CO-FOUNDER

Sylvia Brownrigg is the author of eight works of fiction including The Delivery Room, Pages for You (winner of a Lambda award), and Pages for Her. Her middle-grade book, written under the name Juliet Bell, Kepler’s Dream, was turned into an independent feature film. Sylvia’s stories have appeared in Alta, the art magazine frieze, on NPR’s Collected Shorts and BBC Radio 4. As part of the multimedia arts group Lightfast, she contributed to “Intertwine”, a show at the diRosa Center for Contemporary Art. Sylvia’s reviews and interviews have been published widely including in the NY Times,  the Guardian, the TLS, The Believer, and the LA Review of Books. Her new memoir, The Whole Staggering Mystery: A Story of Fathers Lost and Found, was published in 2024.

CO-FOUNDER

Itamar Kubovy is a theater producer and director. He studied philosophy at Yale University; ran theaters in Germany and Sweden; wrote and directed plays and television; and for 16 years was Executive Creative Producer of the globally acclaimed dance company Pilobolus, where he guided the creation of interdisciplinary collaborations, launched and ran a rural, outdoor arts and ideas festival on a farm in Connecticut, and re-imaged the ancient art of shadow theater through a contemporary lens. Shadowland, a work Kubovy produced and co-directed, toured to more than 60 countries and was seen live by 2 million people worldwide. Co-directing a video for Pilobolus with the rock band OK Go garnered Kubovy a Grammy nomination and three Cannes Golden Lion awards.

CO-FOUNDER

Claire Messud’s bestselling novels include The Emperor’s Children, a New York Times Book of the Year in 2006; The Woman Upstairs (2013); and The Burning Girl (2017), a finalist for the LA Times Book Award in Fiction. She is also the author of a memoir-in-essays, Kant’s Little Prussian Head & Other Reasons Why I Write (2020). Her work has been translated into over twenty languages. She writes for Harper’s Magazine, The New York Review of Books and the New York Times. She was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture in 2020. Her most recent novel, This Strange Eventful History (2024), was shortlisted for the American Library in Paris Book Award and longlisted for the Booker Prize and the Giller Prize. Messud has taught creative writing at Harvard University since 2015.