Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonnano, also known as the Yes Men, have been pranking and hoaxing and jamming for nearly two decades, performing identity correction on Barbie dolls, political candidates, corporations, and entities like the WTO.
Anna Baranchuk earned her BA and MS in Modern Philology from Minsk State Linguistic University (Belarus), her MA in Discourse and Argumentation Studies from the University of Amsterdam (Netherlands), and is currently a doctoral candidate in Public Communication at Georgia State University.
Andrew Boyd is an author, humorist, and long-time veteran of creative campaigns for social change. He led the decade-long satirical media campaign “Billionaires for Bush,” co-founded the Other 98%, and has launched the handbook and platform Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution (2012). He’s the author of several books, including Daily Afflictions, Life’s Little Deconstruction Book (2002) and the forthcoming I Want a Better Catastrophe: Hope, Hopelessness, and Climate Reality. Unable to come up with his own lifelong ambition, he’s been cribbing from Milan Kundera: “To unite the utmost seriousness of question with the utmost lightness of form.” He and his laptop live in New York; you can find him at andrewboyd.com and beautifultrouble.org.
Jack Bratich is Associate Professor in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University. His research critically examines the intersection of popular culture and political culture. He is author of Conspiracy Panics: Political Rationality and Popular Culture (2008) and co-editor, along with Jeremy Packer and Cameron McCarthy, of Foucault, Cultural Studies, and Governmentality (2003).
xtine burrough is a media artist and scholar. She is co-editor with Eduardo Navas and Owen Gallagher of The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies (2014), author of Foundations of Digital Art and Design (2013), and editor of Net Works: Case Studies in Web Art and Design (2012). Informed by the history of conceptual art, she uses social networking, databases, search engines, blogs, and applications in combination with popular sites like Facebook, YouTube, or Mechanical Turk to create web communities promoting interpretation and autonomy. As Associate Professor at The University of Texas at Dallas, she bridges the gap between histories, theories, and production in new media art and education. Her website is at missconceptions.net.
Paolo Cirio, an Italian media artist and hacker, works with information systems to impact norms and dynamics of social systems. Cirio’s artworks investigate fields affected by communication networks, such as privacy, copyright, finance, and law. His work has been exhibited in leading museums worldwide, and he has won prestigious art awards including the Golden Nica at Ars Electronica, the Transmediale Prize, and the Eyebeam fellowship. Cirio is also regularly threatened with prosecution for his subversive actions, which have been covered in the global media.
Christof Decker is Professor of American Studies at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich (LMU). He has published widely on documentary and Hollywood cinema, avant-garde film, literary and cultural history, melodrama, and the history of mass media. Most recently he edited Visuelle Kulturen der USA [Visual cultures of the USA] (2010) and co-edited with Astrid Böger Transnational Mediations: Negotiating Popular Culture between Europe and the United States (2015).
Marilyn DeLaure is Associate Professor in the Communication Studies Department at the University of San Francisco. Her research explores how people work to effect social change and focuses specifically on embodied performance. She has published a number of essays on dance, civil rights rhetoric, and environmental activism.
Mark Dery is a cultural critic. His writings on media, technology, pop culture, and American society have appeared in Artforum, Cabinet, Elle, the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, Salon, Spin, and Wired, among others. He lectures frequently in the United States and abroad. Dery’s books include The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink (1999) and Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century (1996), which has been translated into eight languages. He edited the scholarly anthology Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture (1994) and wrote the monograph Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of Signs (1993). His latest book is the essay collection I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts (2012).
Marco Deseriis is Assistant Professor in the Program in Media and Screen Studies at Northeastern University. He is the author of Improper Names: Collective Pseudonyms from the Luddites to Anonymous (2015) and co-author with Marano Giuseppe of Net.Art: L’Arte della Connessione (2008). In the 2000s, Deseriis collaborated with culture jamming groups such as the Yes Men and 0100101110101101.org and helped organize the culture jamming festival “The Influencers” in Barcelona.
Benedikt Feiten is a freelance writer. He studied American Literature at the University of Munich, where he completed a doctoral dissertation about music and transnationalism in the films of Jim Jarmusch. His academic interests include independent film, film music, graphic novels, narratology, transnationalism, and strategies of subversion.
Moritz Fink is a media scholar and author. He holds a doctoral degree in American Studies from the University of Munich, and has published on The Simpsons, media satire, and visual representations of the grotesque.
The Guerrilla Girls are a bunch of anonymous culture jammers who use facts, humor, and outrageous visuals to expose discrimination and corruption in art, film, politics, and pop culture. Over the past thirty-one years they have reinvented the f-word “feminism” in more than a hundred posters, street projects, actions, books, and billboards. Most recently they did a stealth sticker campaign in New York about the super-rich hijacking art, and a billboard in Reykjavik about discrimination in the Icelandic film industry. Their retrospectives in Bilbao and Madrid have attracted thousands. They travel the world doing gigs and workshops, collaborating with others who want to create their own activist campaigns.
