Timothy J. Leiweke serves as President and CEO of the Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG), one of the world’s leading presenters of sports and entertainment programming.

Over his fourteen years with the organization, Leiweke has been influential in securing AEG a place at the forefront of global sports and entertainment program development. Prior to his current post, Leiweke served as President of the hugely successful STAPLES Center, and guided the creation of The Home Depot Center in Carson, Calif., and the initial development and design of the Pepsi Center in Denver. His current project includes overseeing and managing the creation of L.A. LIVE, a new Los Angeles sports, residential and entertainment district adjacent to STAPLES Center and the Los Angeles Convention Center.

Leiweke’s career in sports and entertainment began at the age of 24, when he became the youngest general manager in pro sports for the MISL’s Baltimore Blast. In the past he has also served as President and CEO for U.S. Skiing, President of the Denver Nuggets, the Minnesota Timberwolves, and the Kansas City Comets, as well as one of the creators and producers of Celine Dion’s five-year production, “A New Day…” at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas.

He is equally committed to charitable pursuits, devoting time to a number of philanthropies, including the Kings Care Foundation, the STAPLES Center Foundation, and The Home Depot Foundation, which have pledged a combined $14 million to community organizations.

He was recently named one of the 100 most influential people in southern California by the Los Angeles Times, as well as the Muscular Dystrophy Association as their Man of the Year, the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce’s Distinguished Man of the Year, and the recipient of the Los Angeles Convention and Visitor’s Bureau’s Los Amigos de Los Angeles Award, among many other honors.

Edward Hirsch is internationally acclaimed as a poet and critic. Among his six books of poems are For the Sleepwalkers, which received the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets and the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award from New York University; Wild Gratitude, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; and most recently, Lay Back the Darkness. His prose books include Poet's Choice, the national best-seller How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry and The Demon and the Angel: Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration.

Among his many honors are fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations, and a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award. Hirsch is currently the president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation

Amy Balkin utilizes research in works that consider how people interact with, and impact the social and material landscapes we inhabit. These projects include This is the Public Domain, an ongoing effort to create a permanent international commons through the legal transfer of 2.634 acres of land purchased for this effort, to the global public. Public Smog is a public park in the atmosphere that fluctuates in location and scale, constructed through a series of economic and political activities and gestures. Her most recent work is Sell Us Your Liberty, Or We'll Subcontract Your Death, a series of large-format rubbings taken from architectural signage of San Francisco Bay Area entities self-implicated in war profiteering, illegal spying, remote sensing, and the local, everyday production of war. She was a recipient of a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award in 2007.

www.thisisthepublicdomain.org

www.publicsmog.org

Kim Stringfellow's work investigates environmental and historical topics related to land use through hybrid documentary forms incorporating a variety of media, including photography, film/video, audio, installation and Web-based interactive multimedia. Project commissions include Salmoncity.net (Seattle Arts Commission) and Safe As Mother's Milk: The Hanford Project (Cornish College of the Arts, Arts + Activism series). Exhibitions include Ecotopia: The Second ICP Triennial of Photography and Video at the International Center for Photography in 2006/07. Her first book Greetings from the Salton Sea: Folly and Intervention in the Southern California Landscape, 1905-2005 was published with the Center for American Places in 2005.

www.kimstringfellow.com

http://www.www.invisible5.org

Matthew Coolidge is the director of the Center for Land Use Interpretation. The CLUI takes a broadly interdisciplinary approach to the investigation of land use, drawing on the natural sciences, sociology, art, architecture, and history. The Center maintains an online database of unusual and exemplary land use in the United States, publishes books, operates a residence program and interpretive site in the salt flats of Utah, exhibits in national and international venues, and conducts public tours. Coolidge teaches in the curatorial practice program at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Books include Overlook: Exploring the Internal Fringes of America with the Center for Land Use Interpretation, and The Nevada Test Site: A Guide to the Nation's Nuclear Proving Ground. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (2004), a Rockefeller Foundation Media Arts Fellowship (2005), and the Smithsonian's Lucelia Artist Award (2006).

www.clui.org

Dr. Lisa Bitel is a professor of history at the University of Southern California who studies the social, cultural and religious history of medieval Europe. She is the author of Isle of Saints: Monastic Settlements and Christian Community in Early Ireland and Land of Women: Tales of Sex and Gender from Early Ireland. She has written widely about sex, gender, dreams and dreamers in the Middle Ages and has recently finished a book on the cults of Saint Genovefa in Paris and Saint Brigit of Ireland. She is currently researching the history of Christian religious visions.

Michael A. Arbib is the Fletcher Jones Professor of Computer Science, as well as a Professor of Biological Sciences, Biomedical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of Southern California (USC). He has also been named as one of a small group of University Professors at USC in recognition of his contributions across many disciplines.

