Dance critic. Having studied at the Department of Performance Studies, Graduate School, New York University, he is currently Professor Emeritus, Keio University. His main fields of expertise are rituals, shamanism and performing arts in Asia, and new forms of innovative expressions after post-modern dance. He has been a judge at the Toyota Choreography Award, Asahi Performing Arts Award, Cairo International Experimental Theater Festival, and the Wifi Body Festival (Manila) among others. Publications include Sexuality of Transvestism, Shintai no rinkai-ten, Danso-ron, A Filmology of the Circus and Polysexual Love.

Tengal is an intermedia artist, researcher, and cultural producer. He has been involved in research-based production bridging art, technology, music, and society in Manila and Southeast Asian region since 2005. He founded the art organization SABAW Media Art Kitchen in Manila as a curatorial platform that initiated the Philippines’ first international media art festival and symposium, WSK Festival of the Recently Possible. He curated the INTERSTICES: Manifolds of The In-between exhibition with the Japan Foundation Asia Center and last Feb 2018 was the guest director for「self-reflexivity: Thinking Media and Digital Articulations」exhibition for MeCA | Media Culture in Asia: A Transnational Platform, a Media art festival in Tokyo. Tengal was a recipient of the Asia Center Fellowship for Cultural and Intellectual Research, where he spent 6 months traveling all over Japan. In 2018, Tengal co-created the international platform Nusasonic, a creative collaboration between YES NO KLUB (Yogyakarta), WSK Festival of The Recently Possible (Manila), Playfreely/BlackKaji (Singapore), CTM Festival (Berlin) and Goethe Institut Southeast Asia. wsk.io  

Emily Wakeling is a writer and curator with experience in Japan, the UK and Australia. In Tokyo, she worked as an editor for Tokyo Art Beat and as an adjunct lecturer at Joshibi University of Art & Design and Kanagawa University. She was the Assistant Curator for the 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art. Her art writing has been included in numerous art journals including Eyeline Contemporary Visual Arts, Art Monthly Australasia, ArtAsiaPacific and ArtReview Asia. Emily is currently undertaking a PhD at Queensland University of Technology.

Music critic, writes about music and the culture surrounding it for publications including iD-Japan, Eureka, OTOTOY, Mikiki, ele-king, The Sign Magazine, and Jazz The New Chapter. His younger brother is New Japan Pro-Wrestling wrestler Tetsuhiro Yagi.

Curator/ CEO NYAW inc./ Co-president of Tokyo Art Acceleration.
After working as a curator at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa and Contemporary Art Centre, Art Tower Mito, he became the director of ANB Tokyo and established NYAW Inc. Major exhibitions include ‘Hello World-for the Post-Human Age’ and ‘Resistance of Fog|Fujiko Nakaya’ (Art Tower Mito) and ‘The world began without the human race and it will end without it.’ (National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts). In addition to planning and consulting on culture/art-related projects such as the art festival ‘Meet Your Art Festival “NEW SOIL”‘ organised by avex, Music Loves Art in Summer Sonic and the Agency for Cultural Affairs’ Cultural Economy Strategy Promotion Project, he also supervises art programmes and features in magazines and on TV. He is also a writer, lecturer, jury member, etc. He was a 2015 overseas trainee for curators from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) and a part-time lecturer at Waseda University and Tokyo Polytechnic University.


Photo: Ittetsu Matsuoka

Hiroki Yamamoto, born in Chiba in 1986, is Lecturer at Kanazawa College of Art in Japan. Yamamoto graduated in Social Science at Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo in 2010 and completed his MA in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts (UAL), London in 2013. In 2018, he received a PhD from the University of the Arts London. From 2013 until 2018, he worked at Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation (TrAIN) as a postgraduate research fellow. After working at Asia Culture Center (ACC) in Gwangju, South Korea as a research fellow and The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, the School of Design as a postdoctoral fellow, he was Assistant Professor at Tokyo University of the Arts until 2020. His publications include The History of Contemporary Art: Euro-America, Japan, and Transnational (Chuo Koron Sha, 2019), Media and Culture in Transnational Asia: Convergences and Divergences (Rutgers University Press, 2020), and Thinking about Racism (Kyowakoku, 2021).