Evan Ratliff is the story editor for Pop-Up Magazine and a writer for Wired, the New Yorker, New York, Outside, and other magazines. His story about disappearing for a month will appear in the December issue of Wired. He can be found online at www.atavist.net and @theatavist.

Steven Leckart is a frequent contributor to Wired. His writing has appeared in various publications in print and online, including GOOD, Maxim, Boing Boing and Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools. For smaller doses, you can follow @stevenleckart on Twitter.

Farhad Manjoo is Slate’s technology columnist, and he also writes frequently for the New York Times, Time, and Fast Company. He is the author of True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society, which argues that digital technology is helping society abandon facts in favor of ideology.

Marc Hawthorne only knows how to play rudimentary drums, but that didn’t stop him from following his high-school dream of becoming a music writer. Once upon a time he was in charge of his own rag, but now he writes for the Onion’s A.V. Club, Wired, SF Weekly, the San Francisco Chronicle, and other assorted publications.

Bonnie Tsui is a frequent contributor to the New York Times and the author of American Chinatown: A People’s History of Five Neighborhoods (Free Press). She is also a former editor at Travel + Leisure and this year’s recipient of the Jane Rainie Opel Award from the Radcliffe Institute.

Philip Wood is the curatorial and creative brains behind the renowned international design and art brand, CITIZEN:Citizen. He is an artisan, entrepreneur, professor, and cultural critic. Products from CITIZEN:Citizen are in the permanent collections of both the New York and San Francisco MoMA.

Aaron Ximm is a San Francisco-based sound artist best known for his composition, installation, and performance work under the name Quiet American (quietamerican.org). From 2001 to 2005, he curated and hosted the Field Effects concert series, which, like his own work, sought to showcase the quiet, fragile, and lovely side of sound art, particularly found sound and field recordings.

Jon Mooallem, a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine, has written recently about whooping cranes, storage facilities and ventriloquists.

Steven Okazaki, working mostly with HBO, has garnered four Academy Award nominations, plus an Oscar, a Peabody and a Primetime Emmy, for his ultra-serious documentaries on Hiroshima, heroin addiction, the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans, and torture in Cambodia, but he is capable of lighter moments.

Joshuah Bearman has written about real life superheroes, CIA missions, aspiring Fabios, and the world’s greatest Pac-Man player. He has written for Harpers, McSweeneys, Wired, Rolling Stone, and contributes to This American Life. He is working on a memoir, called St. Croix, to be published by Riverhead.

Elena Dorfman’s Fandomania: Characters & Cosplay (Aperture), which explored the world of Japanese-style costume play, and Still Lovers (Channel Photographics), which examined the lives of men and women who live with life-sized silicone sex dolls, were the subject of solo shows at the Edwynn Houk Gallery in New York and in cities worldwide.

Nate DiMeo is the creator of the memory palace podcast. He reports regularly on pop culture for NPR. Also, the other day he got paid to write Cannibal Run, a live-action zombie web series. Because he lives in Hollywood. That kind of crap happens occasionally when you live in Hollywood.

Darcy Padilla is a photographer whose work has appeared in numerous publications including: the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Time, Fortune, Harper’s Bazaar, and Wired. Since 1990 she has been photographing the poor in the United States and abroad.

 

Jeff Chang is working on his new book, Who We Be: The Colorization of America (St. Martin’s Press). He is the author of the American Book Award-winning Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation (St. Martin’s Press/Picador) and a 2008 USA Ford Fellow in Literature.

Sam Green’s film The Weather Underground was nominated for an Academy Award in 2004, broadcast nationally on PBS, and included in the Whitney Biennial. His other award-winning documentaries include lot 63, grave c, The Rainbow Man/John 3:16, N-Judah 5:30, and Pie Fight ’69. He teaches at the University of San Francisco and the San Francisco Art Institute. www.samgreen.to

Dave Cerf is a filmmaker, musician, sound designer, and software designer. He composed music for Scott Kennedy’s film OT: Our Town and Sam Green’s The Weather Underground, and performed live accompaniment over the films of Jennifer Reeves, Pat O’Neill, and Melinda Stone, including Stone’s 2003 California Tour of abandoned drive-in movie theaters.

Wayne White’s paintings and sculptures have been exhibited in galleries and museums across the country. He was a production designer, puppet maker, and performer on the Emmy Award-winning Pee Wee’s Playhouse, as well as an art director for music videos including Peter Gabriel’s Big Time, and the Smashing Pumpkins’ Tonight, Tonight. A monograph of his 30 year career called Maybe Now I’ll Get the Respect I So Richly Deserve edited by Todd Oldham has just been published by AMMO Books.

Derek Fagerstrom is a creative director of Pop-Up Magazine. He and Lauren Smith opened the Curiosity Shoppe (www.curiosityshoppeonline.com) on Valencia Street in 2007. He is a former editor at Readymade, Esquire, and Interview magazines.

Paul Schiek is an artist living and working in Oakland, California. He also owns and runs the photo book publishing company TBW Books, which has published books by Todd Hido, Alec Soth, Jim Goldberg and many others. He is represented by the Stephen Wirtz Gallery.

Daniel Alarcón is Associate Editor of Etiqueta Negra, an award-winning monthly magazine published in his native Lima, Peru. He is author of Lost City Radio, winner of the 2008 PEN USA Novel Award, and most recently The King is Always Above the People, a collection of stories published in Mexico and Peru. He is Visiting Writer at California College of Art.

David Maisel is known for depicting realms where beauty and horror converge—from cartographic views of environmentally impacted sites, to images of copper canisters holding the ashes of psychiatric patients. In History’s Shadow, Maisel re-photographs x-rays of art objects, drawing from existing archives the spectral visions of past cultures.

Amy Standen is a reporter for Quest, KQED’s science and environment show, and a frequent contributor to National Public Radio. She’s also a co-founder of Meatpaper.

Elif Batuman’s first book, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in February 2010. Her writing has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s, the London Review of Books, the Nation, and n+1.

Tiffany Campbell and Andria Lessler have supported each other on projects including Tiffany’s production of a seminal women’s skateboarding film, a book on animal tracking, and Andria’s development of a bakery cooperative and the organization of community arts events. These roots in skateboarding, music, film and conscious participation with the planet are shared with Dear and Yonder’s primary cinematographer, veteran filmmaker, Thomas Campbell.