Bella Freud is a storyteller who uses design as her primary medium. Her pieces have been worn by notable figures such as Kate Moss, Alexa Chung, Keith Richards, Olivia Wilde, Salma Hayek, Idris Elba, Jane Fonda, and Eddie Redmayne. Passionate about cinema, she began collaborating on fashion films in 1991, including a trilogy of short films with John Malkovich: Strap Hanging (1999), Lady Behave (2000), and Hideous Man (2002). The film Girl Boils Eggs (2013) marked her directorial debut and was commissioned for Nick Knight's SHOWstudio.
Rachel Kushner is the author of the internationally acclaimed novels The Mars Room (2018), The Flamethrowers (2013), and Telex from Cuba (2008), as well as her collection of essays, The Hard Crowd (2021; all Scribner), and the short story collection The Strange Case of Rachel K (New Directions, 2015). Her books have been translated into twenty-six languages, including Portuguese. Her new novel, Creation Lake, was published this year. She grew up in San Francisco and currently lives in Los Angeles. The daughter of Beatnik academics who instilled in her a poetic sensibility and intellectual erudition, Kushner draws inspiration from both American social life and European intellectual history to craft stories that resonate with a collective imagination. Kushner is a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and the recipient of the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has been a finalist for the Booker Prize, the Folio Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction; she was also a two-time finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction and has won the Prix Médicis Étranger. She serves on the Advisory Council for the Telluride Film Festival and was a guest director at Telluride in 2015. Her fiction and nonfiction have primarily appeared in The New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine, and she is a regular columnist for Harper’s Magazine. Her latest book, Creation Lake, is shortlisted for the Booker Prize and will be launched at LEFFEST in a Relógio d'Água edition, in her second appearance at the festival - in 2023, she was a member of the Official Selection Jury.
