Kaja Silverman(cultural theorist)
Kaja Silverman PhD is Class of 1940 Professor of Rhetoric and Film at the Berkeley campus of the  University of California. She is the author of seven books: James Coleman (Hatje Cantz, 2002); World Spectators (Stanford University Press, 2000); Speaking About Godard (New York University Press, l998; with Harun Farocki); The Threshold of the Visible World (Routledge, l996); Male Subjectivity at the Margins (Routledge, 1992); The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Indiana University Press, l988); and The Subject of Semiotics (Oxford University Press, l982).
Her writing and teaching are concentrated at the moment primarily on phenomenology, psychoanalysis, photography, and time-based visual art, but she continues to write about and teach courses on cinema, and has a developing interest in painting. She maintains a continuing commitment to feminist theory, post-structuralist theory, queer studies, masculinity, and theories of "race." Silverman is currently writing two books, both of which follow closely from World Spectators:  Flesh of My Flesh  and Appropriations. In the first, she explores what it means to say (as Freud did)  that death is the 'aim' of life. She also focuses upon a series on aesthetic texts which move, through an encounter with mortality, toward dramatically different forms of relationality than those so conspicuously on display in the world today. In the second of these books, Silverman rethinks what it means to 'claim' another person or thing.

Fakhry Davids (psychoanalyst)
M.Sc. (Clin Psych), TQAP. Psychoanalyst, (British Psychoanalytical Society) & Psychotherapist (Tavistock Society of Psychotherapists) in full-time private practice. Formerly Lecturer in Psychology, University of Cape Town, South Africa; Honorary Senior Clinical Psychologist, Adult Department, Tavistock Clinic, London; and Honorary Consultant Psychologist, London Clinic of Psychoanalysis. He is a member of Psychoanalysts for peace and justice and recently contributed to their first public forum Psychodynamics of Empire
 11 September 2001: Some thoughts on racism and religious prejudice as an obstacle 
which can be found at 
http://nuclearfree.lynx.co.nz/pp&jresources.htm
Davids also participated in a recent conference Psychoanalysis, gender and race in November 2003 at UCL alongside Nancy Chodorow and Julia Kristeva.

Alia Syed (filmmaker)
Alia Syed studied Fine Art at East London University until 1987 and Mixed Media at the Slade School of Art until 1992. She works as a filmmaker and video artist in London. Her work has been shown at the ICA in London in 1992/96, the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham in 1994, the Lux Cinema and the Tate Modern in 2000 and at the London Film Festival in 2001. Her one person touring exhibition Jigar [1 February 2002 - 15 March 2002] brought together work made over the past fifteen years. Frequently depicting the Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities of East London, Syed looks at personal responses to physical and emotional relationships between individuals. Jigar included a new film Spoken Diary (2001), Watershed (1995) and Swan (1989) as well as a single-screen version of Spoken Diary and Fatima's Letter (1994). She has recently completed a new film Eating Grass (2003) shot in London, Karachi and Lahore and encompassing five stories relating to the times of day for Muslim prayer, the work explores overlaps between time. It was commissioned by Iniva and screened there in November 2003. 

Lubaina Himid (artist)
Lubaina Himid has been at the forefront of advancing black women's art since she explores global histories on an intimate and personal level. She is essentially a history painter, this immense work 'Naming the Money' is an attempt to get to the bottom of the dilemma of losing your identity, being saddled with another and having to somehow make sense of being alive in a world where you are invisible.
During the past 20 years, Himid has exhibited widely both here in Britain and internationally with solo shows at Tate St Ives, Transmission Glasgow, Chisenhale London, Peg Alston New York and St Jorgens Museum Bergen. She represented Britain at the 5th Havana Biennale, has participated in group shows at the Studio Museum New York, Track 17 Los Angeles, the Fine Art Academy in Vienna and the Grazer Kunstverein .She has work in several public collections including the Tate Gallery, the Victoria & Albert Museum, The Arts Council, Birmingham City Art Gallery and the Harris Museum and Art Gallery Preston.

Kodwo Eshun (cultural theorist)
Kodwo Eshun is lecturer in visual cultures at Goldsmiths College, the Dutch Art Institute and artist tutor in residence at Nanjing Institute, China. He is the author of More Brilliant than the sun: adventures in sonic fiction (Quartet Books 1998) and co-founder of the Otolith Group. Eshun has published and lectured extensively on the utopian potential of Afrodiasporic culture. He has also collaborated as an artist with Black Audio Film Collective on the award-winning documentary The Last Angel of History which is now regarded as the foundational film of Afrofuturism. He is a trustee of Artangel and LongPlayer and a research associate for the AHRB project Translating the image-cross cultural contemporary arts at Goldsmiths College and a member of the inter-disciplinary task group at Arts Council, England. 

Professor Tamar Garb (Chair)
Tamar Garb is Professor of Art History at UCL. She has lectured and published extensively on nineteenth century French art, feminism and visual culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her publications include Sisters of the Brush, women’s artistic culture in late nineteenth century France (Yale UP 1994) Berthe Morisot (Cornell UP 1987 with Kathleen Adler); Women Impressionists (Phaidon 1986); Bodies of modernity, figure and flesh in fin-de-siecle France (Thames and Hudson 1998); Christian Boltanski (Phaidon 1997 with Donald Kuspit and Didier Semin); The Jew in the text: modernity and the construction of identity (Thames and Hudson 1995 edited with Linda Nochlin). 

Amna Malik (Conference co-ordinator, Slade)
Amna Malik is lecturer in art history and theory at the Slade School of Art. She has published articles on Steve McQueen, Lorna Simpson and Shirin Neshat and given public lectures and talks on Zarina Bhimji, Louise Bourgeois, Mona Hatoum and Laylah Ali amongst others. She is broadly interested in psychoanalysis, visuality and contemporary art practices with a particular interest in cultural and identity politics. Malik is a regular contributor to Portfolio magazine and has written for Filmwaves and recently collaborated with the artist Rose Frain in an article about her photographic series What I brought with me (2003) published in n.paradoxa in March 2004 and featured in the June 2004 issue of Portfolio. She is currently working on The unhomely citizen a study of the political potential of feminist psychoanalysis in an exhibition series entitled strangers to ourselves staged from September to December 2003 that addressed attitudes to immigration and asylum in the UK curated by Judith Stewart and others. She is currently researching a book entitled Visuality, modernity and identity: the aesthetics and politics of entanglement in contemporary art practices. The conference has emerged out of this research and in collaboration with Ivan Ward at the Freud Museum. Future projects include Black Britannia a collaboration with Raimi Gbadamosi on connections between postcolonial discourse, the historiography of art history and Black British artists and visual culture.