Nathaniel Kahn’s feature documentary My Architect, chronicling his five-year odyssey to know his late father, architect Louis I. Kahn, was nominated for an Academy Award in 2004. The film also received Independent Spirit Award and Emmy nominations and Kahn was awarded the 2004 Directors Guild of America Award for outstanding direction of a documentary. My Architect was released in theaters internationally and appeared on HBO. In 2007, Kahn’s short film Two Hands, about the pianist Leon Fleisher, was also nominated for an Oscar. Two Hands played theatrically and appeared recently on Cinemax. Kahn has made several films on environmental issues and films on childhood mental health for the NYU Child Study Center. He began his career in the theater, writing and directing plays in New York City, including “Owl’s Breath”, which appeared Off-Off Broadway. Kahn holds a BA in Philosophy from Yale and lives in Philadelphia and Los Angeles. He is currently working on his first dramatic feature film.

Digital Librarian and renegade computer scientist, Brewster Kahle is the founder of the Internet Archive and one of the foremost activists in the quest for universal access to all knowledge. He's a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Joseph Jacobson is a physicist, a Professor at MIT, and a prolific inventor. Educated at Brown, MIT and Stanford, he has received numerous awards (the Gutenberg Prize, the Discover Award, the Technology Review TR100), and authored over 70 peer reviewed papers. Joe was a co-founder of E-Ink, Kovio and Codon Devices and is a founding director of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC).

A.J. Jacobs is a philosopher (Brown University), editor (Esquire), author (The Know-It-All; The Year Of Living Biblically); prankster (he impersonated a movie star at the Oscars, and has posed nude for Esquire); and human guinea pig. He lives in New York City with his wife and three sons.

Donald Jackson, born in 1938 in Lancashire, England, is a British calligrapher, official scribe and calligrapher to the Crown Office of United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Jackson is artistic director of The Saint John's Bible, a recent, hand-written and illuminated Grand Bible commissioned by the Benedictine Monastery of Saint John's in Collegeville, Minnesota, USA. He is the author of The Story Of Writing (1981) and The Calligrapher's Art.

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Paul Horowitz is Professor of Physics and of Electrical Engineering at Harvard, where he arrived as an impressionable freshman some 40 years ago and, well, just never left. Paul has published many scientific papers, led two dozen technical studies and authored a hundred reports on topics in national security as a member of JASON. He is a leading researcher in SETI (the search for extraterrestrial intelligence). It’s said that Carl Sagan based the main character in Contact partly on Horowitz, although he bears very little resemblance to Jody Foster.

He has spent the past two years living in small cabins and huts all over the world, and swims every day.

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Brian Greene has degrees from Harvard and Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He joined the physics faculty of Cornell University in 1990 and in 1996 joined Columbia University as a professor of physics and of mathematics. Brian is widely recognized for basic discoveries in superstring theory, including mirror symmetry and topology change, and he is known to the public through his general-level lectures and writings. His first book, The Elegant Universe, won Britain’s top prize for a book on science, and sold more than a million copies worldwide. His latest, The Fabric of the Cosmos, debuted to much critical acclaim, spent half a year on the New York Times bestseller list and inspired the Washington Post to call him “the single best explainer of abstruse concepts in the world today.” Brian has had many media appearances, from Charlie Rose to David Letterman, and his three-part NOVA special on The Elegant Universe was nominated for three Emmys and won a Peabody Award, as well as the Prix Jules Verne. He is co-director of Columbia’s Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Phyics (ISCAP), and is leading a research program applying superstring theory to cosmological questions.

The first food critic to win a Pulitzer prize, Jonathan writes for LA Weekly and Gourmet, and is known for his passion for small, ethnic restaurants. A collection of his articles can be found in his book Counter Intelligence.

Peter Gelb is a legendary musical impresario. He started as an usher at the Metropolitan Opera when he was a teenager. At 17 he went to work as Sol Hurok’s office boy. He grew up to manage the Boston Symphony’s historic 1979 tour of China at the end of the Cultural Revolution; he revived Vladimir Horowitz’s concert career in 1980 and produced the famed pianist’s historic return to Russia in 1986. His experiences are extensive and varied: his films, recordings, broadcasts, concerts and festivals have won numerous awards (Emmys, Peabodys, Grammys), and his artistic collaborators have included Rostropovich, Horowitz, Wynton Marsalis, Mel Brooks, Seiji Ozawa, Placido Domingo, Tan Dun, Julie Taymor, James Levine and many, many others. Returning to his roots, he took over as General Manager of the Metropolitan Opera in 2006 and immediately began to launch initiatives aimed at revitalizing opera and connecting it to a wider audience. Peter is 53, is married to conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson and has two sons.