David Belt is Co-founder, CEO, and Executive Chairman of Newlab. He is also the Founder and Managing Principal of Macro Sea, launched in 2009, working across real estate development with a focus on adaptive reuse to showcase new ways to think about public art and urban design problems. Macro Sea's work has appeared in the Venice Biennale (2012) and the Museum of Modern Art's Design and Violence exhibition (2015), with projects in Rome, Paris, and Berlin, and at the Nakivale Refugee Settlement, Uganda. In 2020, Belt sold his earlier company, DBI (founded in 2002), to its employees; DBI-operating at the intersection of real estate, project management, and consulting-has built more than $5 billion in projects across the US and Europe. Belt has been named one of New York City's fifty most powerful people in tech ( City & State , 2018), one of Brooklyn's one hundred most influential people ( Brooklyn Magazine , 2019), and one of the four hundred people shaping creative America ( Wallpaper Magazine , 2023 and 2024). He currently serves on the Board of OceanX Education and as Vice Chair of the Board at Pioneer Works, where he is helping lead the development of New York City's first public observatory. Mari Kussman is a Japanese American, multidisciplinary designer, writer, and filmmaker; she works across physical and digital media, as well as in fashion and product design. In her creative projects, which range from runway collections to AI-powered inspection systems, Kussman's design point of view treats ecological and living systems as central, not incidental, to the work.

Her documentary project on intersectional environmentalism, Cycles , won the Best Unscripted and Audience Awards at SeriesFest (2022). Her work has been featured in Wired , Fast Company , New York , Monocle , and other publications, and her design leadership has shaped work exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; New York Fashion Week; Tribeca Film Festival; Coachella; and more. Part of Newlab's founding team from 2016-2018, she has returned as Global Head of Creative. Joshua Jelly-Schapiro is a geographer and writer whose books include Island People (2016), Names of New York (2021), Nonstop Metropolis (2016), and, most recently, Daylight Come: Harry Belafonte and the World He Made (2026). His work appears regularly in The New York Review of Books , T he New Yorker , and The New York Time s, among many other publications. Jelly-Schapiro teaches journalism at New York University; he is Director of Publishing at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, and co-editor in chief, with Janna Levin, of Pioneer Works' Broadcast magazine.