Rita Moreno has won all four of the most prestigious awards in show business: an Oscar, a Tony, two Emmys, and a Grammy. Her countless credits span more than six decades, beginning with her Broadway debut at age 13.

Edmund de Waal is an internationally acclaimed artist and writer, best known for his large-scale installations of porcelain vessels, often created in response to collections and archives or the history of a particular place.

Frank Gehry is an architect whose career has spanned more than six decades and produced public and private buildings throughout the world. Some of his best-known designs include the Walt Disney Concert Hall, in Los Angeles; New York by Gehry, in New York City; Dancing House, in Prague; and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.

Academy Award nominee Ava DuVernay is celebrated for her work across film, television and activism. Artist Jeff Koons works with everyday objects and explores themes of self-acceptance and transcendence.

Soprano and musical statesman Renée Fleming is known as "the people's diva." Chicago-based artist and activist Theaster Gates stretches the idea of what we understand visual art to be.

Musician Cameron Carpenter smashes the stereotypes of organists and organ music. Academy Award–winning actor Goldie Hawn is a best-selling author and children's advocate. JR exhibits freely in the streets, mixing Art and Act and raising questions about freedom, identity, and limit.

Dancer Lil Buck is a master of Memphis jookin. Award–winning actor Alfre Woodard's career spans three decades; Woodard is an activist whose works to raise awareness of global poverty and AIDS and for arts education in the United States.

The multi-faceted career of world-renowned cellist, educator, and activist Yo-Yo Ma is a testament to his continual search for new ways to communicate with audiences and to his personal desire for artistic growth and renewal.

The interdisciplinary design firm (SD+R) of Elizabeth Diller is behind projects such as the High Line, Hudson Yards Culture Shed, Los Angeles's Broad museum, and the renovation of MoMA. Julie Taymor is the director of stage and screen spectaculars such as The Magic Flute, Frida, and the highest-grossing stage show in history, The Lion King.

Painter Eric Fischl is best known for his portraits that expose dark undercurrents in suburban and mainstream America. Conductor and pianist Robert Spano has served since 2001 as Music Director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and holds the same position at the Aspen Music Festival and School.

The signature works of contemporary American sculptor Guy Dill are his large-scale bronzes, which have been praised for their achievement of “meaningful monumentality.” Two-time PEN Award–winning writer Tobias Wolff is perhaps best known for his memoirs This Boy’s Life and In Pharaoh’s Army.

Chuck Close is considered one of the modern masters of portrait painting. Paralyzed in 1988 following a rare spinal artery collapse, he since then has painted using specialized devices strapped to his arms.

Before assuming directorship of the Aspen Institute Arts Program in 2011, Damian Woetzel was a Principal Dancer at New York City Ballet from 1989 until his retirement from stage in 2008.

Jessye Norman is one of the most celebrated contemporary singers of opera on the planet and the founder of the Jessye Norman School of the Arts. Stephen Wadsworth is a director of opera and theater and serves at Juilliard as the James S. Marcuse Faculty Fellow and Director of Opera Studies.

In addition to prominent roles on The West Wing and Nurse Jackie, Anna Deavere Smith is credited with creating a new form of theater that has been hailed as “a blend of theatrical art, social commentary, journalism, and intimate reverie.”