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Michael Azerrad is an American author, music journalist, editor, and musician. A graduate of Columbia University, he has written for publications such as Spin, Rolling Stone, and The New York Times. Azerrad's 1993 biography Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana was named by Q as one of the 50 greatest rock books ever written.

Andrew Hammel holds law degrees from the University of Houston and Harvard Law School and was admitted to the bar of the State of Texas in 1996. He is a former death-row defense lawyer and law professor. He is the author of Ending the Death Penalty: The European Experience in Global Perspective (2010) and many scholarly articles. He is fluent in English and German. His long-form journalism on famous true crime cases has appeared in Quillette, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the Berliner Zeitung, and other outlets.

Ric Burns is an American documentary filmmaker and writer. He has written, directed and produced historical documentaries since the 1990s, beginning with his collaboration on the celebrated PBS series The Civil War (1990), which he produced with his older brother Ken Burns and wrote with Geoffrey Ward.

Nick McDonell is an American writer who has worked as a journalist, screenwriter, producer, novelist and researcher.

Kim Cross is a New York Times best-selling author and journalist known for meticulously reported narrative nonfiction. A full-time freelance writer, she has bylines in the New York Times, Nieman Storyboard, Outside, Bicycling, Garden & Gun, CNN.com, ESPN.com, and USA Today.

Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher, cultural theorist and public intellectual. He is international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London, visiting professor at New York University and a senior researcher at the University of Ljubljana's Department of Philosophy.

Christopher L. Miller is retired professor in the Department of French and the Department of African American Studies at Yale University. He is the author of Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French, published by the University of Chicago Press. His new book "Impostors: Literary Hoaxes and Cultural Authenticity" examines a series of literary hoaxes, deceptions that involved flagrant acts of cultural appropriation.

Charles Leerhsen is a former executive editor at Sports Illustrated. He has written for Rolling Stone, Esquire, and The New York Times. His books include Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty; Crazy Good: The Story of Dan Patch, the Most Famous Horse in America; Blood and Smoke: A True Tale of Mystery, Mayhem, and the Birth of the Indy 500; and Butch Cassidy: The True Story of an American Outlaw. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Sarah Saffian. Visit him at Leerhsen.com

Lori Grinker is an American documentary art photographer and filmmaker from New York City. She is best known for her self-directed, long-term documentary projects, and has conducted these projects through photography, video and multimedia.

Rachel Monroe is a contributing writer at The New Yorker, where she covers Texas and the Southwest.

Gary Smith is an American sportswriter. He is best known for his lengthy human interest stories in Sports Illustrated, where he worked from 1983 to 2013.

Alexander Wolff spent thirty-six years on staff at Sports Illustrated. He is author or editor of nine books, including the New York Times bestseller Raw Recruits and Big Game, Small World, which was named a New York Times Notable Book. A former Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton, he lives with his family in Vermont.

Dan Reed is a British documentary director and producer, known for Leaving Neverland (2019), The Valley (2000) and Terror in Mumbai (2009).

Paul Cantor is a writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, New YorkMagazine, Rolling Stone, XXL, Esquire, Billboard, MTV News, Vice, FADER, Complex, and elsewhere. Born and raised in New York City, he began his career as a music producer and is now among the most authoritative voices in music journalism.

Joanna Rakoff is the author of the international bestselling memoir My Salinger Year and the novel A Fortunate Age, winner of the Goldberg Prize for Fiction, the Elle Readers’ Prize, and a San Francisco Chronicle Bestseller.

Kevin Draper is a sports business reporter for The New York Times, covering the leagues, federations, owners, unions, stadiums and media companies behind the games.

Ron Sexsmith is a Canadian singer-songwriter from St. Catharines, Ontario. He was the songwriter of the year at the 2005 Juno Awards. He began releasing recordings of his own material in 1985 at age 21, and has since recorded fifteen albums.

Mark Blyth is a Scottish-American political scientist. He is currently the William R. Rhodes Professor of International Economics and Professor of International and Public Affairs at Brown University. He is the author of several books, including Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century,  Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea, The Future of the Euro, and most recently, Angrynomics in 2020.

