Keynote Speakers

Maira Kalman was born in Tel Aviv and moved to New York with her family at the age of four. She was raised in bucolic Riverdale, the Bronx. She now lives in Manhattan.

Maira has written and illustrated Eighteen children’s books, including Ooh-­‐la-­‐la-­‐Max in Love, What Pete Ate, Fireboat: The Heroic Adventures of the John J. Harvey, 13 WORDS, a collaboration with Lemony Snicket, Why We Broke Up, with Daniel Handler, Looking at Lincoln, and Thomas Jefferson Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Everything.

She is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker Magazine, and is well known for her collaboration with Rick Meyerowitz on the “New Yorkistan” cover in 2001 and “The New York City Sub-­‐Culinary Map.” Maira is currently creating an illustrated column for The New Yorker based on travels to museums and libraries.

Recent projects include illustrating Strunk and White’s classic The Elements of Style. A small opera based on the text was composed by Nico Muhly. She has created two monthly online columns for the New York Times. The first, The Principles of Uncertainty (2006-­‐07), was a narrative journal of her life. The second, And The Pursuit of Happiness (2009) was a year long exploration of American History and democracy. Both columns are now collected in book form, published by the Penguin Press.

Maira Kalman has had eight exhibitions at the Julie Saul Gallery since 2003. In 2010, The Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia organized a retrospective of Kalman’s work entitled Maira Kalman: Various Illuminations (of a Crazy World). The show traveled to the Contemporary Jewish Museum (San Francisco, CA), the Skirball Cultural Center (Los Angeles, CA), and the Jewish Museum in NYC, where it remained until July 31, 2011. In April 2014 all the original paintings for The Elements of Style will be exhibited for the first time. The show will open at the Frist Center for the Arts in Nashville.

She has collaborated with Michael Pollan to illustrate his acclaimed Food Rules, just published Girls on Lawns, with text by Daniel Handler. It is the first of five books she will be doing with the photography department of the Museum of Modern Art. The Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum will publish two books by Maira in connection with an exhibition she has curated, Maira Kalman: My Favorite Things. The exhibition will open in October 2014. One for children, Ag-­‐Ha to Zig-­‐Zag, and one for adults, called My Favorite Things. Future book projects include a book about dogs, and an illustrated edition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. York City.

Baz Luhrmann grew up in rural Australia. He first became enthralled by the world of movies and the power of storytelling at his father's theatre. He also encountered a variety of interesting people while working at the local gas station, and Luhrmann went on to use these experiences as a source for his own creativity. His most notable works to date are the three films that make up his Red Curtain Trilogy. The Red Curtain style of filmmaking was devised by Luhrmann to actively promote audience participation, and the third movie in the trilogy, Moulin Rouge! (2001), has been his most successful film to date.

Luhrmann’s next filmic effort was the multi-themed Australia (2008), starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman; it unleashed a fierce national debate over its historical accuracy, though its director had not intended a documentary. Luhrmann’s following project was a series of eight short videos—featuring Judy Davis as fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli, who died in 1973, and contemporary designer Miuccia Prada—made in conjunction with New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition “Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations.”

In 2013 Luhrmann released The Great Gatsby, his much-anticipated version of American icon F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel of the same name. The film starred Leonardo DiCaprio (in his second Luhrmann vehicle) as the title character. It had Luhrmann’s distinctive stamp, not only in its narrative twist—the novel’s narrator, Nick Carraway, is portrayed in the film as the author of the novel—but in its often vertiginous camera work, operatic scenes, anachronistic musical score, and general embrace of excess.

Elle Luna paints, designs and writes. She also runs a textile venture, the Bulan Project, a collaboration between designers and master batik artists in Bali, and has previously worked as a designer at IDEO and with startups, including Mailbox, Medium, and Uber. Her first book, The Crossroads of Should and Must, debuted in April 2015, and she lives in San Francisco and online at elleluna.com.

Brandon Stanton studied at the University of Georgia and worked as a bond trader in Chicago before starting “Humans of New York”—a photography and storytelling blog—in the summer of 2010. Over the course of four years, HONY has built a devoted following of over 15 million fans. He has appeared on Ellen, Good Morning America, Nightline, MSNBC, CNN, has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, Huffington Post, Mashable, and dozens of other media venues. He has also been named a ‘person of the week’ on the ABC Evening News with Diane Sawyer, and a Time Magazine “30 Under 30 Who are Changing the World.” He is the author of the #1 New York Times Bestseller HUMANS OF NEW YORK and the Children’s book LITTLE HUMANS. His new book HUMANS OF NEW YORK: STORIES will be published in October of 2015.