Antonio Dias (1944–2018) moved to Rio de Janeiro from Campina Grande with his family in 1957. He began working as a draftsman and graphic designer, cultivating art as an autodidact in his spare time. In the early 1960s, Dias began frequenting the studio of Oswaldo Goeldi, the celebrated modernist printmaker, at the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes. Although Dias was grouped with the Brazilian New Figuration, his practice was interwoven with the legacy of the Concrete movement and the revolutionary impetus of Tropicália. While his early sculptural works contained an abstract geometric vocabulary, Dias’s training drew him to paper and canvas. In 1965, he won the painting award from the Biennale des Jeunes Artistes of Paris, where he lived between 1967 and 1968. After May 1968, he moved to Italy and settled in Milan, where he lived until his death.

Horacio Zabala (b. 1943, Buenos Aires) was trained as an architect at the University of Buenos Aires. He had his first solo art show in 1967. In 1972 he began publishing essays and other theoretical texts on art, and in 1975 began curating and planning exhibitions. He was a member of the Grupo de los Trece (Group of Thirteen), which was centered around the Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAYC), until 1976. In that year, which marks the start of Argentina’s final and most violent military dictatorship, he went into an exile that would take him to Rome, Vienna, and Geneva, where he would continue to produce and exhibit his art for 22 years. On his return to Argentina, he created the exhibition Ejercicios y tránsitos (Exercises and Transits) (1998) at Buenos Aires’s Museum of Modern Art, published El arte o el mundo por segunda vez (Art or the World, Once Again) (1998) and resumed his curatorial efforts. Since then, his works have appeared in numerous solo and group shows in Argentina and abroad, and have entered major collections, both private and public, around the world: The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), Tate Modern (London), Dallas Museum of Art, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (Buenos Aires), Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires. In 2016 he had an important anthological exhibition La pureza está en la mezcla (Purity is in the mix), at the Colección de Arte Fortabat (Buenos Aires) and Mapping the Monochrome, at Phoenix Art Museum. He lives and works in Buenos Aires.

Lotty Rosenfeld (b. June 20, 1943; d. 24 July 2020) was an interdisciplinary artist based in Santiago, Chile. She was born in Santiago, Chile, and was active during the late 1970s during the time of the Chilean military coup d'état. She carried out public art interventions in urban areas, often manipulating traffic signs in order to challenge viewers to rethink notions of public space and political agency. Her work has been exhibited in several countries throughout Latin America, and Internationally in places such as Europe, Japan, and Australia.

Colectivo Acciones de Arte (CADA), an interdisciplinary group of Chilean artists, was established in 1979 with the goal of inciting critical reflection on the relationship between art and politics, a question made especially urgent by the conditions of the country’s authoritarian government. CADA concentrated its efforts on executing citizen interventions that sought to launch a new aesthetic in order to reformulate existing artistic circles under the dictatorship. The group made an appeal to multiply the current broadcast channels and transform them into bases of support for discourses on art. The CADA group disbanded in 1985, after completing the actionViuda.

Raúl Zurita (b.1950), winner of the Chilean National Poetry Prize, is the author of the renowned poetic trilogy Purgatory, Anteparadise, and The New Life, considered one of the singular poetic achievements in Latin American poetry. His other publications include the book INRI (translated by William Rowe), Song for His Disappeared Love (translated by Daniel Borzutzky), and the poetry collections El Paraí­so Esta Vací­o, Canto a Su Amor, Desaparecido, El Amor de Chile, Los Paí­ses muertos, In Memoriam, and Las Ciudades de Agua. He has just completed a book that includes “Inscriptions Facing the Sea,” a project to inscribe 22 phrases in the cliffs of the north coast of Chile that would only be read from the sea. Zurita is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Casa de las Americas Prize from Cuba, and the National Poetry Prize of Chile. His work has been translated into a dozen languages.

Diamela Eltit (b. 1949, Santiago, Chile) is an award-winning novelist, short story writer, essayist, and critic. Eltit published her first texts during the dictatorship in Chile (1973–90), while becoming involved in visual arts and diverse modes of performance as a founding member of the renowned group Colectivo Acciones de Arte (CADA). Eltit is an important critic in the field of Latin American literature and has lectured at many institutions in the United States and Latin America.