Joshua Decter
Director, USC Master of Public Art Studies Program
Joshua Decter is a critic, curator, art historian and theorist. He is a contributor to Artforum, Afterall, and other periodicals, and has organized exhibitions at PS1 in New York, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Apex Art in New York, The Kunsthalle Vienna, The Santa Monica Museum of Art, and was a curatorial interlocutor for the inSite_05 San Diego/Tijuana "Interventions" exhibition project. Decter organized the conference, "The Situational Drive: Complexities of Public Sphere Engagement," in collaboration with inSite San Diego/Tijuana and Creative Time, New York, presented at The Cooper Union, NY, in May 2007.

Anne Bray
Executive Director, L.A. Freewaves
Anne Bray is an artist and Executive Director of L.A. Freewaves, a media arts organization and festival in Los Angeles. She developed the concept of the multicultural network based on exchange and the media arts in 1989 and has continued to see the organization through the technological, social and aesthetic changes of the 1990s.  Her educational experience includes photography history at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, new technology art at MIT and new genres at University of California, Los Angeles (MFA, 1985), giving her the conceptual framework to posit media arts as public art. She continues to exhibit her own work as temporary installations in public sites combining personal and social positions via video, audio, slides and 3-d screens. In addition to her class in the Public Art Studies Program at USC, Anne Bray teaches new genre arts at Claremont Graduate University. From 1985 to 1989 she coordinated Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibition's (LACE) video exhibitions, online access program, video workshops and video archive. 

Sarah Cifarelli
Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles
Prior to working in the Public Art Division, she was the Marketing Manager for the Division of Marketing and Development at Cultural Affairs. In this position, Ms. Cifarelli helped develop the Los Angeles International Cultural Exchange Program to send Los Angeles artists abroad to promote greater understanding of American culture through performances and workshops. As part of that program, Ms. Cifarelli toured with the Luckman Jazz Orchestra to Sao Paulo and Salvador, Brazil, and Berlin, Germany. Ms. Cifarelli has also worked for a museum consulting firm, developed exhibitions for Walt Disney Imagineering, and created marketing strategies for university-based English language programs. Ms. Cifarelli earned a Master of Public Art Studies degree from USC and completed a double major in Art History and English Literature from the University of Colorado, Boulder. Ms. Cifarelli currently serves as the Thesis Coordinator in the Public Art Studies Program at USC.

Donna Conwell

Janet Owen Driggs
Director, RAID Projects
British writer and curator Janet Owen Driggs is Co-director of Raid Projects, a non-commercial exhibition and curatorial organization dedicated to facilitating innovative cultural production, ventilating the work of LA artists to the world, and bringing international projects to the city. Previously she was Founding Director of the USC SoFA AIM international festival of time-based media. In addition to her work with Raid, Owen's recent curatorial projects have included a series of online exhibitions, including Know Thyselves, Manifesting Destiny and Being Human Becoming Something Else, for the Susquahannah Art Museum. Owen is currently editing a book about Not A Cornfield, a recent large-scale art project that took place in downtown LA from April 2005- April 2006. Her recent publications include essays on information visualization, sculptor Emilio Garcia Placencia, filmmakers Runa Islam and Heike Baronowsky and photographer Subhankar Banerjee for RiM magazine; the Hammer Museum and the anthology Kolibri.  Before transitioning to work as a writer and curator, Owen practiced for a decade as an artist working in both traditional and new media She has exhibited projects in solo and group exhibitions in Europe and the Americas, at venues which include: Beaux Arts, Delfina Studios, and the Camden Art Center (UK), Shoshanna Wayne and Flowers West (US), Sandberg Institute (Netherlands), Festival Internacional de Linguagem Eletronica (Brazil), and ArtPool (Sweden).

Lauri Firstenberg
Director/Curator, LA><ART
Lauri Firstenberg is the founder and Director/Curator of LA><ART - a new nonprofit contemporary arts organization in Los Angeles. She received her Ph.D. in the History of Art and Architecture Department at Harvard University in 2005. She has recently curated the following exhibitions: "Daniel Martinez: How I Fell In Love With My Dirty Bomb," "Ruben Ochoa: Extracted," "TOROLAB: SOS Emergency Architecture" at LA><ART 2006. She co-curated with Anton Vidokle "Image Bank for Everyday Revolutionary Life" at the Gallery at REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney/Calarts Theatre), 2006 and "Isaac Julien: True North," and Amir Zaki: Spring Through Winter," Mak Center, 2005. Firstenberg was formerly the Assistant Director/Curator of the MAK Center for Art and Architecture and the Schindler House, Los Angeles and Curator of Artists Space, New York. She has contributed to a host of publications on contemporary art including Art Papers, Frieze, Contemporary, Flash Art, Nka, Art Journal, Parkett, Lab 71 amongst others. She is the founder of L'art a new online publication for contemporary art. Forthcoming exhibitions include "Lisa Tan: One Night Stand" at LA><ART and "Excess of Subjectivity," Miki Wick Gallery, Zurich, 2007 and Artpace, San Antonio, 2008. She is currently editing the forthcoming publication "Rodney McMIllan: Words are Deeds," LA><ART, 2007. She is Adjunct Faculty in the Master of Public Art Studies Program at USC Roski School of Art and at Sciarc, Los Angeles.

Susan Gray

Ferdinand Lewis
Irvine Doctoral Fellow, USC School of Policy, Planning and Development
Before coming to USC, Ferdinand Lewis served on the Interdisciplinary Studies and Theater faculties at California Institute of the Arts for nine years. He was producer of the CalArts Interdisciplinary Performance Festival, and produced the documentary,"Art Works: The Community Arts Partnership." During that time he also consulted on educational curricula for public television, and worked as a freelance arts journalist for Variety, American Theater, the LA Times, and others. He is the author of the book, "Ensemble Works: An Anthology" from TCG Publishers, is an essayist in the forthcoming, "Critical Perspectives: A Prism of Writings on Art and Civic Dialogue" from Americans for the Arts, and is co-author of "Touch: Tactile Graphics" from Rockport Publishers. His essay on community-based theater and globalization appeared in the March 2005 issue of Theater Topics. At USC, Lewis has taught for the USC Neighborhood Studies Program, and is an Irvine Doctoral Fellow in the University of Southern California's School of Policy, Planning and Development, where he studies urban planning, and lectures on methods of inquiry.

Karen Moss
Curator of Collections and Director of Education and Public Programs
Orange County Museum of Art

Carol Stakenas
Executive Director, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE)