FRANCES MCDORMAND

Frances received a Master’s in Fine Arts from the Yale School of Drama and has since established a worldwide audience with roles in a wide variety of films, television streaming projects and theatre productions.

Her film accolades include her Academy Award winning performances in Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland, Martin McDonagh’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, and Joel and Ethan Coen’s Fargo, with three additional Oscar nominations for Mississippi Burning, Almost Famous and North Country.

JOEL COEN

Joel Coen is an Academy Award winning filmmaker. He and his brother Ethan have made 18 films together including No Country For Old Men, Fargo, Blood Simple, True Grit, The Big Lebowski, A Serious Man, Inside Llewyn Davis, Raising Arizona, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, among others.

They have won four Academy Awards for Best Picture, Director, Original and Adapted Screenplay.

Other awards include the National Board of Review, Golden Globes, BAFTA, WGA, and DGA. At Cannes they have won Best Director three times, the Grand Prix,
and the Palme D'Or.

ERIC KARPELES

Painter and writer Eric Karpeles, a fellow of the Czesław Miłosz Institute at Claremont McKenna College, has given the Weintraub Lecture on Polish Culture at Harvard University, the Franke Lecture in the Humanities at Yale and the Amon Carter Lecture on the Arts at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin.

He is the painter of both the Rockefeller Chapel in New York City and The Sanctuary, each a monumental work conceived as a multi-faith meditation space for people in search of grounding at times of crisis. He has worked as a volunteer ambulance driver, interviewed composer/lyricist Stephen Sondheim onstage, had tea with Indira Gandhi, and collaborated on a book of mathematical equations and Hebrew references used as a prop in a film by the Coen Brothers.