Mark Alan Hughes is a Professor of Practice at PennDesign, Faculty Director of the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy and a Lead Investigator at the DOE’s Energy Efficient Buildings Hub at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. He is a Faculty Fellow of the Penn Institute for Urban Research, a Senior Fellow of the Wharton School’s Initiative for Global Environmental Leadership, and a Distinguished Scholar in Residence at Penn’s Fox Leadership Program. He has been a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, the Urban Institute, and a senior adviser at the Ford Foundation.

Kelly Loudenberg is an artist and journalist based in Los Angeles. Her short-form documentaries non-dogmatically explore and illuminate the pursuits of mavericks, visionaries, and seekers who are engaged in reconfiguring urban and rural spaces in unexpected ways and bringing the utopian to the practical through radical reconsiderations of the built environment. Her work has screened at the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Guggenheim Lab, and the Architecture and Design Film Festival. In March 2016, she had a residency at the Tadao Ando-designed Casa Wabi in Mexico, and in 2010, she completed a residency at the Center for Land Use Interpretation in Wendover, Utah. She has created work for National Geographic, New Yorker, The New York Times, Vice, LA MOCA, Allied Works Architecture, and NJIT.

Ginger Strand writes about collisions between nature, culture, science and the arts. She is the author of one novel and three books of narrative nonfiction, including The Brothers Vonnegut, and has published essays and fiction in Harper’s, The Believer, Tin House, The Iowa Review, The New England Review and the New York Times, as well as This Land and Orion, where she is a contributing editor.  She also frequently works with photographers and has contributed essays to photography books by Lisa Kereszi, Kyler Zeleny, and the Magnum Agency project Postcards from America. A former fellow in the Behrman Center for the Humanities at Princeton, Ginger has received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Mellon Foundation, the Eisenhower Foundation, and the American Antiquarian Society, as well as residency grants from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the Center for Land Use Interpretation, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo. She lives in New York City and the Catskill Mountains, near the reservoirs seeded by New York City in 1950 using Bernard Vonnegut’s technique.