Architecture of the Air: The Sound and Light Environments of Christopher Janney (signed by artist)

Irena Mausner (née Frydman) was three-and-a-half years old when the Nazi army invaded Poland in 1939. A few weeks later, they ordered her family to vacate her family home in an elegant Warsaw neighborhood-to leave forever. Irena and her sister, Margaret, hid in a Catholic orphanage on the outskirts of Warsaw during most of the war. Their father, Roman, a soldier in the Polish army, was captured in Budapest in 1944 and taken to a German POW camp; their mother subsisted in the Warsaw Ghetto and then was sent to Ravensbrück, also in 1944.

Improbably, the entire family survived. Thanks to a note that the quick-thinking Margaret had posted to the door frame of their former family home, the Frydmans were reunited.

Surviving the Holocaust is just the beginning of Irena's remarkable story. Her memoir takes us through boarding school in London, a happy marriage to a childhood friend of her sister's, and a move to the United States. Raised in conditions of scarcity, uncertainty, and terror, Irena developed a sense of purpose and of perseverance that drove her to a life of academic and professional achievement and material success. More importantly, she absorbed the understanding of impermanence and the importance of decency-qualities that helped her appreciate a happy marriage and overcome a second round of tragedy that struck late in her life.

Irena Mausner (nee Frydman) lives in New York and East Hampton. Born in Poland, her family sent her to London after World War II, where she attended boarding school, married her sister's friend Jack Mausner, trained in dentistry, and started a family. Her family moved to New York in 1970, where she established herself as a leading prosthodontist. Today, she is (mostly) retired.

Anna Deavere Smith is an actress, playwright, teacher, and author. She is credited with having created a new form of theater. Smith's work combines the journalistic technique of interviewing her subjects with the art of interpreting their words through performance.Smith has created over fifteen one-person shows based on hundreds of interviews. Her play This Ghost of Slavery was recently featured in the Atlantic Magazine, making it one of only two plays published during the magazine's 166 year history. Other plays authored by Smith include Notes from the Field about the school to prison pipeline, Let Me Down Easy, about health care; House Arrest, about the U.S. presidency and the press; and Twilight: Los Angeles, about the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Twilight was recently named one of the best plays of the last twenty-five years by The New York Times. In 2018, HBO premiered the film version of Notes from the Field. PBS has broadcast, Fires in the Mirror, Twilight and Let Me Down Easy.President Obama awarded Smith the National Humanities Medal in 2013. She has been selected to give the 2024 Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery in Washington. She was selected in 2015 to give the Jefferson Lecture for the National Endowment for the Humanities, at the John F. Kennedy Center. Additional honors include the MacArthur Award, The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize for Achievement in the Arts, the George Polk Career Award in Journalism, the Dean's Medal from the Stanford University Medical School, Obie Awards, and two Tony nominations. She was runner up for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama.Smith is also an actress in popular culture, having been a part of such shows as Netflix's Inventing Anna, ABC's For the People and Black-ish. Previously, she appeared in Nurse Jackie and The West Wing. Films include The American President, Philadelphia, Ghosted and Rachel Getting Married.She has several honorary degrees including those from Oxford, Harvard, Yale, University of Pennsylvania, Spelman, Dartmouth, Prairie View University and Bard College.