Robert Atkins is an award-winning art historian, activist, and bestselling author of ArtSpeak and ArtSpoke. From 1987 to 1997, he wrote a biweekly column on art and politics for the Village Voice. A co-founder of Visual AIDS, he is a co-editor (with Svetlana Mintcheva) of Censoring Culture: Contemporary Threats to Free Expression (The New Press). He lives in Palm Springs and San Francisco.