Kurt Andersen is the author of two novels, the critically acclaimed bestsellers Heyday and Turn of the Century. His forthcoming book is called Reset: How This Crisis Can Restore Our Values and Renew America. He is also host and co-creator of the Peabody Award-winning public radio program Studio 360, editor-at-large for Random House, a contributing editor to Vanity Fair, and writes for film, television and the stage. read more

Chuck Close’s work has been the subject of more than 150 solo exhibitions including many major museum retrospectives; most recently, Chuck Close Paintings: 1968/2006, at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid in 2007, which traveled to the Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst in Aachen, Germany and The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. read more

A professor of neurobiology at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Livingstone is best known for her work on visual processing. Her work has led to a deeper understanding of how we see color, motion, and depth, and how these processes are involved in generating percepts of objects as distinct from their background. read more

Ken Nakayama received his B.A. in Psychology from the Haverford College in 1962 and his PhD from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1967. For almost twenty years, he was at the Smith Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in San Francisco. In 1990 he moved to the Psychology Department at Harvard and is now the Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology. read more

Interested in the links between art, science, and technology through the ages, New York artist Devorah Sperber's work addresses the way the brain processes visual information versus the way we think we see. "As a visual artist," she says, "I cannot think of a topic more stimulating and yet so basic than the act of seeing-how the human brain makes sense of the visual world." read more

Christopher Tyler spent his research career exploring the fascinating processes of how the eyes and brain work together to produce meaningful vision. His most recent work analyzes the visual perception of faces and the role of symmetry in face recognition. read more