems, and David Wojnarowicz. Her previous publication, Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire (2006), was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Foundation award for writing and culture. She is also the recipient of a 2012 Andy Warhol Foundation | Creative Capital Arts Writers Grant, and is the 2013–14 Fulbright Distinguished Chair at the University of the Arts London. She is also on the Board of Directors at Human Resources Los Angeles, a non-profit arts space supporting interdisciplinary and performance-based practices.
Svetlana Kitto is an NYC-based writer, teacher and oral historian with an MA in Oral History from Columbia University. Her writing has been featured or is forthcoming in Surface Magazine, New York Observer, The Believer, Plenitude Magazine and others, and her essays have been published in the books Occupy (Verso, 2012) and the Who, the What and the Where (Chronicle Books, 2014). She’s the lead interviewer on an oral history project of the Jewish Theological Seminary and has also contributed interviews to projects with the Brooklyn Historical Society, the Museum of Arts and Design, and the Mashantucket Pequot Museum.
Wayne Koestenbaumis a poet, critic, and artist. He has published nine books of nonfiction, on such subjects as hotels, Harpo Marx, humiliation, Jackie Onassis, opera, and Andy Warhol; his cult classic, The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire (Poseidon, 1993), was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. His latest book of prose is My 1980s & Other Essays (FSG, 2013). His six books of poetry include Blue Stranger with Mosaic Background (Turtle Point, 2012) and Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films (Turtle Point, 2006). He has also published a novel, Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes (Soft Skull, 2004). His first solo exhibition of paintings was at White Columns gallery in New York in Fall 2012. He is a Distinguished Professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center.
