Michael McClure is an internationally known poet, essayist, and playwright. Born in Kansas, McClure moved to San Francisco where he was influenced by the developing Beat movement. He went on to join Philip Lamantia, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder & Philip Whalen as the "unknowns" at the famous Six Gallery reading in 1955.

McClure gives performances of his poetry at colleges such as Stanford, NYU and The University of Arizona. He also performs at clubs in San Diego, Vancouver and New York as well as festivals in Paris, Rome and Amsterdam. He has been featured in several films including Scorsese's The Last Waltz. He has made three TV documentaries, and published numerous books of poetry, plays, two novels and several collections of essays.

Peter Selz is Professor Emeritus in the History of Art at the University of California at Berkeley and founding Director of the University Art Museum in Berkeley (1965-1973), where he presented one of the earliest museum exhibitions of sculptor Barbara Chase-Riboud's work. Selz also served as the Curator of the Department of Painting and Sculpture Exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1958-65).

Former West Coast editor of Art in America, Selz has contributed to many American and European journals and has written on virtually the entire spectrum of the arts of the 20th century, from Art Nouveau and German Expressionist painting to kinetic sculpture and environmental art. He is the author of monographs on many artists, including Max Beckmann, Alberto Giacometti, Jean Dubeffet, Sam Francis, Eduardo Chilida and Barbara Chase-Riboud.

BornBorn in San Francisco, Eleanor Kent has lived there most of her life, making art. She started painting and drawing seriously in the mid-1950s after getting a BA in English at Harvard University. Kent then returned to the Bay Area to enter the San Francisco Art Institute, and later earned her Master’s degree in English from San Francisco State University. Kent studied and painted in the Bay Area Figurative style under Ralph Ducasse, Elmer Bischoff, Nathan Oliveira, Frank Lobdell and Bruce McGaw, using a diverse array of mediums to depict the luxury of the California lifestyle.

Working with Bay Area Figurative masters helped Kent form a solid art foundation, which she used to explore other mediums and forms of expression in the following decades. In the 1970s, she painted on fabric and t-shirts and used color copiers to create prints. Throughout the 1980s, Kent explored developing computer technology and graphic systems as art tools and helped found Ylem, a tech art group. During the ‘90s, Kent started knitting the mathematical images she saw on computers, and today crochets body jewelry using electro-luminescent wire, which surrounds the wearer with light. She continues to work for the creative use of technology and a sharing of information as a way of peacefully exploring of our existence.