Miwako Tezuka

Dr. Miwako Tezuka is the inaugural Director of Dib Bangkok, an international contemporary art museum opened in December 2025. Before this appointment, she held key leadership roles at several prominent institutions in New York, including Gallery Director of the Japan Society, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at the Asia Society Museum, and Associate Director of Arakawa and Madeline Gins’s Reversible Destiny Foundation. Dr. Tezuka has curated numerous exhibitions, working with renowned artists such as Chen Chieh-jen, Robert Indiana, Kimsooja, Maya Lin, Mariko Mori, Yoshitomo Nara, Pinaree Sanpitak, and Yang Fudong, among others. She served as Associate Curator of the Hawaiʻi Triennial 2022, which featured works by 46 artists and collectives from across Asia and the Pacific region. Her scholarly writings have been published in exhibition catalogs and books by institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; and the Setagaya Museum of Art, Tokyo, among others.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Apichatpong Weerasethakul began making films and video shorts in 1994 and completed his first feature in 2000. Since 1998, he has also created installations and exhibitions across the world. Recognized as a singular voice in both cinema and contemporary art, his work weaves together memory, myth, desire, and landscape—often unfolding through non-linear, meditative structures. Apichatpong’s films include Memoria (2021) his first feature made outside Thailand, starring Tilda Swinton, which received the Cannes Jury Prize; Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, which won the Palme d’Or in 2010; Tropical Malady, winner of the Cannes Jury Prize in 2004; and Blissfully Yours, awarded Un Certain Regard in 2002. Syndromes and a Century (2006) has been widely celebrated as one of the defining films of the early 21st century. Beyond the cinema, Apichatpong’s installations explore themes of time, invisibility, and collective memory. Notable projects include Primitive (2009), Fireworks (Archives) (2014), and Invisibility (2016). More recent works such as Fic (2018), SleepCinemaHotel (2018), A Minor History (2021–2022), A Conversation with the Sun VR (2022), Solarium (2023), and Ring of Fire (2024, with Haegue Yang) continue to expand his interest in the unseen, the spiritual, and the ecological. Apichatpong’s work has been exhibited in museums, biennials, and festivals worldwide. A retrospective of his practice was presented at Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2024. He lives and works in Chiang Mai, Thailand.

Mieke Bal

Mieke Bal is author of 50 books and supervisor of 81 finished PhDs, the cultural theorist, critic, video artist and curator. She writes in an interdisciplinary perspective on cultural analysis, literature and art, focusing on gender, migratory culture, the critique of capitalism, and the political agency of art. She co-founded (1994) and directed ASCA, the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, an interdisciplinary institute that is still thriving. From 2002 on, she also makes films, as a different, more in-depth, more contemporary and interactive mode of cultural analysis. Since then, writing, filmmaking and curating go together. She made the 16-channel video-installation Don Quijote: Sad Countenances (2019) with Mathieu Montanier, and a short essay film It’s About Time! Reflections on Urgency (2020). Her latest short film, made with Lena Verhoeff, Refugeedom: Lonely but not Alone, premiered in May 2023 in the SPEME program on traumatic memory. Her 50th book, Moments of Meaning-Making, was published by Valiz (Amsterdam) in 2025. Her next book on curating and semiotics is currently in production (London, Bloomsbury). www.miekebal.org

Marcus Schmickler

Marcus Schmickler, born in 1968, is a composer-performer of contemporary and computer-music. He resides in Cologne and in Vienna. Schmickler merges computer music, ensemble composition, performance and research. His multi-channel works have been performed on prestigious stages, creating unique auditory spaces. He explores techniques like Shepard tones and ring modulations, deepening his compositions through data sonification and otoacoustic emissions. Schmickler writes on computer music and has won several prizes, including the Rome Prize. He taught at Bard College, at Calarts and at Robert Schumann Hochschule and IEM. His compositions have been performed by renowned ensembles worldwide. http://www.piethopraxis.org.

Fabio Beltram

Fabio Beltram is an Italian physicist, known for his work in condensed matter physics and nanoscience. He earned a degree in electronic engineering from the University of Trieste in 1985 and a degree in physics from the University of Bologna in 1988. Between 1986 and 1991 he worked as a researcher in the United States at AT&T Bell Laboratories, before joining the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa in 1992, where he became full professor of condensed matter physics in 2000. In 2001 he founded the NEST Laboratory, an interdisciplinary research and training centre on nanoscience that today involves the Scuola Normale Superiore, the Italian National Research Council, the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia and the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna. He served as deputy director of the Scuola Normale Superiore from 2005 to 2010 and as its director from 2010 to 2016, a period during which the institution absorbed the Istituto Italiano di Scienze Umane and expanded its doctoral offerings to include social and political sciences. Beltram is a fellow of the American Physical Society and has been decorated as Grande Ufficiale dell'Ordine al merito della Repubblica Italiana. His research spans nanoscience and nanotechnology, and he has authored around three hundred publications in international journals and patents. He currently serves as president of the Fondazione Pisana per la Scienza.