Steven Seegel Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at The University of Texas, Austin.

Steven is the author of Map Men: Transnational Lives and Deaths of Geographers in the Making of East Central Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Ukraine under Western Eyes (Harvard University Press, 2013), and Mapping Europe's Borderlands: Russian Cartography in the Age of Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2012). He has been a contributor to the fourth and fifth volumes of Chicago's international history of cartography series, and has translated over 300 entries from Russian and Polish for the US Holocaust Memorial Museum's Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945, in multiple volumes, published jointly by USHMM and Indiana University Press. Professor Seegel is a former director at Harvard University of the Ukrainian Research Institute's summer exchange program. You can find him active on Twitter @steven_seegel and currently as the host of author-feature podcast interviews on the popular New Books Network.

Dr. Frederick H. White Professor of Russian and Integrated Studies at Utah Valley University.

He has published six books and more than thirty academic articles on Russian literature, film and culture. He is one of the leading specialists on the writer Leonid Andreev and has published in the areas of Russian Modernism, psychiatry and literature in the Russian fin de siècle, the economics of culture and post-Soviet cinema, with a specific interest in the filmmaker Aleksei Balabanov.

Dmytro Kushneruk  Consul General of Ukraine in San Francisco

Dmytro was appointed Consul General of Ukraine in San Francisco in July 2020. Consul General of Ukraine in San Francisco (consular district including Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington, Wyoming).

Mr. Kushneruk graduated and received his masters degree in international law from the Institute of international relations of Kyiv National Taras Shevchenko University and from Odessa National Law Academy.  In 2012-2014, Mr. Kushneruk was posted as Counsellor at the Permanent Mission of Ukraine to the United Nations in New York. In 2014-2020, Mr. Kushneruk served as Deputy Chief of Protocol to the President of Ukraine. Mr. Kushneruk holds diplomatic rank of Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Envoy of the First Class.

Juan Carlos Sanchez Alonso Consulate General of Spain in Los Angeles

Juan Carlos is a senior Spanish diplomat, who has served as Ambassador of Spain to Peru and Consul General of Spain in Santiago de Chile and held other posts in the Spanish Diplomatic Missions of Venezuela and Argentina. He has held several positions in the Foreign Affairs Ministry in Madrid as Vocal Advisor of Inter-American Affairs, Deputy Director for Countries of the Andean Community, Cabinet Director of the Secretary of State for Latin America and Director General of Foreign Policy for Latin America. He graduated from the University of Oviedo with a Law Degree in 1984 and entered Spain's Diplomatic Corps in 1991.

Mr. Ryan Guirlinger, Political Unit Chief in the Office of Easter European Affairs at the US Department of State