Norman Klein is a professor in the School of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts, and the author, for instance, of The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory (1997/2008) and The Vatican to Vegas: A History of Special Effects (2004/2024), the multimedia novels Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles (2003/2023) and The Imaginary 20th Century (2016), Freud in Coney Island and Other Tales (2006), and Tales of the Floating Class (2018).  A critic, urban and media historian, and novelist, he has written extensively on the culture and politics of Los Angeles, on cinema, and on architecture. 

Scott Benzel is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Los Angeles. His work has been shown or performed at The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum Of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, LA><ART, Los Angeles,  The MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles, The Palm Springs Art Museum, the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, and REDCAT, Los Angeles, and was featured in Made in L.A. 2012 and 2023 (as part of Los Angeles Contemporary Archive) at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Benzel has organized shows at Los Angeles Contemporary Archive, The MAK Center for Art and Architecture (Schindler House and Mackey House), Los Angeles, and Welcome Inn, Eagle Rock, CA, as part of Pacific Standard Time organized by The Getty Museum, among others. He is a member of the faculty of the School of Art at California Institute of the Arts.

Margo Bistis is a European intellectual and cultural historian and adjunct professor at ArtCenter College of Design.  She has published scholarly articles on modernism, caricature, and urban history, and is co-author of The Imaginary 20th Century (2016), a multi-media novel and print book.  This collaborative work has appeared internationally.  Solo and group exhibitions include Orange County Museum of Art (2006); ZKM/ Center for Art & Media Technology Karlsruhe (2007); the Ben Maltz Gallery, Otis College of Design (2009); DOX/ Centre for Contemporary Art, Prague (2010); the College of Creative Studies Gallery, UCSB (2018); and the University of Maryland Art Gallery (2018). 

John Hawk, a native of Seattle, Washington, received his MFA from CalArts in Art and Film/Video in 1991. His award-winning work has been screened and exhibited at numerous museums, galleries and film festivals, including the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, the Seattle Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, REDCAT Theater, Los Angeles, the Black Maria Film Festival in New Jersey, the Anthology Film Archives, New York as well as PBS and CNN television. He is also a critically acclaimed guitarist, recording engineer and record producer and prior to his return to art and film was an internationally recognized guitar builder with a Seymour Duncan bass and guitar pickup named in his honor "The Hawkbucker". He is currently a member of the faculty at CalArts where he has been teaching in the School of Film/Video for 30 years.

Patrick Winfield Vogel is an artist, vintner, and curator from Los Angeles. Their collaboration with Norman Klein began at Office Space Burbank, an experimental space where The Secret Rise of Skunk Works was first exhibited. Patrick received their MFA from the program in Art and Technology at California Institute of the Arts.

Sabrina Tarasoff was born in 1991 in Jyväskylä, Finland. She is an independent writer and critic based in South Pasadena. During the mid-2010s Tarasoff earned a BFA at Parsons Paris (now Paris College of Art) while also acting as codirector of the independent exhibition space Shanaynay in Paris. She is a contributing editor at Mousse Magazine and writes regularly for Artforum, Flash Art, and X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly. Her writing dwells on the mysterious movement between popular culture, poetry, and art, with a particularly keen eye on the nebulous “poet gang” that formed around the Wednesday Night Poetry series at Beyond Baroque Literary Art Center during the period from 1976 to 1986. She also runs the Summer Room, an annual residency at Treignac Projet in Treignac, France.