Jack Pierson was born in 1960 in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and graduated from the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston in 1984. He lives and works in New York. Pierson has had recent solo exhibitions at the CAC Malaga, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin and the Aspen Art Museum. His work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among other museums worldwide. Pierson is represented by Cheim & Read, New York.

Katharine Kavanagh has a background in devised performance; she has been writing about circus since 2013 when she launched The Circus Diaries - a multi-platform hub for critical discourse centered on the circus arts. In addition to exploring how critical practices are nurtured among circus professionals, Katharine also leads workshops and residencies and lectures at the National Centre for Circus Arts in London. She has recently been awarded funding from the UK's Economic and Social Research Council to undertake a PhD, commencing in September 2018 at the School of English, Language and Communication at Cardiff University.