Brenda Farnell is a professor of sociocultural and linguistic anthropology and American Indian studies at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign). Her research interests include ethnopoetics and indigenous performance, Plains Sign Language and dances of the Northern Plains, discourse, movement literacy, and problems in social theory and embodiment. Her most recent book is Dynamic Embodiment for Social Theory: "I Move, Therefore I am" (Routledge, 2012). Recent papers include "The Second Somatic Revolution" (with C. Varela), in the Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior (2008); "Performing Precision and the Limits of Observation" (with Robert Wood), in Redrawing Anthropology: Materials, Movements, Lines (Ashgate Press, 2011); and "Theorizing 'the Body' in Visual Culture," in Visions of Culture: A History of Visual Anthropology (University of Chicago Press, 2011).

Rosita Henry currently serves as the head of the Department of Anthropology, Archaeology and Sociology at James Cook University (JCU), Australia. She holds BA (Hons) and MA degrees in anthropology from Australian National University and a PhD from JCU, where she also studied law for two years. Her Sri Lankan and German parentage and six years in Papua New Guinea as a child fostered a deep interest in how people can begin to understand beliefs and cultural practices that are different from their own. Her ethnographic research concerns relationships between people, places, and the nation-state in Australia and the Pacific as expressed through heritage and the politics of cultural festivals and other public performances. She is author of the book Performing Place, Practicing Memory: Indigenous Australians, Hippies and the State (Berghahn Books, 2012) and coeditor of the book The Challenge of Indigenous Peoples: Spectacle or Politics? (Bardwell Press, 2011).

Monica FA W Santos is a PhD student specializing in the anthropology of human movement at the Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her dissertation concentrates on ballet dancing in the Philippines. In the Philippines, she is involved in projects promoting different performing arts forms in that country and Southeast Asia. She has also trained in various performing arts traditions, including ballet dancing, Balinese gamelan and dance, and kulintang music.

Franca Tamisari is an associate professor in cultural anthropology at the Department of Humanities at Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Italy. She earned BA (Hons) and PhD degrees in social anthropology from the London School of Economics and Political Science. She has conducted ethnographic research in Northeast Arnhem Land, Northern Territory, Australia since 1990. Dr. Tamisari has published widely on the subjects of Australian Indigenous cosmology and performance, with particular attention to ritual and cross-cultural dances and dancing, bicultural education, Australian Indigenous art, and fieldwork methodology. She taught in the Anthropology Department at the University of Sydney from 1996 to 2001 and at the School of Social Science, University of Queensland from 2002 to 2006, where she retains an adjunct affiliation since moving to Ca' Foscari University of Venice in 2007. She can be contacted at tamisari@unive.it.