Nerissa Balce was educated in the classrooms and museums of Manila and the libraries of Berkeley, California. She read feminist literature and poststructuralist theories in college and consequently ditched her plans to become a nun. She identifies as a mongrel academic – an Asian Americanist with a mixed (and questionable) pedigree: one who does a little bit of literature, theory, popular culture, diasporic and Philippine texts. If empires used various media to promote the romance of conquest, it makes sense to have an expansive approach to studying Filipino culture and the global Filipino diaspora. Her book, Body Parts of Empire: Visual Abjection, Filipino Images, and the American Archive (University of Michigan Press, 2016) "is a study of abjection in American visual culture and popular literature from the Philippine-American War (1899–1902)."

Melissa Banta is a curator and author, who has worked with photograph collections in Harvard University’s museums and libraries for over thirty years. Her exhibitions and publications include From Site to Sight: Anthropology, Photography, and the Power of Imagery; A Timely Encounter: Nineteenth-Century Photographs of Japan; The Invention of Photography and Its Impact on Learning; A Curious and Ingenious Art: Reflections on Daguerreotypes at Harvard; The Human Factor: Introducing the Industrial Life Photograph Collection at Baker Library; The High Art of Photographic Advertising: The 1934 National Alliance of Art and Industry Exhibition; and At the Intersection of Science and Art: Edwin H. Land & the Polaroid Corporation, The Formative Years.

Born and raised in the Philippines, I grew up at the foothills of Mount Makiling in Los Baños, Laguna. I left tropical climes for the freezing winters of Ithaca, New York, as a graduate student, where I found refuge from the cold in the Cornell University library stacks. I moved to California for fieldwork, seeking warmer weather, but spent it instead in the chilly fog of Daly City, California. The result, at least, was a master’s and a doctorate, and the publication of my first two books, Displaying Filipinos: Photography and Colonialism in Early 20th-Century Philippines (University of the Philippines Press, 1995) and Pinoy Capital: The Filipino Nation in Daly City (Temple University Press, 2009).

After almost a decade of teaching Asian American Studies and Anthropology at San Francisco State University and other universities in the Bay Area, I’m now a former academic, managing IT projects for a living, and residing, once more, on a warmer island. My fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in Tin House online, SmokeLong Quarterly, Joyland, Atticus Review, Entropy, and the anthology Philippine Speculative Fiction Volume 7. I’m currently writing a crime novel set in Manila.