Smith is a professor emeritus at Pacific Northwest College of Art where he taught painting and drawing for over twenty years. He also taught at Maryland Institute College of Art and was a visiting professor at the University of Oregon and Oregon College of Art and Craft. He received his BFA from Pacific Northwest College of Art, and his MFA from the Hoffberger School of Painting where he was a teaching assistant to Grace Hartigan. He received an honorary PhD from Pacific Northwest College of Art in 2018. In 2017 he was awarded the Oregon Governor’s Arts Award for lifetime achievement. His work is in major African American art collections in Atlanta, Baltimore, Beverly Hills, Harlem, New Jersey, Philadelphia, and Delaware. The Portland Art Museum exhibited his work in the APEX Gallery in 2016.

A retrospective of Smith's work is currently on view at the JSMA at PSU through December 2020, 2Up and 2Back II.

Leroy E. Bynum, Jr., currently resides in Portland, Oregon, having joined Portland State University as Dean of the College of Arts and Humanities this Fall. Before coming to PSU, Bynum served as the Dean of the School of Arts and Humanities at The College of Saint Rose from 2014 to 2017. Prior to that, he was a professor of voice and opera for 22 years, Chair of the Fine Arts Department from 1996 to 2006, and was the Dean of the College or Arts and Humanities from 2006 to 2014.

Bynum holds degrees from the University of Georgia, the University of South Florida, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in voice and opera performance. He has also received performance certificates from the Mozart Conservatory in Salzburg, Austria and the Berlin Conservatory in Berlin, Germany after having been awarded a Fulbright Fellowship for vocal study in Germany from 1990 to 1992.

Throughout his professional career, Bynum has remained active as a performing artist, appearing in operatic roles, as featured soloist, and in solo recitals throughout the United States, Europe, and South America. During this time, Bynum has maintained a vibrant voice studio from which numerous students have gone on to launch successful careers as performers and pedagogues. As a respected member of Georgia's community of voice teachers, Bynum was elected president of the State's chapter of the National Association of Teachers of Singing in 2013.

Lisa Jarrett is an artist and educator. She is Associate Professor of Community and Context Arts at Portland State University’s School of Art + Design. She is co-founder and co-director of KSMoCA (King School Museum of Contemporary Art) and the Harriet Tubman Center for Expanded Curatorial Practice in NE Portland, OR, and the artists collective Art 25: Art in the 25th Century. Her intersectional practice considers the politics of difference within a variety of settings including: schools, landscapes, fictions, racial imaginaries, studios, communities, museums, galleries, walls, mountains, mirrors, floors, rivers, and lenses. She exists and makes socially engaged work within the African Diaspora. She recently discovered that her primary medium is questions.