Coordinates: 40°43′20″N 73°59′36″W / 40.722239°N 73.993219°W / 40.722239; -73.993219

The New Museum, founded in 1977 by Marcia Tucker, is the only museum in New York City exclusively devoted to presenting contemporary art from around the world. The museum originally opened in a space in the Graduate Centre of the then-named New School for Social Research at 65 Fifth Avenue. The New Museum remained there until 1983, when it rented and moved to the first two and a half floors of the Astor Building in the SoHo neighborhood at 583 Broadway.

In 1999, Marcia Tucker was succeeded as director by Lisa Phillips, previously the curator of contemporary art at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Over the past five years, the New Museum has exhibited artists from Argentina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Cameroon, China, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Germany, Poland, Spain, South Africa, Turkey, and the United Kingdom among many other countries. In 2003, the New Museum formed an affiliation with Rhizome, a leading online platform for global new media art.

Kazuyo Sejima (妹島 和世, Sejima Kazuyo^?, born 1956, Ibaraki prefecture, Japan) is a Japanese architect. After studying at Japan Women's University and working in the office of Toyo Ito, in 1987 she founded Kazuyo Sejima and Associates. In 1995 she founded the Tokyo-based firm SANAA (Sejima and Nishizawa and Associates) together with her former employee Ryue Nishizawa. Sejima was appointed Director of the Architecture Sector for the Venice Biennale, which she curated for the 12th Annual International Architecture Exhibition, held in 2010. She was the first woman ever selected for this position. In 2010 she was awarded the Pritzker Prize, together with Ryue Nishizawa.

Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa have worked on several projects in Germany, France, England, the Netherlands, United States, and Spain. Many of their designs like the New Museum in the Bowery District in New York City as well as their Glass Pavilion for the Toledo Museum of Art involve glass and allowing a space to be open to the world around it. This design element can be found greatly in most of their designs.

Ryue Nishizawa (西沢 立衛, Nishizawa Ryūe^?, born 1966, Kanagawa Prefecture) is a Japanese architect based in Tokyo. He is a graduate of Yokohama National University, and is director of his own firm, Office of Ryue Nishizawa, established in 1997. In 1995, he co-founded the firm SANAA (Sejima and Nishizawa and Associates) with the architect Kazuyo Sejima. In 2010, he was awarded the Pritzker Prize, together with Sejima.

Christopher "Chris" Burden (born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1946) is an American artist working in performance, sculpture, and installation art.

Burden studied for his B.A. in visual arts, physics and architecture at Pomona College and received his MFA at the University of California, Irvine from 1969 to 1971.

Burden began to work in performance art in the early 1970s, he made a series of controversial performances in which the idea of personal danger as artistic expression was central. His most well-known act from that time is perhaps the 1971 performance piece Shoot, in which he was shot in his left arm by an assistant from a distance of about five meters. Other performances from the 1970s were Five Day Locker Piece (1971), Match Piece (1972),Deadman (1972), B.C. Mexico (1973), Fire Roll (1973), TV Hijack (1972),Doomed (1975) and Honest Labor (1979).

One of Burden’s most reproduced and cited pieces, Trans-Fixed took place on April 23, 1974 at Speedway Avenue in Venice, California. For this performance, Burden lay face up on a Volkswagen Beetle and had nails hammered into both of his hands, as if he were being crucified on the car.The car was pushed out of the garage and the engine revved for two minutes before being pushed back into the garage.

Nathalie Djurberg (born 1978 in Lysekil) is a Swedish video artist who lives and works in Berlin.

Djurberg is best known for producing claymation short films that are faux-naïve, but graphically violent and erotic. Their main characters, as described by The New York Times, "are girls or young women engaged in various kinds of vileness: from mild deception, friendly torture and oddly benign bestiality to murder and mayhem." The films are accompanied by music by Hans Berg.

Djurberg's works have been shown at Performa 2007, at Tate Britain (2007), at the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York (2006) and at the Berlin Biennial of Contemporary Art (2006). They were also featured at solo shows at the Kunsthalle Wien (2007) and at Färgfabriken in Stockholm (2006). In 2008, she exhibited both installations and films at the Fondazione Prada in Milan.