Frank Hentschker (he/him) executive director of The Segal Center, came to the Graduate Center in 2001 as program director for the Graduate Center’s Martin E. Segal Theatre Center and was appointed to the central doctoral faculty in theatre in 2009. He is the founder of the World Theatre Performance series, the annual fall PRELUDE Festival, and the PEN World Voices Playwrights Series. Apart from programming Segal Theatre Center events Frank teaches Theatre History at Columbia University and is currently working on a book about Robert Wilson’s play texts.​

Ariana Tiziani is the Art and Culture Advisor at Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in New York City. She worked previously at the Grey Art Gallery, NYU; the American Folk Art Museum​, Marvelli Gallery​, The Occidental Agency | Occidental College​ in Los Angeles and as the Manager of Exhibitions & Public Programs​ at The American-Scandinavian Foundation | Scandinavia House.​​

Nicole Birmann Bloom joined the Cultural Services of the French Embassy—now Villa Albertine—in 1995 and serves as Program Officer, Performing Arts. Located in New York City, Nicole manages the development of French cultural projects in Dance, Theater, Contemporary Circus, Puppetry and Street Theatre in the United States, including curatorial travel to foster the rich artistic dialogue between the two countries. She has coordinated several key festivals in dance and in theater and participated in the conception of several publications such as the recent Catalogue of Dance Films. Since their inception, Nicole has managed the administration of two of the grant programs of FACE Foundation: FUSED: French US Exchange in Dance and FACE Contemporary Theater. For Villa Albertine, Nicole contributes insight and experience to development of artistic residencies in Performing Arts. Nicole trained in dance. She worked for more than a decade in the public and private sectors for international relations, prior to joining the Cultural Services.​

Jean-Pierre Dion is the Director of the Cultural Services at the Québec Government Office in New York. As a consultant in finance and production, he moved to New York in 2004 to join the opening team of Wynton Marsalis's Jazz at Lincoln Center and never went back home. He also worked for more than 10 years with internationally acclaimed Cirque Éloize, first as the treasurer of the board and later on as a full-time member of the managerial team, both as the Director of Finance and business partner of the production company.

Jörg M. Schumacher is the executive director of Goethe-Institut New York, Germany’s official cultural institute. He was Head of Department at German National Public Radio (Deutschlandfunk, Deutschlandfunk Kultur, Deutschlandfunk Nova) from 2016 to 2020 and held various positions at the Goethe-Institut in Germany and the Middle East from 2005 to 2016, including Head of the Communication Department at the Munich Headquarter (2014-2016) and director of Goethe-Institut in Ramallah / Palestinian Territories (2009-2014). Jörg completed his Ph.D. in cultural studies at University of Hildesheim with a thesis on cultural policy during the cold war. He holds a M.A. in Political Science and History and studied at the University of Cologne and Queen’s University Belfast. From 2017 to 2020 he served as a member of the scientific advisory board for the Leibnitz Zentrum Moderner Orient (Berlin).

Rachel Cooper has extensive experience in traditional and contemporary Asian and Asian-American performing arts and the development of new interdisciplinary programs. She has presented or commissioned over 800 performances at the Asia Society and venues across the U.S. She works with international artists from Indonesia, Iran, Cambodia, India, Pakistan, Philippines, Japan, China, and Taiwan among others. Equally part of her work is with American artists from across the country. She is a frequent participant at major conferences and a commentator in the media addressing, international arts exchange and culture as diplomacy. Her passion is sharing artist voices with audiences broadly and to facilitate artist meetings at a global level. She co-directed the Muslim Voices Arts and Ideas Festival with BAM and Asia Society and Asia Society’s Creative Voices of Muslim Asia initiative. Cooper lived in Indonesia from 1982-89 and co-organized the Festival of Indonesia in Performance. Ms. Cooper is the co-founder and former director of the San Francisco-based Balinese music and dance company, Gamelan Sekar Jaya, which has been presenting the arts of Bali in the United States.

Trained as an engineer, Laurent Clavel obtained postgraduate degree in the management of cultural institutions before settling in La Réunion, an island in the Indian Ocean, in 1994. He became Théâtre Talipot’s manager director, a company that gathered artists from all over the Indian Ocean, toured the world, organized a festival and opened a third place in a former sugar factory. He then joined the French cultural network abroad, first as head of the Franco-Nigerian Cultural Center in Niamey and then of the French Institute of South Africa in Johannesburg. This South African experience left a deep impression, and he continued as General Commissioner of Saisons France-Afrique du Sud in 2012 and 2013. His journey then took him to the far north as Director of the French Institute of Sweden in Stockholm, before becoming a Cultural Attaché in New York, fulfilling an old dream of coming to work in the heart of a fascinating city, discovered twenty years earlier.

Taylor Gaines (B.A. Theatre and French, University of Virginia; M.A. Cultural Translation, American University of Paris) is the cultural attachée at the Québec Government Office in New York. She is a script reader for The Play Company, and a member of the American Literary Translators’ Association theatre subcommittee. She is the recipient of grants from FACE Foundation and ARTCENA, and her translations have received public readings at the Martin Segal Theatre Center at CUNY and the International Play Reading Festival at Columbia University, and productions at Cherry Arts Space and Carnegie Mellon University.