Public Domain - Celebrating the Lifecycle of Copyright

Taína Caragol is Curator of Painting and Sculpture and of Latino Art and History at the National Portrait Gallery. Since 2013 she has led the effort to increase the representation of Latino historical figures and artists at the museum, adding over 170 portraits to the collection. She was the lead curator for Portraiture Now: Staging the Self (which traveled to New York and Albuquerque in 2015), curated One Life: Dolores Huerta, and co-curated The Face of Battle: Americans at War, 9/11-Present. Most recently, she co-curated with Asma Naeem UnSeen: Our Past in a New Light, Ken Gonzales-Day and Titus Kaphar. Currently, she is co-curating with NPG Historian Kate Lemay the exhibition 1898: The American Imperium, on the topic of American expansionism at the turn of the 20th century. Caragol earned her Ph.D. at the Graduate Center, City University of New York in 2013 with a dissertation titled: “Boom and Dust: The Rise of Latin American and Latino Art in New York Exhibition Venues and Auction Houses, 1970s–1980s.” She has published articles on the impact of exhibitions, archives, and the art market in the validation of art histories.

Nina Gilden Seavey is an Emmy Award-winning documentarian with a 30-year history in the non-fiction world. Her films can be seen in theaters, on television, in ancillary media, and in museum exhibitions across the globe. Seavey is the director of The Documentary Center in the School of Media and Public Affairs at The George Washington University. She holds the academic rank of Research Professor of History and Media and Public Affairs. In addition to her academic appointment at GW, Seavey is a Visiting Research Scholar at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University. Seavey is also the founding director of SILVERDOCS (now AFI Docs).

Ben West is a New York-based writer, director, producer, performer, and musical theatre historian. His current projects include The Show Time! Trilogy, Direct from Proctor’s 23rd Street Theatre for One Night Only: January 16, 1920, and 514 Broadway. West’s directing credits include Unsung Carolyn Leigh for Lincoln Center’s American Songbook; Gatsby: The Songs in Concert; Make Mine Manhattan; and The Fig Leaves Are Falling. Broadway: Old Acquaintance, assistant director and dramaturg; August: Osage County and The Homecoming, assistant producer; and Talk Radio, production assistant. He is the founder of UnsungMusicalsCo. and a 2017 recipient of Lincoln Center’s Martin E. Segal Award.

Douglas Lanier is Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire. He did his graduate work at Duke University, where he was trained as a medieval and early modern drama specialist. He serves on the editorial boards of Adaptation and the journal Shakespeare, and he is a past trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America. For 2016-2017, he served as the Fulbright Global Shakespeare Centre Distinguished Chair at Queen Mary University of London and the University of Warwick; in 2018-2019, he is a long-term research fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Lanier is widely recognized as a pioneer in the study of modern appropriations of Shakespeare in mass media. His book, Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture (Oxford University Press, 2002), established the basic parameters of one of the liveliest fields in Shakespeare studies today. He followed up this work with an annotated catalogue of more than 900 Shakespeare spinoff films for Shakespeares after Shakespeare, ed. Richard Burt (Greenwood Press, 2005), a series of essays on Shakespearean appropriations of specific plays for the Sourcebooks Shakespeare editions, and contributions to The Cambridge World Shakespeare Encyclopedia.