THE ART OF THE DEAD: ICONS IN ASH - Book Party: Readings, Performances and Music about Death

Bios of authors from  

Icons in Ash: 

Anthony Haden-Guest is a writer, reporter, cartoonist, and sporadic performer. He was born in Paris, grew up in London, has lived in Rome, San Francisco, and Los Angeles but is long settled in New York. He won a New York Emmy for writing and narrating a program about the coming of Euro trash to Manhattan. His books include Bad Dreams,True Colours: The Real Life of the Art World (Grove Atlantic), and The Last Party: Studio 54, Disco and the Culture of the Night (Morrow). His collections of cartoons and rhymes are The Chronicles of Now (Allworth) and In the Mean Time (Freight & Volume). He publishes on paper and online and his more ambitious current projects include an animated movie, a follow-up book on the art world, and a much illustrated memoir.

Eleanor Heartney is a Contributing Editor to Art in America and Artpress and has written extensively on contemporary art issues for many publications. Her books include Critical Condition: American Culture at the Crossroads, Postmodernism, Defending Complexity: Art Politics and the New World Order, Postmodern Heretics: The Catholic Imagination in Contemporary Art, and Art & Today. She is a co-author of After the Revolution: Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art, and The Reckoning: Women Artists of the New Millennium. She received the College Art Association's Frank Jewett Mather Award for distinction in art criticism in 1992 and was honored by the French government as a Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2008. Heartney is a past President of AICA-USA, the American section of the International Art Critics Association.

Heide Hatry is a New York based German artist, often described as neo-conceptualist, whose work transforms, transcends, or transgresses the customary relationship of artist to both audience and art. Among her fundamental preoccupations are identity, gender roles, the nature of aesthetic experience and the meaning of beauty, the effects of knowledge upon perception, and the human exploitation of the natural world. She studied and taught art at various schools in Germany while simultaneously conducting an international business as an antiquarian bookseller. She has curated numerous exhibitions, has shown her own work at museums and galleries around the world, has created nearly two hundred artist's books and edited more than two dozen printed books and art catalogs. Skin (2005), Heads and Tales (2009), and Not a Rose (2012) both document her own art and amount to collaborative conceptual artist's books involving some of the most interesting thinkers and authors in the world.

Claudia Steinberg is a New York based journalist born in Germany. She has been covering a wide range of subjects like art, travel, design, social issues, and fashion for German publications like Vogue, Die Zeit, Cicero, Kunstzeitung, and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. She has been the U.S. correspondent for the German architecture and design magazine Architektur & Wohnen since 1999 and has also written for the home section of The New York Times, Surface, and Interior Design Magazine. In 2004 a book of essays on art and food appeared in collaboration with photographer Bärbel Miebach, followed by The Art of Living, published by Monacelli Press in 2009. In 2012 she wrote and co-directed a documentary on the New York Waterfront for the French/German television station Arte. She is currently working on a collection of oral histories about life in the Rockaways.

Linda Weintraub is a curator, educator, artist, and author of several popular books about contemporary art, including TO LIFE! Eco Art in Pursuit of a Sustainable Planet (University of California Press). Weintraub's previous books include In the Making: Creative Options for Contemporary Artists and Art on the Edge and Over: Searching for Art's Meaning in Contemporary Society. Weintraub served as the Director of the Bard College museum where she curated over sixty exhibitions. She was the Henry Luce Professor of Emerging Arts at Oberlin College and is currently on the faculty of the Interdisciplinary Master of Fine Art program at the University of Hartford. Her current book project is Ecological Materialism: Art-is-an Environmental Health Clinic. Weintraub received her MFA degree from Rutgers University. She maintains a homestead on an eleven acre property where she practices permaculture. These principles guide her studio practice, which includes communal art projects entitled Grandmother Earth: Beyond Death.