is a Paris-based filmmaker and one of the major artistic voices of contemporary French cinema. She grew up partly in Cameroon, Burkina Faso and Djibouti as daughter of a French colonial official. Claire Denis enrolled in the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques (today: La Fémis) where she graduated in 1971. At the beginning of her film career, she worked as an assistant director to Dušan Makavejev, Costa Gavras, Jacques Rivette, Jim Jarmusch and Wim Wenders. She made her film debut in 1988 with Chocolat, which takes place in an Africa on the brink of anti-colonialism. Her work deals with colonial and anti-colonial themes in West Africa, issues in modern France as well as the subjects of identity, origin and continued destabilisation. Denis’s film Nénette et Boni won the Golden Leopard in 1996 in Locarno, and her film Beau Travail was awarded the Louve d’or in 1999 in Montreal and for this film Denis received the prize for Best Director at the Geneva Festival Tous écrans. In 2009 Denis was invited to the competition of the 66th Venice Film Festival with her film White Material. Claire Denis is professor at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, and at La Fémis in Paris.

has been director of the Haus der Kunst in Munich since 2011. Prior to that he worked as research curator at the International Center of Photography New York and the Art Institute of Chicago. Enwezor was Dean and Senior Vice President of the San Francisco Art Institute, he taught at the University of Pittsburgh, Columbia University, New York, and the University of Umeå, Sweden, among others, and was Fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program. In addition to exhibitions at the PS1, MoMA, New York, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Guggenheim Museum and Tate Modern, he curated numerous international exhibitions as artistic director such as La Triennale in Paris (2012) and the 7th Gwangju Biennial in South Korea (2007/08). In 2002 he was artistic director of the documenta 11 in Kassel, Germany, and in 1996/97 he directed the second Johannesburg Biennial in South Africa. Since 1993 Enwezor acts as joint editor and founder of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art.

is a writer and curator based in Cairo where she co-founded the art space Beirut whose programme reflects upon the production, establishment and conception of institutions as a curatorial and political act. Rifky initiated CIRCA (Cairo International Resource Center for Art) and, from 2009 to 2011, she was curator at Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art in Cairo. Furthermore, Rifky worked as Curatorial Agent of ddocumenta 13 in Kassel, Germany and in 2010 taught as Adjunct Professor of Art History and Theory at the American University in Cairo. Together with Wael Shawky she has co-managed MASS Alexandria, an independent study programme, for young artists in Egypt.