Susana is a researcher in post-war histories of psychiatry, semiotics, and social movements. She has published and presented widely on the Institutional Psychotherapy movement, with a focus on linking institutional analysis to broader militant and activist contexts. She is particularly concerned with reconstructing neglected post-war histories of psychiatry and intersections of mental health movements with wider social and political struggles. Godofredo is an architect and researcher. He is the head of programme for the MA Environmental Architecture at the Royal College of Art, London. He was a member of Forensic Architecture where he led the Atacama Desert project and edited the book Savage Objects (2012). For the past decade Godofredo has been teaching, publishing and exhibiting on environmental justice, ecologies of existence and collective equipment. For the past 15 years Susana and Godofredo have been writing and researching together on semiotics, institutional analysis and social movements. They are currently working on a book CERFI: Collective Equipment and Institutional Programming recovering the overlooked legacy of the Centre d'Études de Recherche et de Formation Institutionnelle founded by Félix Guattari, and its exploration of action-research and collective research practices, based on oral histories with original members of the group.

Jeanne van Heeswijk is an artist who facilitates the creation of dynamic and diversified public spaces in order to “radicalise the local.” Her long-scale community-embedded projects question art’s autonomy by combining performative actions, discussions, and other forms of organising and pedagogy in order to assist communities to take control of their futures.

Her work has been featured in numerous books and publications worldwide, as well as internationally renowned biennials such as Liverpool, Shanghai, and Venice. She was the 2014–2015 Keith Haring Fellow in Art and Activism at Bard College, Annandale-On-Hudson, NY; received the Curry Stone Prize for Social Design Pioneers, 2012; and the Leonore Annenberg Prize for Art and Social Change, 2011. Van Heeswijk was a BAK 2018/2019 Fellow and convened Trainings for the Not-Yet 2019-2020, together with BAK, basis voor actuele kunst.

Denis Roio, Ph.D. better known by the hacker name Jaromil, founder of the Dyne.org think and do tank. Dyne.org is known worldwide for its community based development of free and open source software with a strong focus on peer to peer networks, social justice, free speech and sustainability, including operating systems distributed worldwide by GNU/Linux magazines.

Jaromil published his doctoral thesis on Algorithmic Sovereignty (AlgoSov.org) and received the Vilém Flusser Award at Transmediale (Berlin, 2009) while leading for six years the R&D department of the Netherlands Media art Institute (Montevideo/TBA), he is a fellow of the 40 under 40 European Young Leaders programme since 2012 and was listed in the Purpose Economy list of top 100 social entrepreneurs in EU in 2014.

Malique Mohamud is an independent writer, thinker, researcher, designer who developed an interest in the relationship between urbanity and street culture in his youth, when he stole tapes by Wu-Tang, Tupac and Outkast from his brother’s room. The son of a Somali poet and general, he champions and looks for meaning in cultural production through an Afro-diasporic lens. Autonomy, subversiveness and skewed power relations are recurring themes in his work. Word on the street is he's the greatest rapper alive and is still a little bit in love with Lauryn Hill. As founder and creative director of Concrete Blossom, an anti-capitalistic corporate jack-of-all-trades, Mohamud and the organisation are investigating how the transformative qualities of street culture can contribute to a radical intersectional society.

The Nest Collective is a multidisciplinary arts collective living and working in Nairobi. Founded in 2012, the Nest Collective has created works in film, music, fashion, visual arts, community events and literature. They are best known for the critically-acclaimed queer anthology film Stories of Our Lives, which has so far screened in over 80 countries and won numerous awards. The Nest Collective also founded HEVA—Africa’s first creative business fund of its kind—to strengthen the livelihoods of East Africa’s creative entrepreneurs. 

Members of the collective participating in the deliberation leading up to the jury meeting are: Jim Chuchu, Njeri Gitungo, Mars Maasai, Dr. Njoki Ngumi.

Dr. Marina Otero Verzier is an architect and the director of research at Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam. She leads research initiatives such as Automated Landscapes, and Architecture of Appropriation. Recently, she curated the exhibitions Spirits in the Material World by Heman Chong (2019), Steve Bannon: A Propaganda Retrospective by Jonas Staal (2018), and co-curated “Malware: Symptoms of Viral Infection” (2019), and “I See That I See What You Don’t See ” at La Triennale Di Milano (2019). She is part of the curatorial team of the upcoming Shanghai Biennial.

In 2018 Marina was the curator of Work, Body, Leisure, the Dutch Pavilion at the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale (2018). Previously, she was Chief Curator of the 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale together with the After Belonging Agency, and the director of Global Network Programming at Studio-X- Columbia University GSAPP (New York). Marina is a co-editor of Unmanned: Architecture and Security Series (2016), After Belonging: The Objects, Spaces, and Territories of  the Ways We Stay In Transit (2016), Work, Body, Leisure (2018), Architecture of Appropriation (2019), and More-than-Human (forthcoming, 2020). She studied at TU Delft, Columbia GSAPP, and ETSA Madrid, where she completed her PhD. Her thesis Evanescent Institutions examined the emergence of a new paradigms for cultural institutions. Marina teaches architecture at RCA in London. From September 2020 she will be the Head of the Social Design Masters at Design Academy Eindhoven.

Elizabeth A. Povinelli is an anthropologist and filmmaker. She is Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, New York; Corresponding Fellow of the Australian Academy for the Humanities; and one of the founding members of the Karrabing Film Collective. Povinelli’s writing has focused on developing a critical theory of late liberalism that would support an anthropology of the otherwise. This potential theory has unfolded primarily from within a sustained relationship with Indigenous colleagues in north Australia and across five books, numerous essays, and six films with the Karrabing Film Collective. Her recent publications include Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (2016) and graphic essay, The Inheritance (Duke 2020). Povinelli lives and works in New York City and Darwin. Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism was the 2017 recipient of the Lionel Trilling Book Award. Karrabing films were awarded the 2015 Visible Award and the 2015 Cinema Nova Award Best Short Fiction Film, Melbourne International Film Festival and have shown internationally including in the Berlinale, Sydney Biennale; MIFF, the Tate Modern, documenta-14, the Contour Biennale; MoMA-PS, IFFR, and numerous others.

Cassie Thornton is an artist and activist who makes a “safe space” for the unknown, for disobedience and for unanticipated collectivity. She uses social practices including institutional critique, insurgent architecture, and “healing modalities” like hypnosis and yoga to find soft spots in the hard surfaces of capitalist life. Cassie has invented a grassroots alternative credit reporting service for the survivors of gentrification, has hypnotized hedge fund managers, has finger-painted with the grime found inside banks, has donated cursed paintings to profiteering bankers, and has taught feminist economics to yogis (and vice versa). She is the Co-Director of the Re-Imagining Value Action Lab in Thunder Bay, Canada. Her new book, The Hologram Feminist, Peer-to-Peer Health for a Post-Pandemic Future, is forthcoming this July from Pluto Press.

Guus Beumer, who studied social sciences, has been director of Het Nieuwe Instituut since January 2013. In the 1980s Beumer was a journalist for publications including Avenue, Marie-Claire and HP-De Tijd and in the 1990s he was art director of the fashion labels orson + bodil and SO. From 2005 he was director of Marres, House for Contemporary Culture and Bureau Europa/NAiM, both in Maastricht.