Pia Arke was a visual artist, who worked with photography and text primarily. She graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen in 1993 and held two additional degrees from that institution: a Cand.Phil. in Art Theory from the Department of Art Theory and a Multimedia Design degree from the School of Media Arts. Born in Greenland by a Greenlandic mother and a Danish father, most of her work deals with her Greenlandic background and the history of Greenland. Arke exhibited in a large number of contexts and completed several public art commissions for the Danish Polar Center, the Ministry of Defense, and the Environmental Investigations of Denmark, among others. Arke was the recipient of the 1999 award from the Danish Arts Foundation and in 2000, she received a 3-year work grant from the Danish Arts Foundation.

Aslaug Juliussen is an artist, pedagogue and therapist who holds a degree in textile art from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts. Recently, she moved to Tromsø, but for twenty years, Juliussen was living in the interiors of Finnmark in northeastern Norway. There she worked with reindeer herding besides actively producing and exhibiting her art. Embodying the Norwegian, North-Norwegian and Sámi cultures, she acculturated to the Sámi reindeer herding culture to which she was a newcomer. Jointly, these hybrid positions – the mix af national, regional and indigenous identities on one hand, and the double status of the newcomer as participant and observer on the other – are the „topos“ from which Juliussen has experienced the world and from which her artistic analyses and expressions spring. Juliussen has shown her work in numerous solo and group exhibitions regionally, nationally and abroad and is the recipient of numerous grants.

Britt Kramvig is a Norwegian social anthropologist and filmmaker of Sámi origin, currently living and working in Tromsø and Oslo. She holds a Ph.D. from the Department of Planning and Community Studies at the University of Tromsø. Her interests include music, lyrics, films, postcolonial, phenomenological, and feminist studies. Among her latest publications are Encounters: Conflicts of Values in Sámi-Norwegian Everyday Life (Oslo University Press) and The Silent Language of Ethnicity, (European Journal for Cultural Studies). Kramvig’s latest film productions include Firekeepers (dir. Rossella Regazzi) as well as co-producing Suddenly Sami (dir. Ellen Lundby).

Kuratorisk Aktion is an independent curatorial collective founded in 2005 by Danish-born independent curators Frederikke Hansen and Tone Olaf Nielsen. The collective works internationally from Berlin and Copenhagen and is committed to using curating to generate new critical knowledges about the global capitalist order and the ideologies of inequality that sustain it. Collaborating with artists as well as theorists and activists from all over the world, the collective produces exhibitions, interventions, and events that engage such ideologies as nationalism, racism, patriarchal supremacy, and heteronormativity in a critical manner. Through their facilitation of alternative knowledge production, Kuratorisk Aktion aims to contribute to the destabilization of these ideologies, which in turn may lead to positive sustainable change. Their recent projects include: Rethinking Nordic Colonialism: A Postcolonial Exhibition Project in Five Acts (Iceland, Greenland, The Faroe Islands, and Finnish Sápmi, 2006); asking we walk, voices of resistance (Den Frie Udstillingsbygning, Copenhagen, 2008); and The Road to Mental Decolonization: Healing the Postcolonial Traumas of Nordic Indigenous Women (Tromsø Gallery of Contemporary Art, Norway, 2008).

Aviâja Egede Lynge is a Greenlandic social anthropologist, who lives and works in Nuuk where she teaches anthropology at the Institute of Arctic Education, University of Greenland. Lynge’s interest are postcolonialism (mental decolonization), culture, development of indigenous societies, and rural areas. Lynge participated in Rethinking Nordic Colonialism: A Postcolonial Exhibition Project in Five Acts (2006) with the paper “The Best Colony in the World”.

Kobena Mercer is a lecturer and critic based in the UK. Mercer writes and teaches about the visual arts of the black diaspora in both the UK and the US. He will be Visiting Professor at the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University in Spring 2009. He is the author of Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (1994) and of monographs on Isaac Julien and Adrian Piper amongst others. He is series editor of Annotating Art’s Histories, the most recent of which is Exiles, Diasporas & Strangers (2008). Mercer was the inaugural recipient of the 2006 Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing.

Katarina Pirak Sikku holds a MFA from the Academy of Fine Arts at Umeå University (2005). Her photography, drawings, installations, and text-based work draw from both immediate family history as well as historical occurrences that have had an impact on her personal life. Sikku’s approach to traditional representation often makes use of subtle displacements, which upsets the logic that organizes established customs. Through her work, she evokes emotions of mourning and grief in the minds of her audience, but she does it with humor and a tremendous amount of generosity. She strives for a combined reflection of the political and social arenas as well as the private and public realms of experience. Sikku’s latest exhibition has been at Skellefteå Konsthall, Sweden, 2008. Pirak Sikku lives and works in Jokkmokk, Sweden.

Rossella Ragazzi (MA, PhD, currently Post Doc Research Fellow in Visual Anthropology and Museum Studies at University of Tromsø Museum, Sami Ethnographic Unit), was born in Rome in 1965. Her main fields of research are: visual anthropology, indigenous studies, cinema, performance, migration & childhood studies. Senior lecturer at Visual and Cultural Studies Dept, University of Tromsø, institute of Social Anthropology from until 2007. Member of the board of the Commission of Visual Anthropology, among other institutional affiliations. Co-owner of Sonar Film, Norway. Her recent anthropological film is Firekeepers (2007).