Krista Tippett is a Peabody-award winning broadcaster, National Humanities Medalist, and New York Times bestselling author. She hosts the On Being public radio show and podcast, curates the Civil Conversations Project, and founded & leads The On Being Project, a non-profit media and public life initiative that pursues deep thinking and moral imagination, social courage and joy, towards the renewal of inner life, outer life, and life together. Krista grew up in a small town in Oklahoma, attended Brown University, worked as a journalist & diplomat in Cold War Berlin, and later received a Master of Divinity from Yale University. Her books are Speaking of Faith, Einstein’s God, and Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living. President Obama awarded Krista the National Humanities Medal at the White House for “thoughtfully delving into the mysteries of human existence. On the air and in print Ms.Tippett avoids easy answers, embracing complexity, and inviting people of every background to join her conversation about faith, ethics, and moral wisdom.”

Pádraig Ó Tuama is a poet and theologian whose work centres around themes of language, power, conflict and religion. Working fluently on the page and in public, Pádraig is a compelling poet and skilled speaker, teacher and group worker. Pádraig presents Poetry Unbound with On Being Studios and in late 2019 was named Theologian in Residence for On Being, innovating in bringing art and theology into public and civic life. From 2014-2019 he was the leader of the Corrymeela Community, Ireland’s oldest peace and reconciliation community. A profoundly engaging public speaker, Ó Tuama has worked with groups to explore story, conflict, their relationship with religion and argument, and violence. For Ó Tuama, religion, conflict, power and poetry all circle around language, that original sacrament. In the context of public theology, he takes the received form of biblical texts and explores the civic and artistic dynamics of language, narrative and impact in these stories. His latest books are In the Shelter (Broadleaf, 2021) and Borders and Belonging (Canterbury Press, 2021).

Rhiannon Giddens is an acclaimed musician who uses her art to excavate the past and reveal bold truths about our present. A MacArthur “Genius Grant” recipient, Giddens co-founded the Grammy Award-winning Carolina Chocolate Drops, and she has been nominated for six additional Grammys for her work as a soloist & collaborator. She was most recently nominated for her collaboration with multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi, there is no Other (2019). Giddens’s latest album, They’re Calling Me Home, is a twelve-track album, recorded with Turrisi in Ireland during the recent lockdown; it speaks of the longing for the comfort of home as well as the metaphorical “call home” of death, which has been a tragic reality for so many during the COVID-19 crisis. Giddens’s lifelong mission is to lift up people whose contributions to American musical history have previously been erased, and to work toward a more accurate understanding of the country’s musical origins. Pitchfork has said of her work, “few artists are so fearless and so ravenous in their exploration,” and Smithsonian Magazine calls her “an electrifying artist who brings alive the memories of forgotten predecessors, white and black.”

Joe Henry has left an indelible and unique imprint on American popular music in a career spanning more than 35 years. As a songwriter and artist, Henry is celebrated for his exploration of the human experience. A hyper-literate storyteller, by turns dark, devastating, and hopeful, he draws an author's eye for the overlooked detail across a broad swath of American musical styles — rock, jazz and blues — rendering genre modifiers useless. Henry has collaborated with many notable American artists on his own body of work, from T Bone Burnett, Daniel Lanois, and Van Dyke Parks on one side of the spectrum, to Don Cherry, Ornette Coleman, Brad Mehldau, and Bill Frisell on the other. A three-time-Grammy-winning producer, Henry has made records for Bonnie Raitt, Hugh Laurie, Lisa Hannigan, Elvis Costello, Rhiannon Giddens and Solomon Burke among many others. As a solo artist and a producer alike, Henry’s records are marked with a consistent sonic depth, attention to narrative, and emphasis on the beauty of spontaneity.

Francesco Turrisi is a Grammy nominated multi-instrumentalist who has been defined a “musical alchemist” and a “musical polyglot” by the press. He left his native Italy in 1997 to study jazz piano and early music at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague, where he obtained a Bachelor and a Master’s degree. Since 2004 he has been working successfully as a freelance musician. He has released five critically acclaimed albums as a leader and two as co-leader (Tarab — a cross boundary innovative ensemble that blends Irish and Mediterranean traditional music, and Zahr — a project that looks at connections between southern Italian traditional music and Arabic music). His latest piano solo album Northern Migrations was described as “delicate, wistful and wholly engrossing” by the Irish Times. Since 2018 Francesco has collaborated with Rhiannon Giddens on a duo project that seamlessly combines music from the Mediterranean with music from the African diaspora in the Americas.