Noah Charney and Svetlana Slapšak
Dr. Noah Charney is the internationally best-selling author of more than thirty books, translated into fourteen languages, including The Collector of Lives: Giorgio Vasari and the Invention of Art, which was nominated for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Biography, and Museum of Lost Art, which was a finalist for the 2018 Digital Book World Award. He is a professor of art history specializing in art crime and has taught at Yale University, Brown University, American University of Rome, and University of Ljubljana. He currently teaches online courses for Yale, Atlas Obscura, the Smithsonian, and the National Gallery (UK). He is the founder of ARCA, the Association for Research into Crimes against Art, a ground-breaking research group and teaches on their annual summer-long Postgraduate Program in Art Crime and Cultural Heritage Protection. He has written for dozens of major magazines and newspapers, including The Guardian, the Washington Post, The Observer, and The Art Newspaper. His books include The Slavic Myths, Brushed Aside: The Untold Story of Women in Art, and The Thefts of the Mona Lisa: The Complete Story of the World’s Most Famous Artwork.
Svetlana Slapšak is an academic, author, and activist. Born in Belgrade, she studied Classics, then activated by the students’ movement in 1968, she never stopped: for human rights, against death penalty, for women’s rights, for freedom of expression, against nationalism and war, for the rights of animals and Balkan rivers. Her passport was taken by the secret police three times in seven years. In 2005, she was among 1,000 women nominated as candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize. Svetlana and her Slovenian archaeologist husband, Božidar, had to choose to live in Ljubljana after being threatened in Serbia. She found her place at the Ljubljana Graduate School in the Humanities department, retiring as the Dean. Since then, she has taught all over Europe, USA, and Turkey, as well as becoming a Fellow at Berlin, Wassenaar, and Budapest Institutes for Advanced Studies and Project Director at CNRS Paris. She started her literary career in her 60s, with essays, novels, dramas, travelogues, and translations from Ancient Greek and Latin. She has published around sixty academic books, forty literary books, 500 studies, and 3,000+ essays. Her key areas of research are anthropology of the ancient worlds, historical linguistics, Balkanology, gender studies, and cultural anthropology.
Daniel Reneau
Daniel Reneau is a Denver-based illustrator skilled in digital and traditional mediums, and specializes in horror, fantasy, science fiction, and comic book illustration. He is the co-creator of the graphic novel Zombiraq, a winner of the 2013 L. Ron Hubbard Illustrators of the Future Award, and a graduate of the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. Learn more at www.danielreneauartist.com.
