Renate Schlesier, Professor of Religious Studies at Freie Universität Berlin, until her retirement in 2017 directed research projects on ritual and cultural anthropological aspects of play, the relationship between aesthetic and religious experience, ancient Greek theatre, and the god Dionysus in modern literature and religious history. She studied general rhetoric, philosophy, classical philology and archaeology, art history, Romance studies and religious studies in Tübingen, Paris and Berlin. Her research interests, which focus on specific transformations of culture, literature, visual art and religion, range from antiquity to modernity. She has been a visiting professor in France, Israel, Italy, Japan, Canada, Switzerland, and the United States, as well as at the Munich Centre for Ancient Worlds in 2017/18.

Falk Kiefer, born in 1969, received his doctorate after studying medicine at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. He completed his psychiatric-psychotherapeutic specialist training at the University Hospital Hamburg-Eppendorf, where he also habilitated in 2004. In 2005 he accepted a professorship for psychiatry and psychotherapy at the University of Heidelberg, and in 2014 he took over the chair for addiction research, which is associated with the position of Medical Director of the Clinic for Addictive Behavior and Addiction Medicine at the Central Institute for Mental Health (ZI) in Mannheim. Prof. Kiefer is President-elect of the German Society for Addiction Research and Therapy (DG-Sucht), board member of the German Addiction Foundation and editor of the journal "European Addiction Research." His research focuses on the aetiopathogenesis, diagnosis, and therapy of addictions.