Ann Hamilton was born in 1956 in Lima, Ohio. She trained in textile design at the University of Kansas, and later received an MFA from Yale University. While her degree is in sculpture, textiles and fabric have continued to be an important part of her work, which includes installations, photographs, videos, performances, and objects. Hamilton’s installations often combine evocative soundtracks with cloth, filmed footage, organic material, and objects such as tables. She has experimented with exchanging one sense organ for another—the mouth and fingers, for example, become like an eye with the addition of miniature pinhole cameras. In 1993, she won a MacArthur Fellowship. As the 1999 American representative at the Venice Biennale, she addressed topics of slavery and oppression in American society with an installation that used walls embossed with Braille. The embossed Braille caught a dazzling red powder as it slid down from above, literally making language visible. After teaching at the University of California at Santa Barbara from 1985 to 1991, she returned to Ohio, where she lives and works.

Hamilton received a Heinz Award in 2008

Meredith Monk creates works that thrive at the intersection of music and movement, image and object, light and sound in order to discover new modes of perception. For nearly 50 years, the scope and breadth of her performances, installations and site-specific works have activated architectural spaces and engaged audiences in new ways. The voice lies at the root of all her creations, which include songs, film, opera, site-specific performance, music-theater, and installations. Her pioneering exploration of the voice as an instrument expands the boundaries of musical composition. She has alternately been proclaimed as a “voice of the future” and “one of America’s coolest composers.”