Born in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1953, Marlene Dumas moved to Amsterdam in 1976, where she has since lived and worked. Dumas is widely regarded as one of the most influential painters working today. Over the past four decades, she has continuously probed the complexities of identity and representation in her work. Her paintings and drawings, often devoted to depictions of the human form, are typically culled from a vast archive of images collected by the artist, including art-historical materials, mass media sources, and personal snapshots of friends and family. Gestural, fluid, and frequently spectral, Dumas¿s works reframe and recontextualize her subjects, exploring the ambiguous and shifting boundaries between public and private selves.

Claire Messud is an award-winning American novelist. The author of six works of fiction, including The Emperor¿s Children (2006), The Woman Upstairs (2013), and The Burning Girl (2017), Messud has received Guggenheim and Radcliffe fellowships and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.