Painting courtesy of Liat.

David Sornig was born and raised in Melbourne and Germany and is now based in Adelaide where he lectures in creative writing at Flinders University. His fiction, non-fiction and criticism have appeared in Griffith Review, New Matilda, Antipodes, The Age and elsewhere. In 2008 he was awarded the Charles Pick Fellowship at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom. His novel Spiel follows an architect’s apocalyptically charged journey through Melbourne and Berlin. He is writing a follow-up about a family at the coalface of climate change and sometimes updates his blog at www.davidsornig.wordpress.com

Image by Massimo Vitali, courtesy of Bonni Benrubi Gallery.

Mary Rozell is Director of Art Business at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, New York. While living in Berlin for almost a decade, she was the correspondent for The Art Newspaper and a curator of contemporary art.  She has written and lectured extensively about Berlin’s emerging art scene and architectural landscape, and is the author of numerous journal articles, catalog essays, and translations. For more, please visit her website.

Image courtesy of wikipedia

Lawrence Douglas is the author of three books: The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust (2001); Sense and Nonsensibility: Lampoons of Literature and Learning (with Alex George, 2004); and The Catastrophist, a novel (2006). His second novel, The Vices will appear next year.  Last year, he was a visiting professor in the law school of Humboldt Universität in Berlin.  He is currently at work on a piece about the Demjanjuk trial for Harper’s.  He teaches at Amherst College.

Image from the beauty brains

Brittani Sonnenberg is a European Journalism Fellow at the Freie Universität Berlin. She has written for the Associated Press and Time Magazine, and her fiction has appeared in the O’Henry Short Stories 2008 and in Ploughshares. Click here to listen to her piece on Berlin from the first season of Berlin Stories!

Image by Mitch Epstein

Susan Bell is the author of The Artful Edit: On the Practice of Editing Yourself (W.W. Norton & Co., 2007), and co-author with Jason West of Dare to Hope: Saving American Democracy, a collection of essays on political activism (Miramax, 2005).  Her writing has been published in Tin House, Vogue, and The London Sunday Telegraph. Bell is the writer and co-creator, with Mitch Epstein, of “What is American Power?”, a not-for-profit billboard and website project to encourage responsible energy production and consumption (launch: Ohio, April 22, 2010). For more about the project please click here. A former editor at Random House and Conjunctions magazine, she teaches at the New School’s graduate writing program in New York City, and the Tin House Writer’s Workshop in Portland, Oregon. For more information about Susan Bell’s work please go to her website.

Freundespaar by August Heitmüller, 1925

Geoffrey Upton is a writer and lawyer based in San Francisco, where he is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in political theory at the University of California, Berkeley.  A New York City native and former professional journalist, Upton has written for The Baltimore Sun, The Los Angeles Times and other publications.  He lived in Berlin on a Robert Bosch Fellowship in 2008-09 and continues to study and write about German language, culture and politics.

Image from ESI

Dr. Reza Aslan, a scholar of religions, is a contributing editor at the Daily Beast. His first book is the New York Times Bestseller, No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam. His most recent book is How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization, and the End of the War on Terror, followed by an edited anthology, Words Without Borders: Writings from the Middle East, which we will be published by Norton in 2010.

Aslan is Cofounder and Chief Creative Officer of BoomGen Studios, the first ever motion picture company focused entirely on entertainment about the Greater Middle East and its Diaspora communities, as well as Editorial Executive of Mecca.com. Born in Iran, he now lives in Los Angeles where he is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside. For more, please click here to go to his website.

Painting by Robert Bechtle.

April Elizabeth Lamm is a writer and curator who has been based in Berlin since 1998. Since curating the exhibition “Anonym: In the Future No One Will Be Famous” (November 2006 to January 2007) at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, she has been working on a collection of short stories called The Ministry of Leisure and is co-authoring an art-world novel with Stefan Heidenreich called The Collector. Her next exhibition “Zimmerreise” – which attempts to answer the question “What would happen if Europeans were never to return home from summer holidays at the beach?” – is loosely based on a short story by J.G. Ballard. Selected texts can be found at: http://boone-broodthaers.blogspot.com/

For more about the Deutsche Guggenheim exhibit described in this piece, please click here.

Detail of Plastic Bottles, 2007 by Chris Jordan.

William MacDougall is a thirtysomething working-class Glaswegian who has lived and worked in Berlin since 2001. His writing has appeared in Counterpunch, Media Lens, Outlook India, and Z magazine. To the best of his knowledge he has been the recipient of no significant awards, grants or scholarships – literary or otherwise. He currently lives in Tiergarten.

Image courtesy of www.vam.ac.uk

Tara Bray Smith was born and raised in Hawaii. She is the author of West of Then, a memoir, and Betwixt, a novel for young adults. She lives with her husband in New York City and Berlin. www.tarabraysmith.com.