Markus J. Buehler is an American materials scientist and engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is the McAfee Professor of Engineering at MIT, where he directs the Laboratory for Atomistic and Molecular Mechanics (LAMM). His research and teaching activities center on the application of a computational materials science approach to understand functional material properties in biological and synthetic materials, specifically focused on mechanical properties. His work is highly cross-disciplinary and incorporates materials science, engineering, mathematics and the establishment of links between natural materials with the Arts through the use of category theory. As a composer of experimental music with an interest in sonification, he works at the interface of science and art, where his work explores the creation of new forms of musical expression, such as those derived from biological materials and living systems. Using an approach termed “materiomusic”, uses sound as an abstract way to model, optimize and create new forms of living matter. In recent work he created music based on proteins—the basic molecules of all life—to explore crossing species, scales and between philosophical and physical models. In recent work he has developed a new framework to compose music based on proteins – the basic molecules of all life, as well as other physical phenomena such as fracturing, to explore similarities and differences across species, scales and between philosophical and physical models.

He is the recipient of many awards including the Harold E. Edgerton Faculty Achievement Award, the Daniel C. Drucker Medal, the Alfred Noble Prize, the Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology, the Leonardo da Vinci Award, and the Thomas J.R. Hughes Young Investigator Award, the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), and others. Buehler is a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher and has authored more than 450 peer-reviewed publications (H-index=99), which have been cited more than 35,000 times, and authored two monographs. He has given more hundreds of invited, keynote and plenary talks around the world, including several highly-praised TED talks. His technical innovations have resulted in several patents. Between 2013 and 2020 he served as the Head of the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at MIT, and in 2019, as President of the Society of Engineering Science.

Peggy Hill is a native Oklahoma matriarch and ecologist whose research lies in the overlap of behavioral and physiological ecology. Her PhD work on conservation efforts to benefit a rare prairie insect led to a personal discovery of a very ancient and widely used method of communication that was known to only a few other scientists across the world at the time. In an effort to sort out and satisfy her own curiosity of what was known about substrate-borne vibrational signals and cues (as opposed to sound), she wrote a small book, Vibrational Communication in Animals (Harvard University Press, 2008), that gave her access to the international community of research on the same phenomenon. Together they moved from a group with shared interests to a vibrant community that in 2014 – 16 launched a new scientific discipline, biotremology, or the study of vibrational behavior. They have produced three edited chapter books from 2014 to 2022. Spiders are but one of a majority of animals, including most arthropods but also mammals, that communicate in this way.

Based in Naʼnízhoozhí (Gallup, New Mexico), Eric-Paul Riege (Diné, b. 1994) creates soft, woven sculptures, wearable art, digital collages, and durational performances that relate to his heritage and spirituality, particularly the intergenerational and interspecies traditions of weaving. These works express his philosophies and cosmologies of sanctuary, harmony, and interconnection with all elements of the world around him. His work is a being of Hózhó–Diné philosophy that encompasses beauty, balance, goodness, and harmony in all things physical and mental and its bearing on everyday experience. His work, which he describes as being “encompassed in the threads of weaving and life,” creates an immersive and charged space influenced by his own homes, ceremonies, and rituals, from his past, future, and present selves.

Riege’s first solo museum presentation was at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami in 2019. He has shown work and performed at venues including the SITE Santa Fe Biennial 2018 ini Santa Fe, New Mexico, the Navajo Nation Museum in Tségháhoodzání in Window Rock, Arizona, the National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and the Heard Museum in Phoenix. In 2021 he had group shows at Regen Projects and STARS Gallery in Los Angeles and a a solo show at Bockley Gallery in Minneapolis. He collaborated with Jeffrey Gibson on Gibson’s monumental sculpture and ziggurat Because Once You Enter My House, It Becomes Our House at deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts. He was a part of the 2021 Prospect New Orleans Triennial and will be included in the 2022 Toronto Biennial.

David Zeitlyn works at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology (ISCA), University of Oxford. As well as working on Mambila spider divination, Zeitlyn does research in anthropological linguistics, the anthropology of religion, visual anthropology, and historical anthropology. Through divination he has interests in prediction and futurology. He is the author of Mambila Divination: Framing Questions, Constructing Answers (2020). Other interests include the use and study of the internet and information and communications technology, and the anthropology of archives as well as archives for anthropology. His work on the history of photography in Cameroon with particular focus on Cameroonian studio photographers led to Photo Cameroon: Studio Portraiture, 1970s – 1990s, an exhibition at the Fowler Museum at UCLA in 2021.

Cynthia Willett is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Philosophy at Emory University. She is the author of Uproarious: How Feminists and Other Subversive Comics Speak Truth (2019); Interspecies Ethics (2014), translated as Etica Interespecies (2019); Irony in the Age of Empire: Comic Perspectives on Freedom and Democracy (2008); The Soul of Justice: Racial Hubris and Social Bonds (2001); and Maternal Ethics and Other Slave Moralities (1995). Her work develops philosophical visions for reimagining a common life across species as well as intersectional axes in human societies. Her current research expands on the role of humor as well as musical communication within and across species, and includes a monograph on the musicology of life.