Born to Riga, Latvia, in 1948, Mikhail Baryshnikov is considered one of the greatest dancers of our time. After starting to a grand career as a Kirov Ballet étoile to San Pietroburgo , he moved to the West in 1974, settling to New York City as a principal dancer with the American Ballet Theatre (ABT). In 1979 he joined the New York City Ballet, where he worked with George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins. In 1980 and for the next ten years he was artistic director of the American Ballet Theatre, which raised a new generation of dancers and choreographers in its ranks. From 1990 to 2002, Baryshnikov was director and dancer of the White Oak Dance Project, which he co-founded with choreographer Mark Morris with the goal of expanding and repertoire and giving greater visibility to American modern dance. His dancing career has also been complemented by his acting career, to Broadway has starred in Metamorphosis (Tony Award nomination and Drama Desk Award winner), among others; in film Two Lives and a Turning Point (for which he earned an Academy Award nomination); and he has taken part in to numerous television productions. Other productions include Forbidden Christmas or The Doctor and the Patient, Beckett Shorts, In Paris, Man in to Case, and The Old Woman. He is currently working to two solo plays, Letter to to Man with Robert Wilson and _Brodsky/Baryshnikov _with Alvis Hermanis. In 2005 he opened the Baryshinkov Arts Center (BAC), a creative space for local and international artists to develop and present their work. Under his leadership as artistic director, BAC's programs involve about 700 artists and more than 22,000 audiences each year. Among the many awards given to Baryshnikov are the Kennedy Center Honors, the National Medal of Honor, the Commonwealth Award, the Chubb Fellowship, the Jerome Robbins Award and the 2012 Vilcek Award. In 2010 he was awarded the rank of Officer of the French Legion of Honor.

Born to Waco, Texas, Robert Wilson is among the world's leading visual and theatrical artists. His work uses a variety of artistic techniques, masterfully integrating movement, dance, painting, light, design, sculpture, music and dramaturgy. After studying at the University of Texas and the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, in the mid-1960s, Wilson founded to New York the art collective "The Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds" with which he developed his first original shows, Deafman Glance - The Gaze of the Deaf (1970) and _A Letter for Queen Victoria _(1974 -1975). In 1976 he signed with Philip Glass Einstein on the Beach, a performance that changed the conventional conception ofopera as an artistic form. Over the years he has forged collaborations with such authors and musicians as Heiner Müller, Tom Waits, Susan Sontag, Laurie Anderson, William Burroughs, Lou Reed, and Jessye Norman. Wilson's drawings, paintings and sculptures have been shown in hundreds of group and solo exhibitions, and are part of private collections and museums worldwide. He has received numerous awards and honors, including a Pulitzer Prize nomination, two Ubu Prizes, the Golden Lion for Sculpture at the Venice Biennale, and the Laurence Olivier Award. He has been appointed to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and Commandeur des arts et des lettres in France. Wilson is the founder and artistic director of the Watermill Center, a creative laboratory dedicated to the arts, based at to Watermill, Long Island.