Anna Handler

The German-Colombian conductor and pianist Anna Handler was appointed Kapellmeister of the Deutsche Oper Berlin in 2025. Her international career has already led her to appearances with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and the Salzburg Festival. She has collaborated with distinguished artists including Kirill Petrenko, Yo-Yo Ma, and John Williams.

Handler unites conducting excellence with innovative approaches to music mediation and the intimacy of chamber music. Her work reflects a deep commitment to creating meaningful connections between music, performers, and audiences across cultures.

Daniel Leonard

Daniel Leonard is a composer, writer, and educator creating songs for children. His songs integrate jazz and poetry to support young children’s emotional development. He has performed at the Children’s Music Network Conference and the National Puppetry Conference. His honors for music, writing, and research include the Alumni Composition Prize from the Wheaton College Conservatory of Music, the Hurley Prize from the Boston University Creative Writing Program, the Robert Fitzgerald Prize in Literary Translation, and the Alice M. Brennan Humanities Award. Daniel has served as Student Artist in Residence for the University of Leuven and as a Postgraduate Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis.

Currently Daniel teaches English literature at Boston College and is a doctoral candidate in English literature at Boston University, where he researches how contemporary American authors use animals to explore relational aspects of the self. He is currently creating his first album.

Brendan Pelsue

Brendan Pelsue is a playwright, librettist, and translator. His work has premiered at venues around the country, including the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Humana Festival of New American Plays, the Westport Country Playhouse, Portland Stage, and the Alliance Theatre.

Commissions include South Coast Repertory, American Opera Projects, Westport Country Playhouse, the Alliance Theatre, and the Actors Theatre of Louisville. Brendan was the 2024 Playwright in Residence at Green College, University of British Columbia, a 2023 MacDowell Fellow, and a 2017 artist-in-residence at Chateau de la Napoule, France. He received his MFA from Yale School of Drama and his BA from Brown University. He has taught at Wesleyan and Rutgers universities, and currently teaches at Waring School in Beverly, Massachusetts.

Sandra Lim

Sandra Lim is the author of the poetry collections The Curious Thing (W.W. Norton, 2021); The Wilderness (W.W. Norton, 2014), winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize selected by Louise Glück; and Loveliest Grotesque (Kore Press, 2006). The Curious Thing will be published in a Swedish translation, En märklig sak, by Rámus Förlag in 2024.

Her honors include the 2023 Jackson Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as fellowships from MacDowell, the Getty Foundation, and the Hawthornden Foundation. Her writing has appeared widely in journals and anthologies such as The New York Review of Books, Poetry, The Baffler, The Yale Review, The New York Times, and The New Republic. She was named the 2023 Distinguished University Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where she is a Professor of English.

Sandra received her BA in English from Stanford University, her PhD in English from the University of California Berkeley, and her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She serves on the Editorial Board of Poetry Daily, a non-profit daily digital anthology of contemporary poetry. She lives in Cambridge, MA.

Stephen Spinelli

Dr. Stephen Spinelli is Assistant Professor of Choral Studies at Boston Conservatory at Berklee, serving there since 2022. Spinelli previously served as the assistant director of choral programs at Cornell University, and held visiting appointments at Thomas Jefferson University, Moravian College, Villanova University, and Syracuse University. In the Summer of 2024, he was appointed as Back Bay Chorale’s sixth Music Director.

Dr. Spinelli has sung with some of the country’s leading vocal ensembles. As a tenor with the Crossing, his credits include the 2018 Grammy Award^®–winning recording of Gavin Bryars’s The Fifth Century. Spinelli also performed with the genre-bending vocal octet Roomful of Teeth. He assisted in the production of their Grammy Award–winning debut album, which yielded the Pulitzer Prize^®–winning recording of Caroline Shaw’s Partita for Eight Voices. As a frequently engaged guest conductor, he particularly cherishes his experiences leading the Maui Chamber Orchestra and Chorus.