Michael Lewis is an American author and financial journalist. He has also been a contributing editor to Vanity Fair since 2009, writing mostly on business, finance, and economics. He is the best-selling author of The Undoing Project, Liar's Poker, Flash Boys, Moneyball, The Blind Side, Home Game and The Big Short, among other books.

Laurie Woolever is a writer and editor, and spent nearly a decade assisting Anthony Bourdain, with whom she coauthored the cookbook Appetites in 2016. Her most recent book is 'Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography'

Jenny Valentish is a journalist and author. Her latest books include 'Woman of Substances' and 'Everything Harder Than Everyone Else'

Tim Hayward is a writer, broadcaster, restaurateur and unrepentant food geek. He writes a column and criticises restaurants for the Financial Times and his features have appeared in the FT, Guardian, Observer Food Monthly, Delicious, Olive, Waitrose Food Illustrated and Saveur, amongst others.

Maria Bustillos is the founding editor of Popula, an alternative news and culture magazine. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Harper’s, and The Guardian.

Leon Gast was an American documentary film director, producer, cinematographer, and editor. His documentary, When We Were Kings depicts the iconic heavyweight boxing match: The Rumble in the Jungle between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman.This film would go on to win the 1996 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and the Independent Spirit Award.

Tom Vitale is a producer and director, known for Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown, Gourmet's Diary of a Foodie and Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations

Randy Roberts is the distinguished professor of history at Purdue University and an award-winning author. He has written thirteen books on sports history, the most recent of which is Blood Brothers: The Fatal Friendship between Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X

Ken Burns is an American filmmaker, known for his style of using archival footage and photographs in documentary films. His widely known documentary series include The Civil War (1990), Baseball (1994), Jazz (2001), The War (2007), The National Parks: America's Best Idea (2009), Prohibition (2011), The Roosevelts (2014), The Vietnam War (2017), and Country Music (2019). He was also executive producer of both The West (1996), and Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies (2015). Burns's documentaries have earned two Academy Award nominations (for 1981's Brooklyn Bridge and 1985's The Statue of Liberty) and have won several Emmy Awards, among other honors.

Patrick Connor is a member of the Boxing Writers Association of America and the International Boxing Research Organization and author of 'Shot at a Brothel: The Spectacular Demise of Oscar “Ringo” Bonavena'

Lance Oppenheim is an American filmmaker, documentarian, and producer from Fort Lauderdale, Florida. His debut feature Some Kind of Heaven (2020) was an Official Selection at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.

Frank Brady is an American writer, editor, biographer and educator. Chairman of the Department of Mass Communications, Journalism, Television and Film at St. John's University, New York, he is founding editor of Chess Life magazine.

Nick Broomfield is an English documentary film director. His self-reflective style has been regarded as influential to many later filmmakers.

Teddy Atlas is an American hall of fame boxing trainer and fight commentator.

Jim Lampley is an American sportscaster and news anchor. He was best known as a blow-by-blow announcer on HBO World Championship Boxing for 30 years. He also had covered a record 14 Olympic Games on U.S. television, most recently the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, China.

Tris Dixon is the former editor of Boxing News and has covered the sport for nearly two decades. He has worked as a boxing broadcaster for Sky Sports, BT Sport, and CNN. He authored the books The Road to Nowhere: A Journey Through Boxing’s Wastelands, Money: The Life and Fast Times of Floyd Mayweather, ghostwrote War and Peace: My Story with British boxing icon Ricky Hatton, and his latest book Damage: The Untold Story of Brain Trauma in Boxing

Maria Konnikova is a Russian-American writer , with a Ph.D in psychology from Columbia University. Konnikova has worked as a television producer, written for several magazines and online publications, and written two New York Times best-selling books. She primarily writes about psychology and its application to real life situations.

Mark Cousins is a Northern Irish director and writer based in Edinburgh. A prolific documentarian, he is best known for his 15-hour 2011 documentary The Story of Film: An Odyssey.

Ashwin Rodrigues is a staff writer at Vice.

