Dr Chris Smith, consultant virologist at Cambridge University and one of BBC Radio 5 Live's Naked Scientists, is back, with the latest info on COVID-19, and practical advice to help us manage the risks associated with it. Among the subjects up for discussion: how effective are travel bans as a way of containing the virus, why Italy has been so hard hit, why children don't seem to be getting sick, and the influence of the weather on its future spread.

Actor, playwright and painter Carl Bland wrote and co-directed Mr Red Light, a comic story about a bank robbery that goes wrong (so badly wrong in fact that the would-be robber ends up taking hostages in a pie shop!)

Rajorshi (Raj) Chakraborti is an Indian-born novelist, essayist and short story writer. He has also lived and studied in Canada, England and Scotland, and now lives with his family in Wellington.

Taking the conventional wedding rom com and giving it a First Nations twist, Australia's ILBIJERRI Theatre Company and New Zealand's Te Rehia Theatre Company bring cultures together in Black Ties.

Irish director and choreographer Michael Keegan-Dolan (aka Micháel MacAodhagáin-O'Dobhailen) was last seen at the festival in 2018 with a production of Swan Lake. He returns with the Teac Da sa production of MÁM which was Inspired by a community hall and features an onstage band accompanying 12 tireless dancers.

Oscar-winning songwriter, and one half of world-conquering comedy folk duo Flight of the Conchords, Bret McKenzie is also one of this year's Festival of The Arts' curators. He's assembled an eclectic, family friendly mix of music and comedy that pairs international acts with local artists.

American artist and musician Laurie Anderson is one of the curators of this year's NZ Festival of the Arts. Anderson tells Kim Hill she feels unchanged by the decades that've passed since she performed at the 1986 NZ Festival of the Arts.

Serhii Plokhy is a professor of history at Harvard University. His 2018 book Chernobyl: History of A Tragedy tells the story of the nuclear accident that occurred on Saturday 26 April 1986, at the No. 4 nuclear reactor in the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, near the city of Pripyat in what is now Ukraine.

Damian Barr is an award-winning Scottish writer whose 2013 coming of age memoir Maggie & Me (about growing up gay in Thatcher-era Scotland), was The Sunday Times' Memoir of the Year.

Peter Sellars is an American theatre director, noted for his unique contemporary stagings of classical and contemporary operas and plays. Sellars is professor at UCLA, where he teaches Art as Social Action and Art as Moral Action. He is directing the rarely staged opera Kopernikus (by the Québécois composer Claude Vivier) at the New Zealand Festival of The Arts. He is also directing a choral work Lagrime di San Pietro at the Auckland Arts Festival