Lora Appleton is a New York-based gallerists, curator, and design producer. The founder of the internationally renowned Kinder MODERN gallery and the studiokinder design studio, Appleton has become a leading authority on children’s furniture and accessories. She is also a prominent figure on the New York Design scene. In 2017, Appleton founded the Female Design Council, an action-oriented membership organization dedicated to supporting women in the field of design. A graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Appleton first launched a boutique hospitality design and branding agency which she steered for several years before the birth of her son in 2009, when she began collecting intelligent design for children, a passion which eventually became kinder MODERN.

Constantin Boym is an industrial designer and educator. Born in Moscow, he trained at the Moscow Architectural Institute and later the Domus Academy in Milan. In 1986, he founded Boym Partners in New York City. For the past three decades, the firm has developed a range of designs for major brands including Alessi, Authentics, Kikkerland, Swatch, Swarovski, and Flos; showroom displays and exhibitions for Vitra and Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum. Boym, and partner Lauren Boym head Boym Editions, an studio practice dedicated to the creation of critical, conceptual, narrative-driven, and limited edition designs. Their work is also part of major museum collections including MoMA. Boym Partners is the recipient of eight I.D. Magazine Annual Design Awards and two Federal Design Achievement Awards. The firm was named a 2005 finalist for the National Design Award in Product Design. In 2015, Constantin Boym became the chair of the Industrial Design program at Pratt Institute.

Gabrielle Golenda is from Mile-High City, Denver, Colorado. She has written for various design and architecture related publications including Dwell, Architizer, and The Cooper Hewitt Design museum’s blog series. Golenda graduated from Parsons with a BBA in design then earned an MA in the history of design from the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum.

Alda Ly is the founder and principal of Alda Ly Architect&Design. The New Zealand-born, New York-based architect worked for top firms like Rafael Viñoly Architects and Leong Leong before establishing her own practice in 2017. Ly and her team have gained recognition for a series of tech-industry and startup office and retail interiors. The studio’s minimalistic yet playful design vocabulary champions biophilic design principles to affect occupants’ wellbeing. Alda Ly holds a bachelors degree from UC Berkeley and an MArch from the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

William Menking has curated and written catalogs for exhibitions including; Archigram: Experimental Architecture 1961-1974, Superstudio Life Without Object’s, and The Vienna Model: Housing for the 21st Century. In 2008 he was U.S. Commissioner of Into the Open: Positioning Practice at The Venice Biennale. He co-authored Four Conversations on the Architecture Of Discourse and Architecture on Display, and his essay Mr. Mumford’s Neighborhood appears in the book Forty Ways To Think About Architecture (Routledge). Menking’s writings have appeared in The Society of Architectural Historians, Journal of Architectural Education, Monocle, Perspecta, etc. He was a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley (2011) and is currently Professor of Architecture at Pratt Institute.

Fiona Raby is a British artist/designer and educator. With partner Anthony Dunne, she founded the seminal London-based critical design practice Dunne & Raby in 1994. The studio revolutionized the domain by stimulating debate, among designers, industry, and the public, about the social, cultural, and ethical implications of emerging technologies. The pair helmed the ground-breaking Design Interactions program at London’s Royal College of Art from 2005 to 2015. Dunne and Raby are currently Professors of Design and Social Inquiry at Parsons School of Design. Dunne & Raby’s speculative designs have been exhibited at MoMA, the Pompidou Centre in Paris, the Design Museum in London, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Austrian Museum of Applied Arts (MAK).