Marc De Kuyper, 11th generation of the Dutch family that produces a rainbow of popular hard-partying liqueurs, didn’t exactly have a free ride into the business. He had to get the right degrees and succeed at several other jobs first. Finally, with an impressive resume in hand, he had to go through a series of formal interviews, business exams and psychological and IQ testing at De Kuyper Royal Distillers, which was founded in 1695 and has always been run by the family.

When artist Agustina Woodgate was a kid growing up in Buenos Aires, she had a thing about tire valve stem caps. She’d go from parking lot to parking lot, plucking them off cars like they were ripe strange berries.

At the Sundance Film Festival, the eclectic artists who make up the Borscht Corporation are bringing national attention to Miami.

The director of “Seven” and “The Social Network” takes on the Stieg Larsson bestseller.

Cuban artist Tomás Sánchez, whose paintings of idealized tropical landscapes have earned him a place among the island’s most important living artists and have nabbed as much as $800,000 at auction in New York, has dabbled with photography for several years, taking point-and-shoot cameras with him as he has traversed the beaches, rain forests and mountains of Costa Rica, which has been home for more than a decade.

Andrew Carmellini, the sizzling New York chef who began making his name as he climbed through the ranks at Le Cirque and Café Boulud, has just opened a South Beach outpost of his celebrated, American-loving The Dutch.

With the release of “Breaking Dawn: Part 1,” the pop culture phenomenon can no longer be written off as kid stuff.

Thomas Kramer, the man who has been called everything from wunderkind stock trader to visionary developer to rapist to Nazi to the devil incarnate, is in the kitchen of his Star Island mansion, making open-faced Reuben sandwiches for lunch.

In late 1988, restaurateur Mark Soyka helped tip South Beach toward its future when he opened News Café on Ocean Drive. It was a casual, Euro-style joint with sidewalk seating and international newspapers for sale. And as the fashion industry stepped up its invasion, a growing roster of jet-setting regulars gathered there.

Developer Craig Robins, a force behind the transformation of South Beach from sketchy retirement village to world-class tourism hot spot, peered across the causeway in the mid 1990s and saw another plum.

Good luck coaxing Vagia Theodorou to come out of the kitchen at Egg & Dart, the Design District’s newest hip eatery. She’s a strange bird in a neighborhood filling up with star chefs and wannabes, all of them happy to drop their saucepans at the first mention of a photo opp.

For the sake of a photo shoot, singer Nicolle Chirino offers to climb onto the pool table at her family’s sprawling home in Miami’s Bay Point neighborhood.

The bar at the Lords Hotel on Collins Avenue near 11th Street is done up in gaudy gold, a campy tribute to the women of Miami. Many of the guest rooms feature huge portraits of Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra drag. There’s a giant polar bear towering over the lobby, but he’s hardly scary. How can he be when he’s striking a pose with a big vinyl beach ball between his paws?