Theodore S. Berger has served as Executive Director of the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) since 1980. In this position, Mr. Berger has been responsible for for all aspects of policy formulation, overall administrative and long-range planning, annual fundraising and development for this not-for-profit arts service and creative development organization. He has also represented the Foundation and Directors in relationships with other cultural and academic institutions, public agencies, foundations, donors, elected officials and legislators at local, state, and national levels, as well as in many speaking and panelist engagements throughout the country.

Previously, Mr. Berger served as the Executive Director of the New York State Arts in Education Program from 1973-79. He worked as a free-lance writer from 1970-73 and graduated from Columbia University's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences with a major in English in 1965.

Mr. Berger serves either as a Director on the Board, or in an advisory capacity for various organizations, including the Alliance of New York State Arts Councils, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York City Arts Coalition, Studio in a School, amongst numerous others.

Irving Sandler, Senior Fellow, received a BA at Temple University and an MA at the University of Pennsylvania in 1950 for American history and his PhD in Art History at New York University in 1976. Throughout the 1950s, Irving Sandler was involved in several different artist organizations; he was the director of the artist-run Tanager Gallery, the Program Chairman for the Artists’ Club and worked as a reviewer for Art News and Art International. During the 1950s, he also independently interviewed artists and worked as an art critic. In the 1960s he taught at New York University and and SUNY-Purchase. Mr. Sandler has been published several times for his books on interviews with artists, reviews and surveys of contemporary art. Some of his work includes The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism (1970), The New York School: The Painters and Sculptors of the Fifties (1978), American Art of the 1960s (1988), Art of the Postmodern Era: From the Late 1960s to the Early 1990s (1996) and A Sweeper-Up After Artists: A Memoir (1993). Throughout his career, Irving Sandler has also held several influential positions at various curatorial organizations as well as larger foundations such as the National Endowment for the Arts and the Sharpe Art Foundation.

Eleanor Heartney, is a Contributing Editor to Art in America and Artpress and has written extensively on contemporary art issues for such other publications as Artnews, Art and Auction, The New Art Examiner, the Washington Post and The New York Times. She received the College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award for distinction in art criticism in 1992. Her books include: Critical Condition: American Culture at the Crossroads (Cambridge University Press, 1997); Postmodernism (Cambridge University Press, 2001); Postmodern Heretics: The Catholic Imagination in Contemporary Art (Midmarch Arts Press, 2004); Defending Complexity: Art, Politics and the New World Order (Hard Press Editions, 2006) and Art and Today (Phaidon Press Inc., 2008), a survey of contemporary art of the last 25 years from Phaidon. She is a co-author of After the Revolution: Women who Transformed Contemporary Art (Prestel Publishing, 2007), which won the Susan Koppelman Award. Heartney is a past President of AICA-USA, the American section of the International Art Critics Association. In 2008 she was honored by the French government as a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

Deborah Kass received her BFA in Painting at Carnegie Mellon University, and studied at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and the Art Students League of New York. Kass' work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Jewish Museum (New York), The Museum of Fine Art, Boston, The Cincinnati Museum, the New Orleans Museum, The Weatherspoon Museum, 720 W. 173rd Street, New York City, as well as numerous public and private collections. Her work has been written about extensively in the New York Times, art press, and academic books. A survey show, "Deborah Kass, The Warhol Project" traveled across the country from 1999-2001. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally including at the Venice Biennale, the Istanbul Biennale, and the Museum Ludwig, Cologne. Kass is a Senior Critic in the Yale University M.F.A. Painting Program. Kass is represented by Vincent Fremont and the Paul Kasmin Gallery, where she presented a new body of work entitled Feel Good Paintings for Feel Bad Times in 2007.

Jonathan Lethem is the author of six novels, including The Fortress of Solitude (2003, Doubleday) and Motherless Brooklyn (1999, Doubleday), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is also the author of two short story collections, Men and Cartoons (2004) and The Wall of the Sky, The Wall of the Eye (1996, Hartcourt Brace & Co.), and the editor of The Vintage Book of Amnesia (2000, Random House, Inc.). His essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Granta, and Harper's. He lives in Brooklyn and Maine. 

Corina Larkin is a painter and writer who lives in New York.

Prior to becoming an artist, Ms. Larkin co-founded a company to market the brand of U.K. childcare expert Dr. Miriam Stoppard. She also worked at Booz Allen & Hamilton as a management consultant to the media, telecommunications and financial sector for many years, serving clients in the U.S., Europe and Asia.

Ms. Larkin received a BA from Cornell University, a BFA from Purchase College, an MA in China Studies and International Economics from SAIS and an MBA from Wharton. She speaks German and Mandarin Chinese. Ms. Larkin also sits on the board of the Purchase College Foundation.

Ian Cooper was born in 1978 and raised in New York City. He received a BS in Studio Art from New York University. Recent solo exhibitions include Fiction Friction at Sandroni.Rey, Los Angeles, 2008; Ian Cooper, Constellations Align curated by Nu Nguyen, Sandroni.Rey, Los Angeles, 2005; and Ian Cooper, curated by Sue de Beer at CUE Art Foundation, New York, 2005. Recent group exhibitions include Beyond a Memorable Fancy curated by Michelle Levy at The Elizabeth Foundation, New York, 2008; Zero Zone curated by David Hunt at Tracy Williams, Ltd, New York, 2008; B’Ling curated by Amy Yao at Dark Fair at Swiss Institute, New York, 2008; Don’t You Dare Look At Me curated by Norbert Witzgall at Nice & Fit, Berlin, 2008; News From USA at Annarruma 404, Naples, 2008; Spook Up, We Can’t Hear You curated by The Embassy at Edinburgh Sculpture Court, Edinburgh, 2007; and NeoIntegrity curated by Keith Mayerson at Derek Eller Gallery, New York, 2007. Cooper lives and works in Red Hook, Brooklyn with artist Rachel Foullon, and their Chihuahua.

