Anna Wolak, editor of What We Do Here Is Magic, was born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1985 and was raised in Wilkinson, Indiana. She was awarded a Lilly Endowment Scholarship in 2003 and she earned her B.A. in English, with a concentration in creative writing, from Butler University in Indianapolis in 2007. There, she studied under Andrew Levy, Dan Barden, Jason Goldsmith, and Hilene Flanzbaum. In 2011, she completed her M.A. in new arts journalism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she studied under Lewis Kostiner and James Elkins. Professionally, she focuses on adoption photography and writing and she has worked with various nonprofits and publications. She is the Vice President of Communications for the Lilly Scholars Network and the youngest member on the Board of Directors for the Indiana Association on Adoption and Child Care Services.

Lewis Kostiner was born in Montréal, Québec, Canada, in 1950 and was raised in Montréal before his family moved to Westbury, Long Island, in 1962. He earned his B.A. in liberal arts, with an emphasis in photography and creative writing, at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, where he also studied at the Rhode Island School of Design with Aaron Siskind, Harry Callahan, and Emmit Gowen. He completed his M.S. in photography at the Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, where he studied with Arthur Siegel, Garry Winogrand, and Geoff Winningham. After he left Brown, he assisted Aaron Siskind for many years and traveled with him worldwide. From 1973 to 1981 he was an adjunct professor of photography at Columbia College Chicago, and from 2008 to 2012, he was a faculty member in the Department of Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His photographs are in the permanent collections of, and have been exhibited at, the Art Institute of Chicago, Center for Creative Photography, Museum of Contemporary Photography, and Museum of Modern Art, among many others. Lewis is married to Anne Neri Kostiner, and they have two daughters, Rickie and Tess.