He is the author or editor of 38 books. His edited volume, The Handbook of Brain Theory and Neural Networks is a massive compendium embracing studies in detailed neuronal function, system models of brain regions, connectionist models of psychology and linguistics, mathematical and biological studies of learning, and technological applications of artificial neural networks. Neural Organization: Structure, Function, and Dynamics, co-authored with Peter Érdi and the late John Szentágothai, provides a comprehensive view of the working of the brain. His two most recent books are Who Needs Emotions: The Brain Meets the Robot (edited with Jean-Marc Fellous) and Action To Language via the Mirror Neuron System.

Ben Ratliff has been a jazz critic at The New York Times since 1996. The author of Coltrane and The New York Times Essential Library: Jazz, he lives in Manhattan with his wife and two sons.

Bennie Maupin is best known for his atmospheric bass clarinet playing on Miles Davis’ classic “Bitches Brew” album, as well as other Miles Davis recordings such as, “Big Fun,” “Jack Johnson,” and “On the Corner.” He was a founding member of Herbie Hancock’s seminal band The Headhunters, as well as a performer and composer in Hancock’s influential Mwandishi band. Born in 1940, Maupin started playing clarinet, later adding saxophone, flute and, most notably, the bass clarinet to his arsenal of woodwind instruments. He has freelanced with groups led by Marion Brown, Pharoah Saunders, and Chick Corea, and played regularly with Roy Haynes and Horace Silver. He also recorded with McCoy Tyner, Lee Morgan, Freddie Hubbard, Jack DeJohnette, Andrew Hill, Eddie Henderson, and Woody Shaw to name only a few. Maupin’s own discography as a leader includes “The Jewel in The Lotus” (1974), “Slow Traffic to the Right” (1976), “Moonscapes”(1978), and “Driving While Black.” 1998). His current group, The Bennie Maupin Ensemble, harkens back to the tradition of great saxophone-bass-drum trios, such as the group led by Sonny Rollins with Wilbur Ware and Elvin Jones. He maintains active performing and teaching careers in Europe, and the US. Bennie Maupin currently resides in the Los Angeles area.

www.benniemaupin.com

Roy Blount Jr. is the author of twenty books, about a wide range of things, from the first woman president of the United States to what barnyard animals are thinking. His first book, About Three Bricks Shy...And the Load Filled Up, was named one of the ten best sports books ever by The Washington Post. His most recent book, Long Time Leaving: Dispatches From Up South, won the 2007 nonfiction award from the New England Independent Booksellers Association. A contributing editor of The Atlantic Monthly, Blount also writes a regular column ("Gone Off Up North") for The Oxford American, and has done so in the past for Esquire, The New York Times, Conde Nast Traveller, The San Francisco Examiner, and The Atlanta Journal. His essays, articles, stories, verses and even drawings have appeared in 166 different periodicals.

Blount Jr. has also tried his hand as a playwright, song writer, script writer, and television/radio personality. He is a panelist on NPR's Wait, Wait...Don't Tell Me, and has appeared on A Prairie Home Companion, the CBS Morning Show, Tonight Show, David Letterman Show, Good Morning America, Today Show, Larry King, and Politically Incorrect.

www.royblountjr.com

Toni Morrison is the Robert F. Goheen Professor of Humanities Emeritus at Princeton University. She has received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. In 1993 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Eli Broad is the founder of SunAmerica Inc. and KB Home, two Fortune 500 companies he cultivated over a career that spanned five decades.

Mr. Broad and his wife, Edythe, are also founders of The Broad Foundations, which they established to advance entrepreneurship for the public good in education, science and the arts. The Broad Foundations include The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, which promotes urban public education improvements, as well as provides resources for scientific and medical research; and The Broad Art Foundation, which is dedicated to increasing access to contemporary art for audiences worldwide.

Mr. Broad is a tireless patron of both local and national arts. He is a founding chairman and life trustee of MoCA in Los Angeles, as well as a life trustee at LACMA, where the Broads recently built The Broad Contemporary Art Museum. He is currently a trustee of MoMA in New York. A champion of the cultural and architectural vitality of Los Angeles, Mr. Broad spearheaded the fundraising campaign to build the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall.

Strong believers in higher education, the Broads have further extended their philanthropy to a number of universities across the country. The Broads endowed The Eli Broad College of Business and The Eli Broad Graduate School of Management at Mr. Broad’s alma mater, Michigan State University (MSU). Also at MSU, the Broads created the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum. Local schools UCLA, USC, and Caltech now house Broad art and science centers, and Mr. Broad has also served as chairman of the board of trustees of Pitzer College and vice chairman of the board of trustees of the California State University system.

In 2004, Mr. Broad became a Regent of the Smithsonian Institution by appointment of the U.S. Congress and the President. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a recent recipient of the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy.

Matthew Bishop is Chief Business Writer/American Business Editor for The Economist. He also serves as the publication’s New York Bureau Chief.

He is the author of several Economist special reports, including most recently "The Business of Giving", which looks at the industrial revolution taking place in philanthropy; "Kings of Capitalism", which anticipated and analysed the recent boom in private equity; and "Capitalism and its Troubles", an examination of the impact of problems such as the collapse of Enron.

Before joining The Economist, Matthew was on the faculty of London Business School, where he co-authored three books on subjects ranging from privatisation and regulation to corporate mergers.