Sophie Lewis is a German British academic and self acclaimed communist writer known for her theoretical ideas of family abolition and the use of surrogacy on a societal scale. Her first book Full surrogacy now, Feminism against the family was published in 2019 by Verso Books, followed by Abolish the Family, a manifesto for care and liberation in 2022. Lewis teaches courses on feminist, trans and queer politics and philosophy, including family abolitionism at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research in New York.
Jutta Allmendinger is one of Germany's leading thinkers on topics such as (unpaid) labor, gender inequality, family politics, social policy and welfare. Since 2007, she is the President of the Social Science Research Center in Berlin, professor of educational sociology and labor market research at Humboldt University, senior fellow at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University and member of the editorial board of newspaper Die Zeit. Allmendinger has won many awards and written numerous books and articles for her groundbreaking, investigative yet accessible research on social issues.
Lauren Elkin is an award winning Franco-American writer, translator and cultural critic. In 2023 she published the bestseller Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art. A dazzlingly original reassessment of women's stories, bodies and art - and how we think about them. For decades, feminist artists have confronted the problem of how to tell the truth about their experiences as bodies. Queer bodies, sick bodies, racialized bodies, female bodies, what is their language, what are the materials we need to transcribe it? Exploring the ways in which feminist artists have taken up this challenge, Art Monsters attempts to rethink the concept of the monstrous and to theorize a feminist aesthetics of the body.
Kaveri Mayra is a midwifery, nursing and global health researcher from India. In her research she highlights how systemic, gender injustices can impact and negatively manifest health policy-making and affect women's empowerment and health. During her PhD in Global Health from the University of Southampton she explored the experiences and determinants of obstetric violence in India through a newly developed arts-based method called 'birth mapping'. Kaveri is also recognised in the WGH 2020 list of 100 Outstanding Women Nurse & Midwife Leaders.
Camille Henrot is one of the most influential voices in contemporary art today, with a practice encompassing drawing, painting, sculpture, installation and film. Inspired by references from literature, psychoanalysis, cultural anthropology and the banality of everyday life, she questions what it means to be both a private individual and a global subject in an increasingly connected and over-stimulated world.
Henrot has had numerous solo exhibitions worldwide in venues including Middelheim Museum, Antwerp; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; New Museum, New York; and Art Sonje Center, Seoul. She lives and works in New York City with her family.
Hettie Judah is a British art critic, broadcaster and writer who has spent many years dealing with the subject of art and motherhood. Following the publication of her 2020 study on the impact of motherhood on artists' careers, she collaborated with a group of artists in 2021 on the manifesto How Not To Exclude Artist Parents, now available in 15 languages. In 2022, Judah co-founded the Art Working Parents Alliance with Jo Harrison – a support network and campaign group for people working in the arts.
In the same year, she published How Not To Exclude Artist Mothers (and other parents) (Lund Humphries), a book that argues that by making changes and becoming more sensitive to the needs of artist parents, the art world has much to gain. Judah is the curator of the Hayward Gallery Touring exhibition Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood which will open in Bristol in March 2024. Her next book with the same title will be published globally by Thames & Hudson in summer 2024.