Bárbaro Martínez-Ruiz earned his BA from the University of Havana in 1994 and his Ph.D from Yale University in 2004. He is an art historian with expertise in African and Caribbean artistic, visual, and religious practices. He was the 2017-2018 recipient of the Leverhulme Visiting Professorship, hosted by Oxford’s School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies, and a Senior Fellow at St. Anthony’s College and Trinity College. His books include Kongo Graphic Writing and Other Narratives of the Sign, El Colegio de México, Faisal Abdu’Allah: On the Art of Dislocation, and Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and his Worlds, for which he received the College Art Association Alfred H. Barr Award.

Teresita Fernández’s work is characterized by an interest in self-reflection and conceptual wayfinding. Her immersive, monumental works are inspired by a rethinking of landscape and place, as well as by diverse historical and cultural references. Often drawing inspiration from the natural world, Fernández’s practice emphasizes the connection between place, people, and materials. Her luminous works poetically evoke the landscape while also exposing the loaded historical ties to colonization and the inherent violence embedded in it. Her work is a quiet unraveling of place, power, visibility, and erasure that prompts an intimate experience for individual viewers. Fernández is a 2005 MacArthur Foundation Fellow and the recipient of numerous awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Artist’s Grant, and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial Award. Appointed by President Obama, she is the first Latina to serve on the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, a 100-year-old federal panel that advises the president and Congress on national matters of design and aesthetics. Fernández’s works have been exhibited both nationally and internationally at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Smithsonian Museum of American Art; MASS MoCA; and Castello di Rivoli, Turin, among others. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Ada Ferrer, an award-winning writer and historian, is Julius Silver Professor of History and Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University. She is the author of Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868–1898, winner of the Berkshire Book Prize for the best first book by a woman in any field of history, and Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution, which won the Frederick Douglass Book Prize from the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale University as well as multiple prizes from the American Historical Association. Her most recent book, Cuba: An American History, published by Scribner, is both a history of the island from before Columbus to the present, as well as a reflection on the relationship between personal stories and national and transnational histories. She wrote much of the book while in residence at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library and on a Guggenheim Fellowship.