Jon Ronson is a Welsh-American journalist, author, and filmmaker whose works include Them: Adventures with Extremists (2001), The Men Who Stare at Goats (2004), and The Psychopath Test (2011). He produces informal but skeptical investigations of controversial fringe politics and science.

Jonathan Ames is an American author who has written a number of novels and comic memoirs, and is the creator of two television series, Bored to Death (HBO) and Blunt Talk (STARZ). In the late '90s and early 2000s, he was a columnist for the New York Press for several years, and became known for self-deprecating tales of his sexual misadventures. He also has a long-time interest in boxing, appearing occasionally in the ring as "The Herring Wonder".

Chuck Klosterman is an American author and essayist whose work focuses on American popular culture. He has been a columnist for Esquire and ESPN.com and wrote "The Ethicist" column for The New York Times Magazine. Klosterman is the author of eleven books, including two novels and the essay collection Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto.

Uncover the man behind the myth of one of America’s greatest and most complicated writers. Hemingway from Ken Burns and Lynn Novick premieres April 5, 2021 on PBS.

Jerry Izenberg is a sports journalist with The Newark Star-Ledger in Newark, New Jersey. Izenberg has covered many memorable sporting events and figures of the late twentieth century, including Sonny Werblin's ownership of the New York Jets, the boxing career of Muhammad Ali, and the Loma Prieta earthquake which interrupted the 1989 World Series.

Dan Roberts is an attorney and has written about boxing, law, violence against women and - occasionally - good champagne for Deadspin (RIP), Splinter, and others.

Brian Koppelman is an American showrunner. He is the co-writer of Ocean's Thirteen and Rounders, the producer for films including The Illusionist and The Lucky Ones, the director for films including Solitary Man and the documentary This Is What They Want for ESPN as part of their 30 for 30 series, and the co-creator, showrunner, and executive producer of Showtime's Billions.

Gay Talese is an American writer. As a journalist for The New York Times and Esquire magazine during the 1960s, Talese helped to define contemporary literary journalism. Talese's most famous articles are about Joe DiMaggio and Frank Sinatra.

Alex Vadukul is a city correspondent for The New York Times. He writes for Sunday Metropolitan and is a three-time winner of the New York Press Club award for city writing. He teaches journalism at The New School.

Jason Kander is an American attorney, author, veteran, and former politician. A Democrat, he served as the 39th Secretary of State of Missouri, from 2013 to 2017.  Before entering politics, he was an intelligence officer in the Army National Guard, achieving the rank of captain.

Holly Lawson is a personal trainer and former professional boxer originally from Sechelt, British Columbia, Canada

Evan Rutkowski is the head of boxing at Ring City USA and formerly worked as a marketing executive for HBO Sports.

Bruce Pandolfini is an American chess author, teacher, and coach. A USCF national master, he is generally considered to be America's most experienced chess teacher. Pandolfini was a consultant to The Queen's Gambit, a 2020 American Netflix miniseries.

Andre Ward is an American former professional boxer who competed from 2004 to 2017. He retired with an undefeated record and held multiple world titles in two weight classes. He also won a gold medal in the light heavyweight division at the 2004 Olympics.

Irvine Welsh is a Scottish novelist, playwright and short story writer. His novel Trainspotting was made into a film of the same name. He has also written plays and screenplays, and directed several short films.

Thomas Hauser is the author of forty-eight books on subjects ranging from professional boxing to Beethoven. Hist first novel Missing was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, the Bancroft Prize, and the National Book Award, and was the basis for the Academy Award-winning film starring Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek. Hauser wrote Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times—the definitive biography of “the most famous man on earth”—was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

Bill Hillmann is an American author, storyteller, and journalist. He is a bull-runner and former boxer.

Charles Bock is an American writer whose debut 2008 novel Beautiful Children was selected by The New York Times as a Notable Book of the Year for 2008, and won the 2009 Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

T. J. English is an American author and journalist known primarily for his non-fiction books about the Irish mob, organized crime, criminal justice and the American underworld.