Christine Harold is Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Washington. Her research explores opportunities for meaningful political action in a world increasingly defined by the logics and rhetorics of the marketplace. Her book, OurSpace: Resisting the Corporate Control of Culture (2007), evaluates strategies of resistance to the commercialization of public life.
IOCOSE is a collective of four artists who have been working as a group since 2006. IOCOSE’s art investigates the after-failure moment of the teleological narratives of technological development, in regard to both their enthusiastic and pessimistic visions. They have exhibited internationally at several art institutions and festivals, including the Venice Biennale (2011, 2013), Tate Modern (London, 2011), Science Gallery (Dublin, 2012), Jeu de Paume (Paris, 2011), FACT (Liverpool, 2012), and Transmediale (Berlin, 2013, 2015), and have been featured in publications such as Wired magazine, The Creators Project, Flash Art, Neural, Liberation, Spiegel, and El País. Their website is at iocose.org.
Henry Jenkins is the Provost’s Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. He is the author and/or editor of twelve books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (1992), Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture (2003), Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture (2006), and Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (2006). His latest co-authored book, with Sangita Shresthova, Neta Kligler-Vilinchik, Liana Gamber-Thompson, and Arely Zimmerman, is By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism (2016). He has also written for Technology Review, Computer Games, Salon, and the Huffington Post.
Michael LeVan is an independent scholar in Vancouver, WA. His research explores intersections among aesthetics, political philosophy, performance studies, and public memory. His essays have appeared in Performance Research, Text & Performance Quarterly, and International Journal of Translation. He is editor of Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies.
Mark LeVine is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern history at University of California, Irvine, and Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University. A long-time columnist at Al-Jazeera and a professional musician working with artists across Africa, the Middle East, and Europe, he is the author of Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Resistance and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam (2008), Impossible Peace: Israel/Palestine since 1989 (2009), and The Five-Year-Old Who Toppled a Pharaoh (forthcoming), as well as co-editor, with Gershon Shafir, of Struggle and Survival in Palestine/Israel (2012).
Evelyn McDonnell is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Journalism Program at Loyola Marymount University. She is the author or co-editor of six books, including Mamarama: A Memoir of Sex, Kids, and Rock ’n’ Roll (2007) and Queens of Noise: The Real Story of the Runaways (2013). Her articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, the Village Voice, Spin, Ms., and many other publications.
Kembrew McLeod is Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Iowa and an independent documentary filmmaker. McLeod’s books include Freedom of Expression®: Resistance and Repression in the Age of Intellectual Property (2007), Creative License: The Law and Culture of Digital Sampling (2011, co-authored with Peter DiCola), Pranksters: Making Mischief in the Modern World (2014), the anthology Cutting across Media: Interventionist Collage, Appropriation Art, and Copyright Law (2011, co-edited with Rudolf Kuenzli), and Parallel Lines (2016), about Blondie, punk, and disco in the 1970s. McLeod’s music and cultural criticism have appeared in Rolling Stone, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Wilson Quarterly, the Village Voice, MOJO, SPIN, and the New Rolling Stone Album Guide.
Wazhmah Osman is a filmmaker and Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Studies and Production at Temple University. Currently, she is writing a book analyzing the impact of international funding and cross-border media flows in Afghanistan. She is also researching how new technologies of war, violence, and representation, predicated on old colonial tropes, are being repackaged and deployed in “The War on Terror.” Her critically acclaimed documentary Postcards from Tora Bora has screened in festivals nationally and internationally.
Tony Perucci is Associate Professor of Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of Paul Robeson and the Cold War Performance Complex: Race, Madness, Activism (2012). His writings on the politics and aesthetics of performance have appeared in the journals Performance Research, TDR: The Drama Review, Text and Performance Quarterly, and Liminalities, as well as the books Iraq War Cultures (2011), Performing Adaptations (2010), and Violence Performed (2010). He is a founding member of The Performance Collective, which makes performance and trouble.
Bill Talen (Reverend Billy) and Savitri D are directors of the Church of Stop Shopping, a New York City–based radical performance community with fifty performing members and a congregation in the thousands. They are wild anticonsumerist gospel shouters, as well as earth-loving urban activists who have worked with communities on four continents defending land, life, and imagination from reckless development and the extractive imperatives of global capital. They employ multiple tactics and creative strategies, including cash register exorcisms, retail interventions, and cell phone operas, combined with grass roots organizing and media activism.
Michael Serazio is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Boston College. His studies focus on popular culture, advertising, politics, and new media. He is the author of Your Ad Here: The Cool Sell of Guerrilla Marketing (2013). His scholarly work has appeared in the Journal of Communication, the International Journal of Communication, Critical Studies in Media Communication, the Journal of Consumer Culture, Communication Culture & Critique, and Television & New Media, and he has written essays on media and culture for the Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, the New Republic, the Nation, and Salon.
Rebecca Walker is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Southern Illinois University–Carbondale, where she teaches classes in performance studies and persuasive communication. Her research on flash mobs has been published in Text and Performance Quarterly, Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, and the Kenneth Burke Journal of Communication.