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Raised in England, Devonté Hynes started in the punk band Test Icicles before releasing two orchestral acoustic pop records as Lightspeed Champion. Since 2011, Hynes has released five solo albums under the name Blood Orange, all of which have been met with critical acclaim. In addition to his solo work, Hynes has collaborated with pop music superstars including Mariah Carey, A$AP Rocky, Solange, Blondie and Paul McCartney among others. His 2024 collaboration with Nathy Peluso won the Latin Grammy award for best Alternative Song, and in 2026 he was nominated for a BRIT award for Best Alternative Act. Hynes’s film and television credits include the scores for Melina Matsoukas’ Queen and Slim, Gia Coppola’s Palo Alto, and Luca Guadagnino’s We Are Who We Are. Hynes’s symphonic and instrumental music has been performed and commissioned by the London Symphony Orchestra, LA Philharmonic, and Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, among others, and championed by artists including Seth Parker Woods, Adam Tendler, and Third Coast Percussion, who in 2020 were nominated for a Grammy in the category of Best Chamber Music or Small Ensemble Performance for their recording of Hynes’s work, Fields. Hynes’s piano concerto, Happenings, saw its premiere at New York’s Little Island Festival in 2021, and has been featured, along with his cello concerto, Origin, multiple chamber works, and his symphony Naked Blue, in a series of Selected Classical Works programs, which have appeared at Sydney Opera House, Los Angeles’s Ford Theatre, London’s Barbican Centre, and New York’s Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Mati Diop is a Franco-Senegalese filmmaker born in Paris in 1982. With her first feature film Atlantics (2019), awarded the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, followed by Dahomey (2024), which received the Golden Bear at the Berlinale, she has emerged as one of the major voices in international auteur cinema and in a new wave of contemporary African and diasporic filmmaking. By founding the Dakar-based production company Fanta Sy, she continues to expand her artistic engagement on the African continent.

Manon Lutanie (b. 1987) is an independent filmmaker and publisher based in Paris. Her short films Liberian Boy (2015) and Naked Blue (2022), co-directed with Mati Diop, as well as Untitled (2024) have been screened at institutions and festivals including the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, e-flux, the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, The Renaissance Society, CAP UCLA, Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, and the Institute of Contemporary Arts. She is the founder of the independent press Éditions Lutanie. From 2019 through the early 2020s, she was an active member of P.A.I.N., a non-profit founded by Nan Goldin to address the overdose epidemic and the stigma of addiction.