Fernanda Prates is an MMA staff writer at The Athletic. She is a sports journalist based out of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, who worked as a correspondent and reporter for MMA Junkie for three years.

Todd Snyder is associate professor of rhetoric and writing at Siena College and author of the new book 'Bundini: Don't Believe The Hype'

Robert Lipsyte is an American sports journalist and author and former Ombudsman for ESPN. He is a member of the Board of Contributors for USA Today's Forum Page, part of the newspaper's Opinion section. He received the Margaret Edwards Award from the American Library Association in 2001 for his contribution in writing for teens.

Chris Bell is an American director, producer and writer, known for his documentaries Bigger, Stronger, Faster., Trophy Kids, and Prescription Thugs. His work is focused on the impact that society has on our consumption and addictions, especially to prescription drugs.

Brian Campbell covers MMA, boxing and WWE. The Connecticut native joined CBS Sports in 2017 and has covered combat sports since 2010. He has written and hosted various podcasts and digital shows for ESPN and Grantland.

Louis Theroux is a British documentary filmmaker, journalist, broadcaster, and author. He has received two British Academy Television Awards and a Royal Television Society Television Award. He is known for My Scientology Movie, When Louis Met... Jimmy and Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends.

Steven Garza stars in the Sundance Film Festival Grand Prize winning documentary “Boys State,” directed by Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine.

Roy Jones Jr. is an American former professional boxer, boxing commentator, boxing trainer, rapper, and actor. He competed in boxing from 1989 to 2018, and held multiple world championships in four weight classes, including titles at middleweight, super middleweight, light heavyweight and heavyweight, and is the only boxer in history to start his professional career at junior middleweight and go on to win a heavyweight title.

Roberto José Andrade Franco was born in Chicago but considers the El Paso-Juárez borderland home. After working in construction for over a decade, he attended El Paso Community College and then University of Texas at El Paso. He is now a PhD candidate at Southern Methodist University where he’s writing a dissertation, which will be a book, on boxing and Mexican culture. Among other places, he’s written for Deadspin, ESPN, Texas Monthly, D Magazine, and Bleacher Report.

James Altucher is an American hedge-fund manager, author, podcaster and entrepreneur who has founded or cofounded over 20 companies. He has published 20 books and he is a contributor to publications including The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch, and The Huffington Post. #JamesAltucher #NewYorkTimes #JerrySeinfeld

Errol Morris is an American film director primarily of documentaries examining and investigating, among other things, authorities and eccentrics. His 1988 documentary The Thin Blue Line is cited among the best and most influential documentaries ever made. In 2003, his documentary film The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.

Hamilton Nolan is a labor reporting fellow at In These Times. He has spent the past decade writing about labor, politics and a bit of boxing for Gawker, Splinter, The Guardian and elsewhere.

Jesse Moss is a Sundance Award-winning director and cinematographer. His new film Boys State, co-directed with Amanda McBaine, premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, in the US Documentary Competition. The film was awarded the Grand Jury Prize and acquired by A24 and Apple for distribution. Boys State will be released on August 14th, 2020.

Chuck Mindenhall is an MMA writer published in The Ringer, SBnation, LA Weekly, and The Athletic.

Jeff MacGregor is currently a writer-at-large for Smithsonian Magazine. He has written often for The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, The New Yorker, ESPN, Esquire, Men's Journal, Details and Los Angeles magazine, among many others.

Wright Thompson is a senior writer for ESPN.com and the author of The Cost of These Dreams. In 2019 he published a book of essays called The Cost of These Dreams. His work has been included in the Best American Sports Writing series numerous times.

Dana Vespoli is an American pornographic actress and film director. She is a graduated from Mills College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in comparative literature.

David Hill's first book, "The Vapors: A Southern Family, the New York Mob, and the Rise and Fall of Hot Springs, America’s Forgotten Capital of Vice," is due July 2020 from Farrar, Straus & Giroux. His work has been featured on This American Life, in New York Magazine, The New Yorker, The New York Times, GQ, McSweeneys.