William Corbett is a poet, memoirist, art critic and essayist. Owing to his distinct role in developing CUE's literary programs that coincide with specific exhibitions, Mr. Corbett will continue to serve as a member of the Advisory Council for another two seasons. He has written books on New York City literary life, the sculptor John Raimondi and painter Philip Guston. His most recent books are Boston Vermont (Zoland Books, 1999) and his collected essays and reviews, All Prose (Zoland Books, 2001). He frequently publishes poetry and prose in The Boston Phoenix, Modern Painters, Brick and other journals and magazines large and small. Mr. Corbett is Writer-in-Residence at MIT, an editor of Pressed Wafer, and lives in Boston's South End.

Rossana Martinez was born in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico and lives in Brooklyn, NY. Martínez received a BA in Liberal Arts from the University of Puerto Rico in San Juan and an MFA in Sculpture and Printmaking from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including P.S.1/Museum of Modern Art, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, El Museo del Barrio, and Metaphor Contemporary Art, in New York City, as well as in Australia, Belgium, The Netherlands, Switzerland, New Zealand and Puerto Rico. Martínez has been a recipient of the Brooklyn Arts Council’s Community Arts Regrant Program, the Artist in the Marketplace Program from the Bronx Museum of the Arts, and the Mujeres Destacadas (Distinguished Women) Award by New York’s daily El Diario La Prensa. She recently participated in the Workspace Residency of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and is also the co-founder of MINUS SPACE — a curatorial/critical project based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The Village Voice, The Brooklyn Rail, The New York Sun, Flavorpill and Artnet.

Juan Sanchez earned his BFA from Cooper Union in and his MFA from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers State University of New Jersey. He currently teaches painting at Hunter College in New York City. Sanchez combines painting and photography with other media clippings and found objects to confront America's political policies and social practices concerning his parents' homeland of Puerto Rico. Sanchez often specifically addresses Puerto Rico's battle for independence and the numerous obstacles facing disadvantaged Puerto Ricans in America. Sanchez has received many awards for his work, including a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Hispanic Academy of Media Arts and Sciences and the Pollack/Krasner Award. He has worked at Island Press twice: first in 1990 and again in 1997. His 1997 IP work, Sol y Flores para Liora, won a Grand Prize at the XII Bienal de San Juan del Grabado Latinoamericano y Del Caribe in 1998. Other work by Sanchez is included in the collections of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, El Museo del Barrio in New York, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and El Instituto de Cultura Puertoriqquena in San Juan.

Polly Apfelbaum, a New York-based artist, has been showing her artwork in New York City as well as abroad since her first solo show in New York in 1986. In the past five years, Apfelbaum had solo exhibitions in London, England; Santa Monica, CA; Richmond, VA; Vienna, Austria; New York, NY; St. Louis, MO; and Boston, MA. She has also been recently involved in several group exhibitions in New York, NY; Bombay, India; Buffalo, NY; Toronto, Canada; London, England; Pittsburgh, PA; Lodz, Poland; and Valencia, Spain. Her work is included in collections throughout the country. She has received several grants and awards from various institutions such as the Guggenheim Fellowship; an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Richard Diebenkorn Fellowship; a Joan Mitchell Fellowship; an Artist’s Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts; an Anonymous Was a Women Award and a Pollack-Krasner Foundation Grant.

Lilly Wei is a New York-based independent curator and critic who contributes to many publications in the United States and abroad. She has written regularly for Art in America since 1982 and is a contributing editor at ARTnews and Art Asia Pacific. Wei has also written for Asian Art News, Art Papers, Sculpture Magazine, Tema Celeste, Flash Art, Art Press and Art and Auction, among others, and has frequently reported on international biennials such as those of Sydney, Cairo, Athens and Reykjavik. She has been the essayist for many exhibition catalogues and brochures on contemporary art, including publications for the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Marlborough and Pace Wildenstein, New York, NY. She has served on numerous advisory panels and review committees, including the Pew Fellowship awards and is a member of several boards, including the International Association of Art Critics (AICA/USA), Art in General, New York, NY; and Art Omi, an international artist residency program. She has been a guest lecturer, panelist and visiting critic at art institutions nationally and internationally. Wei has curated numerous shows in the United States and abroad, most recently the exhibition Mei Guo (The Beau Monde) for Contrasts Gallery in Shanghai and Beijing and Into the Trees for The Fields Sculpture Park in Ghent, NY. Some current writing projects include articles and essays on Sonsbeek 2008, the international sculpture exhibition in The Netherlands, Folkert de Jong, the young Dutch artist, several contemporary Israeli artists and Chuck Close. Wei received her M.A. in art history from Columbia University, New York, NY.

Michelle Grabner is an artist, writer, and curator based in Oak Park, Illinois. She is a professor and Chair of the Painting and Drawing Department at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is also co-director of The Suburban, an artist-run project space that she initiated in 1998 together with the artist Brad Killam, which hosts international artists and projects, including Dave Muller, Katharina Grosse and Luc Tuymans. The Suburban is dedicated to giving the artist complete control over what they choose to produce and exhibit. A regular contributor to Artforum, X-tra, Art-Agenda and many other publications, Grabner is also the co-editor of The Studio Reader (University of Chicago Press, 2010). Grabner also develops independent curatorial projects, including 25 years of Talent at Marianne Boesky Gallery in 2011 and Inheriting Matisse: The Decorative Contour in Contemporary Art in 2002 for the Rocket Gallery in the U.K. She is represented by Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago and Anne Mosseri-Marlio Gallery, Zurich; she has participated in numerous group shows across the U.S. and in Europe.