Cathy Kaufman is a trained chef and food historian with extensive experience in the food world in New York and beyond. After working as an attorney in New York for more than a decade, Cathy gained multiple degrees in cooking from Peter Kump's New York Cooking School and the School for American Chefs at Beringer Vineyards, California. She has worked in catering and restaurants in New York, and has been on the faculty at the Institute of Culinary Education. Since the late 1990s, she has written and taught extensively on the history of cuisine, including numerous articles for the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery. She is senior editor of the <i>Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America</i> and author of the recently published <i>Cooking in Ancient Civilizations</i> (Greenwood Press).

Matico Josephson has been a student of New York's built environment for as long as he can remember, and an explorer of the city's nooks and crannies for even longer. His curiosity has found an outlet in the History of Architecture, in which he has recently been pursuing a Ph.D. at NYU's Institute of Fine Arts. He will prepare a dissertation on modern architecture in Spain.

Allison holds a Ph.D. in History of Art from Bryn Mawr College. Her specialty is Florentine visual culture and, within that broad theme, portraiture and representations of the body. She is the editor of Widowhood and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe (2003), winner of the Society of Early Modern Women Book Award; and author of Re-membering Masculinity in Early Modern Florence: Widowed Bodies, Mourning and Portraiture (2006). Her third book is a collection of essays on sex and sexuality in Renaissance Italy, published in Italian as Sesso nel Rinascimento (2009) and in English as Sex Acts (2010). She is currently studying the art of misbehavior. Professor Levy has taught at Bryn Mawr, Tulane University, Wheaton College in Massachusetts, and University College London. She worked for Context in Florence for several years before moving to New York.