Jon Lee Anderson (born January 15, 1957) is an American biographer, author, investigative reporter, war correspondent and staff writer for The New Yorker, reporting from war zones such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Uganda, Palestine, El Salvador, Ireland, Lebanon, Iran, and throughout the Middle East as well as during Hurricane Katrina rescue efforts with K38 Water Safety as documented in the New Yorker article Leaving Desire. Anderson has also written for The New York Times, Harper's, Life, and The Nation. Anderson has profiled political leaders such as Hugo Chávez, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and Augusto Pinochet.

Wesley Lowery is a journalist at CBS News, formerly at The Washington Post. He was a lead on the Post's "Fatal Force" project that won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2016 as well as the author of They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America's Racial Justice Movement.

Dave Zirin, born 1974, is an American political sportswriter. He is the sports editor for The Nation, a weekly progressive magazine dedicated to politics and culture, and writes a blog named Edge of Sports: the weekly sports column by Dave Zirin. As of January 2020, he has authored ten books.

Howard Bryant is a multi-award-winning author, sports journalist, and radio and television personality with ESPN and NPR. He is the author of the Legends series for young readers; Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston; The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron; Juicing the Game; and Full Dissidence. The only two-time winner of the prestigious Casey Award for baseball writing, Howard is a senior writer for ESPN.com and is a regular contributor to NPR’s Weekend Edition.

Dr. Scott Weiss is the co-author of Confusing the Enemy: The Cus D’Amato Story and a licensed physical therapist and board certified athletic trainer based in New York. He is also a registered exercise physiologist and strength and conditioning specialist with over twenty years of experience. Scott was also a part of the USA Sports Medicine team in the 2004 Athens Olympics, the 2008 Olympics held in Beijing, and the 2012 Olympics in London. He has trained elite athletes at the NCAA, Olympic, and major league levels, as well as top performing individuals competing at the highest levels of international sport.

Donald McRae is the award-winning author of eleven non-fiction books, which have featured sporting icons, legendary trial lawyers and heart surgeons. He has twice won the prestigious William Hill Sports Book of the Year, for Dark Trade and In Black & White. He is a three-time Interviewer of the Year winner and has also won Sports Feature Writer of the Year on three separate occasions for his work in the Guardian.

Rafe Bartholomew is a staff writer covering boxing for The Athletic. He’s also a New York Times Bestselling author of Basketball: A Love Story, as well as Pacific Rims and Two and Two: McSorley's, My Dad, and Me. Before joining The Athletic, he worked as an editor at Eater.com and Grantland.com and hosted Hoop Nation for CNN Philippines.

Chris Jones is the author of Out of Orbit: The Incredible True Story of Three Astronauts Who Were Hundreds of Miles Above Earth When They Lost Their Ride Home, Too Far from Home: A Story of Life and Death in Space, and Falling Hard: A Rookie’s Year in Boxing. Jones was formerly a sportswriter at the National Post, where he won an award as Canada’s outstanding young journalist. He joined Esquire as a contributing editor and sports columnist, and became a writer at large when he won the 2005 National Magazine Award for Feature Writing for the story that became the basis for his second book. His work has also appeared in The Best American Magazine Writing and The Best American Sports Writing anthologies.

S.L. PRICE, a Senior Writer at Sports Illustrated since 1994, has written four books—including the just-released Playing Through The Whistle: Steel, Football and an American Town, a biography of Aliquippa, Pa. Of Price’s work, the New York Times said, “The seasoned reporter … is a master of the new journalism developed by Hunter Thompson, Gay Talese and Price’s personal paragon, Pete Hamill. Whenever he writes about sports–or about the craft of writing–he hits it over the fence.”

Mike Sager is a bestselling author and award-winning journalist. He has been called "the Beat poet of American journalism, that rare reporter who can make literature out of shabby reality." A former Washington Post staff writer, Rolling Stone contributing editor, and writer for GQ, Sager has been a writer for Esquire for more than two decades. In 2010 he received the American Society of Magazine Editors' National Magazine award for profile writing for his story "The Man Who Never Was," which appeared in Esquire.

