Described by The Strad as a 'virtuoso with a truly Romantic temperament', Yuri Zhislin has performed with the Oxford Philharmonic, the BBC Concert Orchestra, the London Mozart Players, the Lithuanian State Symphony and the Santiago de Chile Symphony, to name a few. Yury is a professor of violin and viola at the Royal College of Music in London.

A winner of several prizes and competitions as a soloist, Evgenia Epshtein was a co-founder of the Aviv string quartet which won the 3rd Melbourne International Chamber Music Competition, the Bordeaux String Quartet Competition and the Charles Hennen Music competition as well as other top prizes and was proclaimed as the “Best young ensemble” by the Culture Ministries of Germany and Israel.

Winner of many international competitions, including Johannes Brahms chamber music competition, Mikhail Rudoy connected his musical career with chamber music and string quartet.

Alexey Steblev is sharing several careers as a cellist, composer, conductor, and entrepreneur.
Playing most of his life in string quartets (Talan Quartet and New Russian Quartet) and being a soloist of Moscow Virtuosi chamber orchestra, Alexey has performed in most of the important halls throughout the world.
Alexey has composed music for several films, his "Moviemusic for String Quartet" was released at the NRQ album at the "Melodiya" label.

In his work, he combines unorthodox approaches to creating interactive videos and light installations using game engines and real-time simulations.
The main themes of his work are the diffusion of the digital and the real, the transmission of spiritual and mystical worldviews into the computer age, and the eschatology of technological progress.

Ivan Krastev is the chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies and Albert Hirschman Permanent Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences, IWM Vienna. He is a founding board member of the European Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the Board of Trustees of The International Crisis Group and member of the Board of Directors of GLOBSEC. He is a Financial Times contributing editor and the author of "Is it Tomorrow, Yet? How the Pandemic Changes Europe" (Allen Lane/Penguin, 2020); The Light that Failed: A Reckoning (Allen Lane/Penguin, 2019), co-authored with Stephen Holmes - won the 30th Annual Lionel Gelber Prize; “After Europe” (UPenn Press, 2017); “Democracy Disrupted. The Global Politics on Protest” (UPenn Press, 2014) and “In Mistrust We Trust: Can Democracy Survive When We Don't Trust Our Leaders?” (TED Books, 2013).

Prof Sir Konstantin ‘Kostya’ Novoselov FRS (1974) was educated as a physicist first in Russia and then in the Netherlands (PhD in 2004), before he settled in the United Kingdom. He also received a formal education in Chinese art, working in the studio of Zheng Shenglong (Xiamen University, China). His background in Physics links nicely with the traditional Chinese art, both following reductionism approach. Also interested in modern art, he collaborated with a number of artists, including Cornelia Parker and Mary Griffiths. In his artwork Kostya uses novel approaches and materials. He expanded the range of topics far beyond the traditional Chinese ones, producing a novel, refreshing view on many subjects. Also, he introduced the use of graphene ink (the work he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010, jointly with Prof. Sir Andre Geim FRS) in his painting. Together with the inks based on other two-dimensional materials such media strongly expands the expressiveness and functionality of his artwork. Following Hofstadter’s idea, Kostya is fascinated with the concept of strange loops, which can be traced throughout many of his works. Kostya Novoselov was knighted in the 2012 New Year Honours.