The people behind the craft

Mitsuharu Tsumura

Chef & Owner, Maido

Chef and owner of Maido in Lima, Peru. Maido was ranked #1 in The World's 50 Best Restaurants in 2025 and is renowned for its Nikkei cuisine blending Peruvian and Japanese traditions.

Mónica Oropeza

Restaurant Director

Joined Quintonil in 2018 and is responsible for connecting different parts of the project, ensuring attention to detail and bringing Chef Vallejo's vision to life.

Nadia Santini

Italian Cuisine

Self-taught chef of three-Michelin-star Dal Pescatore in Lombardy, named World's Best Female Chef in 2013.

Naoto Fukasawa

Industrial Design

Coined 'design dissolving in behaviour' and created MUJI's wall-mounted CD player, an icon of intuitive product design.

Nikola Tesla

Electrical Engineering — historical

Pioneered the alternating-current system that became the global standard for electrical power transmission.

Nile Rodgers

Producer / Guitarist

As Chic's guitarist and a producer, defined a rhythm-guitar language behind disco, then Bowie's 'Let's Dance' and Daft Punk's 'Get Lucky'.

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan

Qawwali / Vocals — historical

Pakistani qawwal whose staggering vocal range and improvisation brought centuries-old Sufi devotional music to global stages and film.

Olafur Eliasson

Light / Installation

Built immersive environments of light, weather and perception, most famously Tate Modern's artificial indoor sun.

Peter Zumthor

Architecture

Designed the Therme Vals thermal baths, an exercise in atmosphere, stone, water, and light that redefined phenomenological architecture.

Pia León

Chef & Founder, Kjolle

Pia León is the chef and founder of Kjolle in Lima, Peru, ranked #9 on the World's 50 Best Restaurants in 2025. Kjolle celebrates Peruvian ingredients through a cuisine rooted in her identity and culinary research. León is also a key figure in the broader Peruvian gastronomic movement, collaborating closely with related restaurants in Lima. She has been recognized as one of Latin America's leading female chefs. Sources: World's 50 Best, Wikimedia Commons, culinary press.

Pierre Herme

Patisserie

Patissier dubbed 'the Picasso of Pastry' who reinvented the macaron as a haute-couture flavour object with his rose-lychee Ispahan.

Piet Oudolf

Landscape Design

Designed New York's High Line plantings and pioneered the New Perennial movement, which values a plant's death as much as its bloom.

Quincy Jones

Producer / Arranger — historical

Produced Michael Jackson's Thriller, the best-selling album ever, and arranged across jazz, pop and film for six decades.

Rasmus Munk

Chef and Founder

Rasmus Munk is chef and founder of Alchemist, the Copenhagen restaurant ranked among the world's most innovative dining establishments, known for its radical approach to gastronomy and immersive storytelling on a plate.

Rei Kawakubo

Fashion Design

Founded Comme des Garcons and upended Western fashion with deconstructed, asymmetric, deliberately 'imperfect' clothing.

Rembrandt van Rijn

Painting — historical

Redefined portraiture and etching through radical use of light, shadow and raw psychological presence.

Ricardo Legorreta

Architecture — historical

Extended Barragan's chromatic, wall-and-light vocabulary to a monumental civic scale across Mexico and beyond.

Robert Moog

Synth Builder — historical

Built the first commercially viable voltage-controlled modular synthesizer, giving musicians a playable electronic instrument.

Rodolfo Guzmán

Chef & Founder, Boragó

Rodolfo Guzmán is the chef and founder of Boragó in Santiago, Chile, a restaurant dedicated to showcasing Chilean ingredients and terroir through innovative cuisine. Boragó has been ranked on the World's 50 Best Restaurants list, reaching #23 in 2025. Guzmán is known for his research into native Chilean botanicals and ingredients, positioning Boragó as a leading voice in Latin American gastronomy. Sources: World's 50 Best, Wikimedia Commons, culinary press.

Roger Deakins

Cinematography

Shot Blade Runner 2049 and 1917, mastering naturalistic light and the long-take illusion of continuous time.

Rudy Van Gelder

Recording Engineer — historical

Engineered the defining Blue Note and Prestige jazz catalog, shaping the sound of hard bop from his New Jersey studio.

Ryoji Ikeda

Audiovisual Art

Fuses raw data, sine waves and stroboscopic light into overwhelming audiovisual installations at the edge of human perception.

Sakaida Kakiemon XV

Porcelain

Fifteenth-generation head of the Kakiemon kiln in Arita, keeper of the overglaze 'akae' enamel style prized in Europe since the 1600s.

Sakichi Toyoda

Mechanical Invention — historical

Invented the automatic power loom that stopped itself on a broken thread, seeding the principles that became the Toyota Production System.

Salvatore Ferragamo

Shoemaking — historical

Engineered footwear anatomically and invented the cork wedge heel, marrying comfort with sculptural innovation.

Sandor Katz

Fermentation

Author of The Art of Fermentation, the self-taught revivalist who globalized wild kraut, miso and live-culture pickling.

Satyajit Ray

Film Direction — historical

Directed the Apu Trilogy, bringing a humanist, poetic realism to world cinema and controlling music, design, and script himself.

Saul Bass

Graphic Design — historical

Invented the modern film title sequence for Hitchcock and Preminger and designed enduring corporate logos.

