Mark Romanek (born September 18, 1959) is an American filmmaker, whose directing work includes feature films, music videos and commercials.

He wrote and directed the critically acclaimed 2002 film One Hour Photo starring Robin Williams. His most notable music videos include "Hurt" (Johnny Cash), "Closer" (Nine Inch Nails), "Criminal" (Fiona Apple), and "Scream" (Michael & Janet Jackson). His music videos have garnered 20 MTV Video Music Awards, including Best Direction for Jay-Z's "99 Problems" in 2004. He has also won three Grammy Awards for Best Short Form Music Video — more than any other director.

Romanek was born in Chicago, Illinois. He credits seeing Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968, at the age of nine, and again during its re-release in 1973, with inspiring him to become a film director. Romanek experimented with Super 8 and 16mm film as a teenager while attending New Trier East, a progressive public high school north of Chicago that offered a four-year film production and theory program. At New Trier, Romanek studied first with Kevin Dole, a local filmmaker who was already creating a form of music video on his own in the mid-1970s; and then with Peter Kingsbury, a filmmaker who had studied with experimentalists Owen Land, John Luther Schofill and Stan Brakhage at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Both teachers had studied at SAIC and they exposed students to works by significant figures of the American avant-garde cinema such as Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, Owen Land and Paul Sharits. Romanek subsequently attended Ithaca College in Ithaca, New York, and graduated from its Roy H. Park School of Communications with a degree in cinema and photography.

Shawn Corey Carter (born December 4, 1969), better known by his stage name Jay-Z, is an American rapper, songwriter, record producer, entrepreneur, and occasional actor. He is one of the most financially successful hip hop artists and entrepreneurs in America, having a net worth of over $450 million as of 2011.He has sold approximately 50 million albums worldwide, while receiving fourteen Grammy Awards for his musical work, and numerous additional nominations. He is consistently ranked as one of the greatest rappers of all-time. He was ranked #1 by MTV in their list of The Greatest MCs of All-Time in 2006. Two of his albums, Reasonable Doubt (1996) and The Blueprint (2001) are considered landmarks in the genre with both of them being ranked in Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. Blender included the former on their 500 CDs You Must Own Before You Die.

Jay-Z co-owns the 40/40 Club, is part-owner of the NBA's Brooklyn Nets and is also the creator of the line Rocawear. He is the former CEO of Def Jam Recordings, one of the three founders of Roc-A-Fella Records, and the founder of Roc Nation. As an artist, he holds the record for most number one albums by a solo artist on the Billboard 200 with eleven. Jay-Z also has had four number ones on the Billboard Hot 100, one as lead artist.

Edward St. John Gorey (February 22, 1925 – April 15, 2000) was an American writer and artist noted for his macabre illustrated books.

Edward St. John Gorey was born in Chicago. His parents, Helen Dunham (née Garvey) and Edward Lee Gorey, divorced in 1936 when he was 11, then remarried in 1952 when he was 27. One of his stepmothers was Corinna Mura (1909–1965), a cabaret singer who had a small role in the classic film Casablanca as the woman playing the guitar while singing "La Marseillaise" at Rick's Café Américain. His father was briefly a journalist. Gorey's maternal great-grandmother, Helen St. John Garvey, was a popular 19th century greeting card writer and artist, from whom he claimed to have inherited his talents.

Gorey attended a variety of local grade schools and then the Francis W. Parker School. He spent 1944 to 1946 in the Army at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, and then attended Harvard University from 1946 to 1950, graduating in the class of 1950, where he studied French and roomed with poet Frank O'Hara.

Michael Trent Reznor (born May 17, 1965) is an American singer–songwriter, composer, and record producer. As both a vocalist and a multi-instrumentalist, Reznor has led the industrial rock project Nine Inch Nails beginning in 1988, and as of 2010 he and his wife, Mariqueen Maandig, are also members of the post-industrial band How to Destroy Angels alongside fellow composer Atticus Ross, with whom Reznor has scored two films. Reznor was previously associated with the bands Option 30, Exotic Birds, and Tapeworm, among others. Reznor left Interscope Records in 2007, and is now an independent recording artist.

Reznor began creating music early in his life, and cites his Western Pennsylvania childhood as an early influence. After being involved with a number of synthesizer-based bands in the mid-80s, Reznor gained employment at Right Track Studios in Cleveland, Ohio and began creating his own music during the studio's closing hours under the moniker Nine Inch Nails. Reznor's first release as Nine Inch Nails, Pretty Hate Machine (1989), was a commercial and critical success, and he has since released seven major studio releases. Outside of Reznor's chief project Nine Inch Nails, he has contributed to many other artists' albums, including Marilyn Manson and Saul Williams. In 1997, Reznor appeared in Time magazine's list of the year's most influential people, and in Spin magazine he was described as "the most vital artist in music."

David Bowie ( /ˈboʊ.i/ BOH-ee; born David Robert Jones on 8 January 1947) is an English musician, actor, record producer and arranger. A major figure for over four decades in the world of popular music, Bowie is widely regarded as an innovator, particularly for his work in the 1970s. He is known for his distinctive voice and the intellectual depth and eclecticism of his work.

Bowie first caught the eye and ear of the public in July 1969, when his song "Space Oddity" reached the top five of the UK Singles Chart. After a three-year period of experimentation he re-emerged in 1972 during the glam rock era with the flamboyant, androgynous alter ego Ziggy Stardust, spearheaded by the hit single "Starman" and the album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Bowie's impact at that time, as described by biographer David Buckley, "challenged the core belief of the rock music of its day" and "created perhaps the biggest cult in popular culture." The relatively short-lived Ziggy persona proved merely one facet of a career marked by continual reinvention, musical innovation and striking visual presentation.