Jeremy Schaap is an American sportswriter, television reporter, and author. Schaap is an eleven-time Emmy Award winner for his work on ESPN's E:60, SportsCenter, and Outside the Lines.

Tommy Tomlinson has written for publications including Esquire, ESPN the Magazine, Sports Illustrated, Forbes, Garden & Gun, and many others. He spent twenty-three years as a reporter and local columnist for the Charlotte Observer, where he was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize in commentary.

Sean Froudist-Walsh is a neuroscientist who studies the brain in health and disease using a variety of computational, psychological and neuroscientific techniques. He has written or co-authored 31 published articles in international journals in the fields of neuroscience, psychiatry and psychology.

Tom Junod is the recipient of two National Magazine Awards and worked at Esquire, Sports Illustrated, Life, and GQ among other publications. He currently works for ESPN The Magazine. Most recently Junod’s Esquire profile of Fred Rogers inspired the 2019 feature film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.

Patrick Brazeau is a Canadian senator from Quebec. Brazeau is an Algonquin from the Kitigan Zibi reserve near Maniwaki. He worked at HMCS Carleton, a Royal Canadian Naval Reserve unit based in Ottawa that operates under the Canadian Forces Maritime Command. At the age of 34, he was the youngest member of the Senate. On March 31, 2012, Brazeau lost in a celebrity boxing match to Liberal MP (and future Prime Minister) Justin Trudeau.

Mickey Duzyj is an Emmy-nominated artist and director living in New York, contributing illustration and animation to clients like Netflix, ESPN, Nike, Wieden+Kennedy, Rolling Stone, Vice, Time, The Ringer, and The New York Times Magazine. Recent highlights include creating/directing the Netflix Original documentary series “LOSERS” and directing the award-winning ESPN 30 for 30 short "The Shining Star of Losers Everywhere". He was selected as one of Variety Magazine’s 2019 “Top 10 Documentary Filmmakers to Watch”. Michael Bentt was one of America's most decorated amateur boxers and won the WBO Heavyweight title from Tommy Morrison in 1993, losing the title in his first defense in 1994 to Herbie Hide, where he was knocked into a coma and nearly died. After retiring from boxing, Bentt entered acting and playing Sonny Liston in the 2001 film "Ali" and doing the boxing choreography for director Michael Mann and Clint Eastwood for the winner of the Oscar for Best Picture, "Million Dollar Baby." Bentt is featured in the first episode of the 2019 Netflix original series Losers.

Mark Kriegel is an author, journalist, and ESPN commentator. Kriegel is the author of critically acclaimed New York Times bestsellers, Namath: A Biography, about Hall of Fame quarterback Joe Namath and Pistol: the Life of Pete Maravich and The Good Son: The Life of Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini.

DBC Pierre Pierre was awarded the 2003 Booker Prize for fiction for Vernon God Little, his first novel, becoming the third Australian-born author to be so honored. After winning the Whitbread First Novel Award the same year, he became the first writer to receive a Booker and a Whitbread for the same book. The book also won the Bollinger Wodehouse Everyman Prize for comic literature at the Hay Festival in 2003, and earned the author a James Joyce Award from the Literary and Historical Society of University College Dublin.

Ben Anderson is an award-winning journalist, author, and filmmaker who has reported from around the world: Afghanistan, Iraq, North Korea, Brazil, Congo, Cambodia among others, covering conflicts, environmental catastrophes and pariah regimes. His films include Holidays in the Axis of Evil, This is What What Winning Looks Like and Battle for Marjah, which later became a book, No Worse Enemy: The Inside Story of the Chaotic Struggle for Afghanistan. His war dispatches have been published in The Guardian Magazine and GQ UK. Ben is currently a senior producer and correspondent for VICE on HBO.

Rosie Perez is an actress, activist, author, dancer, and choreographer. Her film breakthrough was in 1989 with Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing.  She was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in 1993 for her performance in Fearless. She was also nominated for three Emmy Awards for her work as a choreographer on In Living Color. In 2014, Perez published an autobiography: Handbook for an Unpredictable Life: How I Survived Sister Renata and My Crazy Mother, and Still Came Out Smiling.