Ishmael Houston-Jones is a choreographer, author, performer, teacher, curator, and arts advocate known for his improvisational dance and language work. His work has been performed in New York City, across the United States, in Europe, Canada, Australia and Latin America. Houston-Jones and Fred Holland shared a 1984 New York Dance and Performance Bessie Award for their work Cowboys, Dreams and Ladders performed at The Kitchen and he shared another Bessie Award in 2011 with writer Dennis Cooper and composer Chris Cochrane for the 2010 revival of their 1985 collaboration, THEM. THEM was performed at Performance Space 122, the American Realness Festival, Springdance in Utrecht, Tanz im August in Berlin, REDCAT in Los Angeles, Centre Pompidou in Paris, and at TAP, Theatre and Auditorium of Poitiers, France. The 1985 premier performance of THEM at PS122 was part of New York's first AIDS benefit.

Dennis Cooper is an American novelist, poet, critic, editor and performance artist. He is best known for the George Miles Cycle, a series of five semi-autobiographical novels published between 1989 and 2000 and described by Tony O'Neill "as intense a dissection of human relationships and obsession that modern literature has ever attempted." Cooper is the founder and editor of Little Caesar Magazine, a punk zine, that ran between 1976 and 1982.