Paris, France

Xiaolu Guo is a Chinese British novelist, memoirist and filmmaker. She has published a dozen books in both English and Chinese. Her memoir Nine Continents won the National Book Critics Circle Award 2017. I Am China was one of NPR’s Best Books of the Year. Her previous novels include A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (Orange Fiction Prize Shortlist) and A Lover’s Discourse. She also directed feature films including She, A Chinese and UFO In Her Eyes. She describes her work as "documentary novels".

Ana Paulina Lee is an author and cultural historian. She is a faculty member at Columbia University where she teaches courses on Asian and Latin American cultural and historical connections. She is the author of Mandarin Brazil: Race, Representation, and Memory and winner of the 2019 Antonio Candido Book Prize for Best Book in the Humanities.

Marc Marder is a New York-born musician resident in Paris since1978. After studies with Alvin Brehm and Robert Levin at S.U.N.Y. College at Purchase, he made his debut at the Marlboro Chamber Music Festival, before becoming double bass soloist for Pierre Boulez’s L’Ensemble Intercontemporain. In the eighties he played in the French National Radio Orchestra conducted by Leonard Bernstein and Lorin Maaze, as well as the Mostly Mozart Orchestra. He has also taught bass at the French National Superior Conservatory. Marder has composed over a hundred film scores, as well as many concert pieces and theatre scores. His score for Charles Lane’s Sidewalk Stories (1989) won the Deutscher Schallplatten Preis. The Missing Picture (2014) won Un Certain Regard and was Oscar-nominated, and Marder received the Sacem-France Musique prize for best film music.

Marie d’Origny is Associate Director at Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination. Before joining the Institute she was the Deputy Director of the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at The New York Public Library from 2009 to 2017. Before then she worked in film preservation and programming. She holds a BFA in Cinema Studies from the Tisch School of the Arts and an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University.