Renea S. Brown is a Helen Hayes Award winning actor in DC. She has appeared at The Shakespeare Theatre Company, Arena Stage, The Folger Shakespeare Theatre, Chesapeake Shakespeare Theatre, and Round House Theatre and more. You can watch her on Law and Order and Godfather of Harlem on MGM+, or see her work in the world premier of The American Five as Coretta Scott King at Fords Theatre this fall.

Kimberly Marteau Emerson is a lawyer, advocate and non-profit leader in human rights, education and foreign policy, especially transatlantic relations. She speaks regularly at conferences and gatherings in Europe and the US. In June 2023, she was appointed by President Biden to serve on the US Holocaust Memorial Council. Ms. Emerson also currently serves as Vice Chair of the Board of Human Rights Watch, Chair of the Board of Governors of Bard College Berlin, and on the Board of Trustees of Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson. She serves on the Advisory Boards of the Thomas Mann House, foreign and domestic policy retreat center the Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands, the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, the German-American Institutes, and German social impact consultancy PHINEO. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Pacific Council on International Policy. 

Jeffrey Gedmin is the President & CEO of the Middle East Broadcasting Networks, Inc., a non-profit international multimedia corporation funded by the U.S. Government to produce and communicate accurate, objective, timely and relevant news and information about the United States, the region, and the world to Arabic-speaking audience across the Middle East and North Africa. Gedmin served on the International Broadcasting Advisory Board (IBAB) from 2023 to 2024. He also served as Interim President of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) in 2023. He is the former president of the London-based Legatum Institute. Gedmin served for four years as president of RFE/RL, prior to which he served as president of the Aspen Institute in Berlin. He was a Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., and Executive Director of the New Atlantic Initiative.

Kokayi is a GRAMMY-nominated musician, improvisational vocalist, producer, author, speaker, and multidisciplinary fine artist. A Guggenheim Fellow for Music Composition—the first emcee to receive the honor—he is also a Halcyon Arts and Nicholson Arts Fellow, and a TEDxWDC presenter. He is author of You Are Ketchup: and Other Fly Music Tales (Globe Pequot). Kokayi is a longtime collaborator and Board member with OneBeat, and has served as a U.S. State Department music emissary. A committed advocate for DC’s indigenous music, Kokayi served in multiple leadership roles within the Recording Academy, including Chapter President and National Trustee, where he helped establish go-go as an official genre within the Regional Roots category—cementing its legacy within music history.

Summer Lopez is PEN America’s Interim Co-CEO and Chief Program Officer, Free Expression. She has been with the organization since November 2017 and has led PEN America's advocacy, research, and programming in defense of free expression in the U.S. and globally. Lopez has worked to advance democracy and human rights in the nonprofit and government sectors, including for eight years with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and three years with The AjA Project. Her writing has appeared in outlets including The Washington Post, TIME, The Daily Beast, and the New York Daily News. She has lived and worked in Zimbabwe, Egypt, Nepal, India, and Ghana, and holds a BA from Harvard University and a master's in public affairs from the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs.

Azar Nafisi is a lifelong champion and ardent supporter of the importance of Humanities and Liberal Arts and the role they play in the preservation and promotion of democracy. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, which has won diverse literary awards. Nafisi was a Fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, DC, and Director of The Dialogue Project & Cultural Conversations. She has lectured and written extensively on the political implications of literature and culture, as well as the human rights of the Iranian women and girls. She has been consulted on issues related to Iran and human rights both by the policy makers and various human rights organizations in the US and elsewhere.

Clint Smith is the author of the narrative nonfiction book, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, which was a #1 New York Times bestseller, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the Hillman Prize for Book Journalism, the Stowe Prize, and selected by the New York Times as one of the 10 best books of 2021. He is also the author of the New York Times bestselling poetry collection Above Ground and the award-winning poetry collection Counting Descent. His writing has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. Clint received his B.A. in English from Davidson College and a Ph.D. in Education from Harvard University. He is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Hans Rudolf Vaget is Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature at Smith College (Northampton, Massachusetts). He received his academic training at the universities of Munich and Tübingen, the University of Wales at Cardiff and at Columbia University in New York. His research focuses on Goethe, Wagner and Thomas Mann, on which he has published extensively. Recently he published Wehvolles Erbe: Richard Wagner in Deutschland. Hitler, Knappertsbusch, Mann (S. Fischer Publishing House, 2017). He is the author of the seminal book Thomas Mann, der Amerikaner: Leben und Werk im amerikanischen Exil, 1938-1952 (S.Fischer Publishing House, 2011).

Daniel Ziblatt is the Eaton Professor of Government at Harvard University where he is also the director of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies. He leads a research group at WZB Berlin Social Science Center, Germany. His current research focuses on the comparative study of democracy and authoritarianism with a focus on Europe and the United States. He is the author of the New York Times best-seller How Democracies Die (2018), co-authored with Steven Levitsky. In 2023, he published Tyranny of the Minority (w/ Steve Levitsky), an analysis of American democracy in comparative perspective. He is also the author of the book Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2017), a history of democracy in Europe, in addition to Structuring the State (Princeton University Press, 2006). In 2023, Ziblatt was elected member of the American Academy for Arts and Sciences.