Serbian-born composer Aleksandra Vrebalov explores the concepts of time, place, and memory by combining documentary audio with acoustic instruments. She has created music for opera, dance, and the concert stage, as well as for documentary films and art exhibitions. Her electronic pieces are most often based on materials from her personal audio archive. Vrebalov moved to San Francisco in 1995 and now resides in New York City.

www.aleksandravrebalov.com

Aleksandra Vrebalov was nominated by David Harrington.

Eleni Sikelianos is the author of a hybrid memoir (The Book of Jon, City Lights) and seven books of poetry, most recently The Loving Detail of the Living & the Dead (Coffee House, 2013). She has been the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fulbright Fellowships, The National Poetry Series, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Princeton University’s Seeger Fellowship, and the Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative American Writing, among others. In the summer of 2012, she performed parts of The California Poem with composer Philip Glass, set to his music. Her work has been widely anthologized (including in several Norton anthologies) and has been translated into a dozen languages. Sikelianos has taught poetry in public schools, homeless shelters, and prisons, and is on guest faculty for the Naropa Summer Writing Program and for L’Ecole de Litérature in France and Morocco. She currently teaches in and directs the Creative Writing Ph.D. program at the University of Denver, where she runs the Writers in the Schools program, and is frequently poet-in-residence at art centers and creative writing programs. The great granddaughter of Greek poet Angelos Sikelianos and theater director Eva Palmer Sikelianos, she shares her days with the novelist Laird Hunt and their daughter Eva Grace.

Eleni Sikelianos was nominated by Anne Waldman.

Henry Rollins has toured the world as a spoken word artist, as frontman for both GRAMMY-nominated Rollins Band and Black Flag–and without a microphone. Henry's spoken word performances–"talking shows," as he calls them–are a seamless (yet seemingly extemporaneous) mix of humor and outrage; pop culture, political commentary and personal anecdote; healthy skepticism and rugged optimism. When he's not living out of a backpack, he is constantly at work as an actor, radio DJ, author of more than 25 books, and running his publishing company and record label 2.13.61. He earned a GRAMMY award in 1994 for Best Spoken Word or Non-Musical Album for his reading of his classic punk-rock travelogue Get in the Van. In recent years he has hosted several TV shows for National Geographic, including 2012's three-part series Animal Underworld with Henry Rollins. He currently hosts a weekly radio show on L.A.'s renowned NPR affiliate KCRW, and is a regular columnist for LA Weekly and Rolling Stone Australia. In January 2013, Henry celebrated the 200th broadcast of his weekly KCRW show. Billed as "a great mix of all kinds from all over from all time," his show airs Saturday nights from 8-10pm pacific time, and streams online at KCRW.com.

Henry Rollins was nominated by Mike Mills.

http://henryrollins.com

Born in Brussels in 1979, Katja grew up in a Belgian-German-Jewish family. She moved to Berlin in 1999, where she studied at the Art Academy of Weissensee. During her studies the artists Vaginal Davis, Alice Creischer and Pauline Boudry greatly inspired her. Katja exhibited across Europe and in Buenos Aires from 2005 to present. She is currently working on a "milieu study" drawn on metal plates with dry paint. The series portray artists, cultural producers, and activists, who are connected to Katja and represent her references in the Berlin cultural scene.

Katja von Helldorff was nominated by Vaginal Davis.

www.katjavonhelldorff.com

Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1982, Matías Piñeiro studied at the Universidad del Cine, where he taught Filmmaking and Film History. In 2011, he received the Radcliffe Institute Fellowship from Harvard University for developing his new film project, “Sarmiento, Translator”. He currently lives in New York under an NYU scholarship in Creative Writing. His films include “El hombre robado” (2007), “Todos mienten” (2009),“Rosalinda” (2010) and “Viola” (2012). He is currently developing the third installment of his Shakespearean Project: “The Princess of France”.

Matías Piñeiro was nominated by Rose Kuo.

The world of Matthew E. White unfolded out of the mingled sands of Virginia Beach and Manila, the youngest son in a family that raised him barefoot between the blurred racket of that far eastern jungle city. He was born into an already deep sonic archaeology: the dusts of the Delta had swirled into Rock and Roll. King Tubby was dubbing. Terry Riley was overdubbing. Caetano Veloso had just turned 40. Muddy Waters was just about gone. Jimmy Cliff had sung "Many Rivers to Cross", and so had Harry Nilsson, and White shared this common inheritance and out of it he stitched his own flag out of it. His debut album Big Inner,  begins with "One of These Days -- looking in, up, and over in its declarations of love. It is about waking up next to someone, or feeling the wood of the church pew on your back. Recorded in Richmond, VA, White's home and the epicenter of Spacebomb, the label and adjacent group of musicians radiating from a core House Band, Big Inner forms a new history in seven songs. Strings, horns, piano, perfect bass, ripping guitar, and heart-racing percussion help tell the story. I am a barracuda, I am a hurricane. You don't need the seven-voice choir chasing White's voice to make you believe it, but it sure doesn't hurt.

http://www.matthewewhite.com http://hometapes.tumblr.com/matthewewhite

Matthew E. White was nominated by Nigel House.

Nancy Kuhl is the author of Suspend (2010) and The Wife of the Left Hand (2007). A chapbook, Little Winter Theater, was published in 2011. She is co-editor of Phylum Press, a small poetry publisher and Curator of Poetry of the Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

www.phylumpress.com/nancykuhl.htm

Nancy Kuhl was nominated by Dan Beachy-Quick.

Sarah Rara is a Los Angeles-based artist working with film, video, performance, and photography. She is a contributing member of the band Lucky Dragons. Her work, solo and in collaboration, has been presented at such institutions as the Whitney Museum of American Art (as part of the 2008 Whitney Biennial), the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, London's Institute for Contemporary Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, MOCA Los Angeles, and the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, among others. She received a MFA from the University of Southern California in 2011.

www.sarahrara.com

Sarah Rara was nominated by Andrew Berardini.

Born in Lyon, France in May 1983, Woodkid grew up in a captivating environment full of World War II stories and traveling to his family's roots in Eastern Europe. He studied illustration and animation at the Emile Cohl School before landing jobs on Luc Besson's Arthur, The Invisibles and Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette. Stepping out from behind the camera, Woodkid became one of the few video directors to embark on a recording career of his own. In between shooting promos for the likes of Katy Perry ("Teenage Dream"), Taylor Swift ("Back to December"), Lana Del Rey ("Born to Die," "Blue Jeans"), and Drake and Rihanna's ("Take Care"), he recorded the Iron EP and the Run Boy Run EP, won the MVPA Award for Best Director of the Year, and started work on his debut album, The Golden Age, scheduled for release on March 18th, 2013. Look out for WoodKid's exclusive mixtape for Dream The End.

www.yoannlemoine.com/woodkid/

Woodkid was nominated by Mia Moretti.