Sebastiao Salgado

Photography — historical

Made vast, luminous black-and-white photo-essays on labour, migration and nature that redefined documentary photography's scale and ambition.

Sheila Hicks

Textile Art

Pioneering fibre artist whose monumental woven and wrapped installations elevated textile into globally exhibited fine art.

Shigeru Miyamoto

Game Design

Created Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda, establishing the grammar of the modern video game.

Suzanne Ciani

Synthesist / Composer

Pioneered the Buchla synthesizer in commercial sound design and quadraphonic live performance as an early female synth virtuoso.

Tadao Ando

Architecture

A self-taught former boxer who mastered board-formed concrete and light, exemplified by the Church of the Light.

Thomas Edison

Invention / Electrical — historical

Developed the first commercially practical incandescent light bulb and the systems to power it, electrifying everyday life.

Tim Wendelboe

Coffee Roasting

2004 World Barista Champion whose Oslo micro-roastery pioneered ultra-light Nordic roasting and direct farm sourcing.

Timothy Barrett

Papermaking

MacArthur 'genius' papermaker and scholar who revived Japanese washi and historical European hand-papermaking techniques.

Toshiko Takaezu

Ceramics — historical

Hawaiian-American ceramicist who pioneered the closed, sculptural 'moon' form, sealing rattling clay beads inside her pots.

Trevor Horn

Producer

Produced the maximalist studio sound of the 1980s, from 'Video Killed the Radio Star' to Frankie Goes to Hollywood and ABC.

Ub Iwerks

Animation / Engineering — historical

Animated the first Mickey Mouse cartoons and later engineered the optical printing and effects techniques that transformed film compositing.

Vicente Flores

Sous Chef

Culinary knowledge gained from experiences across Mexico, including working with renowned chefs and learning traditional techniques in Oaxacan villages.

Victor Arguinzoniz

Chef & Founder, Asador Etxebarri

Victor Arguinzoniz is the owner and chef of Asador Etxebarri in Atxondo, Spain, a village in the Basque Country. He cooks everything over a grill, giving even dessert a distinctive smoky, fire-kissed taste. He taught himself to cook and built his own kitchen with manual grilling contraptions using multiple types of wood. Born and raised in the same village as the restaurant, he worked in a flag factory for many years before buying the restaurant with his father and uncle. Source: Wikipedia (Asador Etxebarri restaurant page)

Walt Disney

Animation — historical

Produced the first full-length animated feature, Snow White, and drove the multiplane camera and synchronized sound in animation.

Warren MacKenzie

Ceramics — historical

Leach- and Hamada-trained potter who championed affordable, everyday functional 'mingei' pottery across America.

William Kentridge

Drawing / Animation

South African artist known for hand-drawn charcoal animations made by erasing and redrawing a single sheet, filmed frame by frame.

Yoann Amado

Chef

Chef who crafts a cuisine freely inspired by the products of South Gironde.

Yohji Yamamoto

Fashion Design

Built a poetic, oversized, predominantly black aesthetic that rejected body-conscious fashion and redefined draping.

Yves Behar

Industrial Design

Designed the One Laptop Per Child XO and Jawbone products, fusing social mission with consumer industrial design.

Zaha Hadid

Architecture — historical

The first woman to win the Pritzker Prize, she pioneered parametric, fluid forms once dismissed as unbuildable.

Zuzana Licko

Type Design

Co-founded Emigre and designed pioneering digital typefaces that legitimized the coarse Macintosh screen as a design tool.

Third-generation head of Poilane bakery in Paris, guardian of the wood-fired two-kilo sourdough miche shipped worldwide.

Arnaud Donckele (born March 29, 1977, Rouen) is a French chef who currently runs two Michelin 3-star restaurants: La Vague d'Or at Cheval Blanc St-Tropez and Plénitude at Cheval Blanc Paris. Named Gault & Millau's Chef of the Year in 2020, Donckele grew up surrounded by charcutiers-traiteurs and trained at École Ferrandi before rising to become one of France's most decorated chefs.

Co-founder of Tartine Bakery in San Francisco whose country loaf and book Tartine Bread reset the global naturally-leavened standard.

Daniel Calvert is the Executive Chef of Sézanne, the French restaurant located on the 7th floor of Four Seasons Hotel Tokyo at Marunouchi. Having lived and worked across several of the world's culinary capitals, Daniel brings an open-minded approach and a willingness to embrace versatile cultural influences and ingredients to his cooking. Sézanne holds two Michelin stars and was named the best restaurant in Japan by Asia's 50 Best Restaurants 2024.

Meilleur Ouvrier de France sommelier who curates a diverse wine selection.

Award-winning fine binder and conservator known for design bindings and for teaching hand bookbinding internationally.

Renowned chef known for his innovative approach to Indian cuisine.

Tenth-generation head of Kyoto's 285-year-old Kondaya Genbei, reviving rare silk and obi-weaving techniques for the modern kimono.

Vancouver chef credited with inventing the inside-out 'BC roll' and the format that seeded the California roll for Western diners.

Ginza bartender behind Bar High Five, global ambassador of the Japanese hard shake and hand-cut diamond ice.

Founder of Visvim, fusing Japanese natural-indigo dyeing and traditional craft with cult-status handmade footwear and denim.