MEDIA CONTACTS:  

Caroline Oyama , 212.229.5667 x3547 or oyamac@newschool.edu

Deborah Kirschner, 212.229.5667 x4310 or kirschnd@newschool.edu

Vito Acconci has earned international recognition through his provocative and often radical art-making practices. He has been a vital presence in contemporary art since the late 1960s; his confrontational and ultimately political works have evolved from writing through conceptual art, body art, performance, film, video, multimedia installation, and architectural sculpture. In the 1970s, Mr. Acconci produced an extraordinary body of conceptual performance-based videotapes, including Theme Song (1973) and The Red Tapes (1976), regarded as one of the most important works in the medium. In 1987, a major retrospective of his work, Vito Acconci: Domestic Trappings, was displayed at La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art in California and traveled to sites throughout the United States. Mr. Acconci’s work has also been shown internationally: Solo exhibitions have appeared at the Sonnabend Gallery, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, Germany; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. In the late 1980s, he formed Acconci Studio, a group of designers and architects who recently completed an artificial island in Graz, a clothing store in Tokyo, and a façade for a subway station in Coney Island.

Zygmunt Bauman is regarded as one of the world’s great social theorists and the leading sociologist of postmodernity. He is known for his analyses of the links between modernity and the Holocaust and of postmodern consumerism. A professor at the University of Warsaw until 1968, he also taught at the University of Tel Aviv and held several visiting professorships. Professor Bauman taught sociology and served at various times as head of the department at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom until his retirement in 1990; since then, he has been emeritus professor. Professor Bauman is known throughout the world for works such as Legislators and Interpreters (1987), Modernity and the Holocaust (1989), Modernity and Ambivalence (1991), and Postmodern Ethics (1993). He is the author of more than 20 books in English and numerous articles and reviews. Professor Bauman was awarded the European Amalfi Prize for Sociology and Social Sciences in 1990 and the Theodor W. Adorno Award of the city of Frankfurt in 1998.

Majora Carter, a dynamic urban revitalization strategist, was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (“genius grant”) in 2005. In 2001, Ms. Carter founded Sustainable South Bronx, an organization that works in partnership with government, businesses, and neighborhood groups to improve transportation, fitness, recreation, and nutrition and promote economic development in the low-income community where she was raised and now lives. Ms. Carter wrote a $1.25 million federal transportation grant proposal to design the South Bronx Greenway, with 11 miles of bike and pedestrian paths connecting neighborhoods and the rivers; since then, she has secured more than $20 million for the project, which is to begin construction in 2008. Known as a visionary with tremendous drive, Ms. Carter travels widely in pursuit of resources to improve the quality of life in her environmentally challenged community. She has created riverfront parks and green roofs, dramatically increasing the number of trees in the South Bronx. Ms. Carter also worked to have an underused expressway removed and implemented the Bronx Environmental Stewardship Training program. She serves on New York State’s Energy and Environment Transition Team and the Clinton Global Initiative’s Poverty Alleviation Panel. Ms. Carter has won New York University’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Award for Humanitarian Service and the National Audubon Society’s Rachel Carson Award.

Elizabeth LeCompte is a founding member of the Wooster Group, the groundbreaking artists’ ensemble. Since 1975, Ms. LeCompte and the Wooster Group have created 18 multimedia theater pieces, including House/Lights (1999), based on Gertrude Stein’s Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights; To You, the Birdie! (Phèdre) (2002), from the play by Jean Racine; Poor Theater (2004); Who’s Your DADA?! (2006), a work commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art to close its Dada exhibition; Hamlet (2007); and La Didone (2007), an opera by Francesco Cavalli and Giovan Francesco Busenello. Ms. LeCompte has also created seven film, video, and DVD works and choreographed four short dance pieces. Ms. LeCompte and the Wooster Group were recently commissioned to create an installation for the 2008 opening of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center. Ms. LeCompte herself has received numerous honors and awards, including an NEA Distinguished Artists Fellowship for Lifetime Achievement in American Theater, a MacArthur Fellowship, and the medal of the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French Ministry of Culture.

Henry Mintzberg is an internationally renowned academic and writer on business and management. Since 1968, he has taught at McGill University in Montreal, where he is currently the Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies. Professor Mintzberg earned his master's degree in management in 1965 and his PhD in 1968 from MIT’s Sloan School of Management. He has written more than 140 articles and 13 books on management and business strategy, including The Nature of Managerial Work (1973), The Structuring of Organizations (1979), Power in and Around Organizations (1983), The Strategy Process (1988; 2nd ed. 1991), Mintzberg on Management: Inside Our Strange World of Organizations (1989), and, most recently, Tracking Strategies (2008). Professor Mintzberg has received a number of academic and practitioner awards. His book The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning won the Academy of Management’s 1995 George R. Terry Award for best book of the year; “The Manager’s Job: Folklore and Fact” was named the best article of the year in 1975 by the Harvard Business Review. Professor Mintzberg was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1997 and an Officer of the National Order of Quebec in 1998. He also received the Distinguished Scholar Award in 2000 from the Academy of Management.

Wanda Nowicka has been a leader in the field of women’s rights and health for many years. Since 1990, she has been active in the NGO movement in Poland; she is a cofounder and member of several NGOs, including the Neutrum Association for an Ideologically Free State and the Federation for Women and Family Planning, whose president she has been since its creation. The federation, which advocates and lobbies for women’s reproductive health and rights, has initiated campaigns to liberalize Poland’s highly restrictive anti-abortion law. Ms. Nowicka is also one of the founders of ASTRA, the Central and Eastern European Women’s Network for Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights. Ms. Nowicka is also active in the international arena of women’s rights and health. From 1996 through 2002, she served on the Gender Advisory Panel of the World Health Organization’s Research, Development, and Research Training in Human Reproduction Programme; she has also served on the United Nations Fund for Population Activities’ international NGO Advisory Committee. Ms. Nowicka has participated in many international conferences and has written numerous articles on women’s rights and sexual and reproductive health. In 2007, she co-authored an important shadow report on the status of women in Poland for the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women. Ms. Nowicka received the Women of Europe Award in 1994.