Laura Brunow Miner is an editor, designer, and photography lover in San Francisco. She founded Pictorymag.com and Phootcamp.com.

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

Bryant Terry is a chef and author of two critically acclaimed books: Vegan Soul Kitchen and Grub. For the past decade he has worked to build a more just and sustainable food system, using cooking as a tool to illuminate the intersections between poverty, structural racism, and food insecurity.

Allison Smith’s art practice investigates the cultural phenomenon of historical reenactment and the role of craft in the construction of national identity. Her work has been exhibited at P.S.1/MoMA, MASS MoCA, Indianapolis Museum of Art, and UC Berkeley Art Museum, among others. Her website www.allisonsmithstudio.com details ongoing projects including her downtown Oakland version of a general store called SMITHS, and her Arts & Skills Service, a series currently unfolding at SFMOMA.

Joanna Pearlstein (@jopearl) is a senior editor at Wired magazine, where she directs the fact-checking department. Erik Malinowski (@erikmal) is an associate research editor and contributor to Playbook, Wired’s sports blog. Rachel Swaby (@rachelswaby) is an assistant research editor and Wired’s resident mollusk mating expert. Follow Wired Research on Twitter @wiredresearch.

Josh Harkinson is a staff writer at Mother Jones, where he covers California and the West, climate change, and the environment. His 2008 story about a bush doctor working among aboriginal communities in Canada’s tar sands inspired Dirty Oil, a 2009 documentary film produced by Academy-Award nominee Leslie Iwerks and narrated by Neve Campbell.

Jennifer Kahn is a contributing editor to Wired magazine, and a feature writer for The New Yorker, National Geographic, and Outside, among others. Her work has appeared in the Best American Science Writing series four times in the past seven years. She teaches in the Magazine Program at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She hopes to age as well as her father.

Rebecca Solnit is an activist, historian and writer who lives in San Francisco. Her twelfth book, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, came out in 2009. Other books include Storming the Gates of Paradise; Wanderlust: A History of Walking; and River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West. A contributing editor to Harper’s, she also writes for the political site Tomdispatch.com.

Christopher Hawthorne is architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times, where he writes about buildings, sustainability, planning, transit and the lives of cities. With Alanna Stang, he is the author of The Green House: New Directions in Sustainable Architecture (Princeton Architectural Press). He grew up in Berkeley and is a graduate of Yale University.

Zana Woods is the Photo Director of Wired magazine in San Francisco, California, where she started in 1999. Her focus at Wired is on environmental portraiture, photojournalism and product photography.

Jon Mooallem is a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine where he recently wrote about the science and politics of gay animals. He also contributes to Harpers, Slate, and This American Life and was a presenter at both issues 1 and 2 of Pop-Up Magazine.

Jamie Meltzer’s documentary films include Off the Charts: the Song-Poem Story, about the shadowy world of song-poems, Welcome to Nollywood, an investigation into the wildly successful Nigerian movie industry, and La Caminata, about a small town in Mexico that puts on a simulated border crossing as a tourist attraction. He teaches in the M.F.A. Program for Documentary Film and Video at Stanford University.

 

 

Elizabeth Weil is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine. She is working on a memoir about marriage improvement, to be published by Scribner’s, called No Cheating, No Dying.

Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman have been making films together since 1987. Their first film, Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt, won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature (1989). This was Rob’s second Oscar, having previously won for The Times of Harvey Milk (1984). Other collaborations include The Celluloid Closet and Paragraph 175. HOWL, their first narrative feature, will be released in the fall.

Joe Richman is an independent producer and reporter for NPR and the founder of Radio Diaries (radiodiaries.org). For 15 years, Radio Diaries has helped pioneer a model for working with people to document their own lives. Past award-winning productions include: Teenage Diaries, Prison Diaries, My So-Called Lungs, Thembi’s AIDS Diary, and Mandela: An Audio History. BRIDGETTE MCGEE-ROBINSON is the granddaughter of Willie McGee.

Tracey Snelling is an Oakland, California-based artist exploring reality and scale through sculpture, photography, and video. Her works are featured in the collections of the Baltimore Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and others, and have been exhibited internationally, with solo shows in Brussels, Amsterdam, London, and Beijing. Upcoming exhibits include Brandts in Denmark and the Frist Museum in Nashville.

Mirissa Neff is a reporter for PBS’s Sound Tracks: Music Without Borders, a new series that explores the world through music. She is the art director for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and by night hip-shaking crowds know her as DJ Felina. San Francisco’s 7x7magazine named Mirissa the city’s “Best Mood Setter.”

Justine Sharrock is a journalist whose work has appeared in Mother Jones, San Francisco magazine, Utne Reader, Alternet.org, and the San Francisco Bay Guardian. Her upcoming book, Tortured (Wiley, June 2010) documents the experiences of American soldiers who tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

Trevor Paglen is an artist, writer, and experimental geographer whose work blurs lines between social science, contemporary art, and journalism. He has exhibited internationally, and his work has been featured in numerous publications including the New York Times, Newsweek, and Art Forum. He is the author of three books, including Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA’s Rendition Flights (co-authored with AC Thompson; Melville House, 2006). In fall 2010, Aperture will publish a book of his visual work.

DOUGLAS J. LONG was raised on too many episodes of Wild Kingdom and realized his childhood dream of studying wild animals in exotic places. Douglas has rustled rattlesnakes, seen shark predation in action, enjoyed the aromas of bat caves, and discovered ten new species of fishes. Currently, he is the Chief Curator of Natural Sciences at the Oakland Museum of California, and a Research Associate at the California Academy of Sciences.

Lisa Margonelli is a fellow at the New American Foundation and the author of Oil on the Brain: Petroleum’s Long Strange Trip to Your Tank, published by Nan Talese/Doubleday in 2007. She has written for the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Wired, and Discover, among others.

Alex Cohen is a reporter and news anchor at KPCC FM and a regular contributor to NPR and Marketplace. Her roller derby alter-ego Axles of Evil, of L.A.’s Derby Dolls, was the consultant for Drew Barrymore’s film Whip It. Alex/Axles co-authored the upcoming book Down and Derby: The Insider’s Guide to Roller Derby.