Mary Louise Schumacher is a journalist, critic and filmmaker based in Portland, Maine. She is the Executive Director of the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation, known for giving a prize for excellence in arts journalism to writers each year. She was the longtime art and architecture critic for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, was the the 2019 Clarice Smith Distinguished Critic at the Smithsonian, and the 2017 Arts & Culture Fellow with the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, where she spent a year studying documentary film, among other things. Her bylines have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, ARTnews, Hyperallergic, Nieman Reports and Milwaukee Magazine. Out of the Picture is her first film.

In 28 years as the architecture critic of the Chicago Tribune, Blair Kamin wrote with clarity and power about all aspects of the built environment, from skyscrapers and museums to parks and public housing. His “activist criticism” not only shaped civic debate but sometimes influenced its outcome, earning him the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1999 for a body of work highlighted by a series of articles about the problems and promise of Chicago’s lakefront. He has authored or edited five books, including most recently, Who Is the City For? Architecture, Equity, and the Public Realm in Chicago (2022). Since leaving the Chicago Tribune in 2021, he has served on the design team selection committee for the planned Fallen Journalists Memorial on the National Mall, written for The Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic, and underwritten a new architecture column at the Chicago Tribune.

Paul Goldberger is the New School's Joseph Urban Professor of Design and the former Architecture Critic for both The New Yorker and The New York Times, where in 1984 his architecture criticism was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. One of the nation's most respected architecture critics, he has also won the National Building Museum's Vincent Scully Prize, the President's Medal of the Municipal Art Society of New York, the medal of the American Institute of Architects, and the Medal of Honor of the New York Landmarks Preservation Foundation. A contributing editor at Vanity Fair, he is the author of several books, including BALLPARK: Baseball in the American City, published in 2019 by Alfred A. Knopf; BUILDING ART: The Life and Work of Frank Gehry, published in 2015 by Knopf; Why Architecture Matters, published in 2009 by Yale University Press, and Building Up and Tearing Down: Reflections on the Age of Architecture, a collection of his architecture essays published in 2009 by Monacelli Press. Paul Goldberger's chronicle of the process of rebuilding Ground Zero, entitled UP FROM ZERO: Politics, Architecture, and the Rebuilding of New York, which was published by Random House in the fall of 2004, was named one of The New York Times Notable Books for 2004. An active lecturer on architecture, planning and historic preservation around the country, Paul Goldberger has also served as an advisor on architect selection and design to many organizations and institutions including the Barack Obama Foundation, the New York Public Library, the Glenstone Museum, and Lincoln Center.

Carolina A. Miranda is an independent culture writer who reports on visual art, performance, design, books, film, and digital life. Until early 2024, she was a columnist at the Los Angeles Times, where she produced in-depth articles on subjects such as the intersection of art and race in museums and how communities are rethinking the nature of monument design. Her stories have since appeared in The Atlantic, the New York Review of Books, Curbed, Alta Magazine, Artnews, Fresh Air and KCRW. She is a winner of a 2017 Rabkin Prize in visual arts journalism.