Marieluise Hessel was born in Munich and lived in Mexico for many years before moving to the United States. Her wide-ranging collection of over 2,000 works, featuring international artists, is housed at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in New York, which she cofounded in 1992.

In 2006, CCS Bard inaugurated the Hessel Museum of Art with a major expansion of its galleries where Marlise’s collection is on view for students, scholars and visiting curators. Marlise also established the Library and Archives at the Center for Curatorial Studies. The library contains over 25,000 volumes of art related literature. 

Sara Raza is an award-winning contemporary art curator and writer based in New York City. She is the author of “Punk Orientalism: The Art of Rebellion,“ published by Black Dog Press in London in 2022. In 2019, Sara established her own global curatorial studio practice, Punk Orientalism Studio, culminating almost two decades of independent and institutional dynamic and thematically driven global curatorial work across Asia, the Caucasus, the Middle East and North Africa, Europe and North America. The studio’s activities include exhibition making, curatorial knowledge, publishing, lecturing, creating curricula, and contemporary collecting practices. Rooted in Sara’s practice the studio explores modern and contemporary art and architecture, emergent technologies, the ancient thinking sciences, and philosophy and theory to rethink curatorial activities from a broad and scholarly perspective.