Mikhail Pogarsky (b. 1963, Murom) is an artist, poet, and novelist. He graduated from Moscow State University and holds a Candidate of Technical Sciences degree (1991). He works in design, photography, video, land art, and mail art and makes environments and artist’s books. He has organized and curated over 40 international projects and taken part in over 200 exhibitions in Russia and other countries. He has produced over 100 books for children and adults and published numerous academic, art historical, and popular articles and essays, as well as the monographs The Phenomenon of the Artist’s Book (2013), Artist’s Book[+] (2015), and Artist’s Book [x] (2021, in three volumes). He is a member of the Russian Creative Union of Artists (2005). He lives and works in Moscow.
Valeriy Ledenev (b. 1985, Moscow) is an art critic and researcher specializing in the artist’s book. From 2014 to 2022 he was a senior librarian at Garage, where he initiated and coordinated the project Single Copy, focused on the artist’s book. He has given lectures and seminars on the artist’s book at the Higher School of Economics (Moscow) and worked with the Goethe-Institut (Frankfurt) and the Klingspor Museum (Offenbach). He has published essays on contemporary art in ArtChronika, The Art Newspaper Russia, Moscow Art Magazine, Iskusstvoznanie, Colta.ru, and Art Focus Now. He lives and works in Hochheim am Main (Germany).
Gennady Kuzovkin (b. 1968, Moscow) is a historian, co-head of the project on the cultural history of the Khrushchev Thaw at the Project Lab for the Study of the Art of Yury Lyubimov (Higher School of Economics, Moscow). He is the author of over 50 academic papers. From 2008 to 2022, he headed the research program The History of Non-Conformist Thought in the USSR at Memorial Human Rights Center, which gathered a large collection of samizdat materials. He has edited reference publications on samizdat, including the comprehensive Samizdat Catalogue (2003, online). He lives and works in Moscow.
Anton Metelkov (b. 1984, Novosibirsk) is a poet and book historian. He is the head of the Department of Samizdat and Non-traditional Print at the Laboratory of Book Studies of the State Public Research Library of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Novosibirsk). He holds a Candidate of History degree. He coordinated the cultural programs of the festivals Experiences (2013), Knizhnaya Sibir (2015–2023), Beloye Pyatno (2019–2021) and Koreshki (2022) and the conferences Makushin Readings (2021) and Homo Legens in the Past and Today (2023). He lives and works in Novosibirsk.
Sasha Obukhova (b. 1967, Moscow) is an art historian and Curator of Garage Archive Collection. She graduated from Moscow State University in 1992. In 1993, she studied at the Central European University (Prague). She has worked at the Institute of Contemporary Art (Moscow), the State Tretyakov Gallery, and National Center for Contemporary Arts. In 2000, she was a member of the working group that curated the permanent exhibition The Art of the Second Half of the XX Century at the Tretyakov Gallery. In 2004, she became a founding member and director of the Art Projects Foundation where she established the Archive of Russian Contemporary Art. She lives and works in Moscow.