Spinelli is a co-founder of ONEcomposer a non-profit organization dedicated to research, publication, performance, and recording in celebration of historically excluded musical voices. ONEcomposer’s collaboration with the Philadelphia Orchestra to present the original orchestration of Florence Price’s Piano Concerto in One Movement was hailed as “a knockout” by The Philadelphia Inquirer. On July 26, 2024, ONEcomposer will release Beyond the Years, the organization’s inaugural commercial recording, featuring previously unpublished and unrecorded art songs of Florence Price as performed by soprano Karen Slack and pianist Michelle Cann. All editions, created by Dr. Spinelli from archival source material, will be published in the fall of 2024.

Spinelli was a Beinecke Library Research Fellow at Yale University from 2022–2023, where he investigated the creative partnership between Langston Hughes and Margaret Bonds. Spinelli holds degrees from Williams College, Temple University, and Northwestern University.

Christopher Trapani

Christopher Trapani earned a Bachelor’s degree from Harvard, then spent most of his twenties overseas: a year in London, working on a Master’s degree at the Royal College of Music; a year in Istanbul, studying microtonality in Ottoman music on a Fulbright grant; and seven years in Paris, where he studied with Philippe Leroux and worked at IRCAM.

Christopher earned a doctorate in 2017 from Columbia University in New York City. He is currently Assistant Professor of Electronic Music and Digital Media at Louisiana State University.

Recent commissions have come from Klangforum Wien, Ensemble Modern, and Radio France, and his works have been heard at Carnegie Hall, Southbank Centre, Wiener Konzerthaus, Ravenna Festival, and Wigmore Hall.

Christopher is a Guggenheim Fellow (2019) and a winner of the Rome Prize (2016). He has held fellowships at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Camargo Foundation, and the Bogliasco Foundation. Christopher is the winner of the 2007 Gaudeamus Prize, and has been awarded commissions from the Koussevitzky Foundation, the Fromm Foundation, the Ernst von Siemens Foundation, and Chamber Music America.

Waterlines, his debut portrait CD was released on New Focus Recordings in 2018, followed by Horizontal Drift in 2022.

Christopher splits his time between New Orleans and his European base in Palermo, Sicily.

Aaron Helgeson

Aaron Helgeson is a composer whose recent choral cycle “The Book of Never”—commissioned by the Barlow Endowment for the Grammy Award winning choir, The Crossing—combines ancient hymns from the Novgorod Codex (a medieval book of Russian psalm chant overwritten hundreds of times by an excommunicated monk in early Ukraine) with contemporary texts by writers in various states of exile.

In 2016 he received an Ohio Arts Council Award for his “Snow Requiem,” an anti-cantata based on author David Laskin’s book The Children’s Blizzard about the Homestead-era snowstorm of the same name. He is also a scholar of creativity and mental health in the arts, frequently offering workshops in creative wellness. His 2021 article “The Doppelgänger Within: How Depression Hides in the Creative Process” discusses the way creative work can lead to mental health obstacles, documenting his own depression and methods that help him manage it. He serves on the advisory board of Creatives Care, a non-profit facilitating low-cost psychological treatment for performing artists. Aaron resides in New York, serving as Associate Professor of Composition and Music Theory at Montclair State University.

Earl Lee

Winner of the 2022 Sir Georg Solti Conducting Award, Earl Lee is a renowned Korean-Canadian conductor who has captivated audiences worldwide. 2023-24 marks his second season as Music Director of the Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra and his third season as Assistant Conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which he has led in subscription concerts both at Symphony Hall and Tanglewood. Among many others, Earl has conducted the Toronto, Pittsburgh, and San Francisco Symphonies, New York and Seoul Philharmonic Orchestras and New York’s Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra and is a frequent guest conductor at North America’s top conservatories.

He studied cello at the Curtis Institute of Music and the Juilliard School and conducting at Manhattan School of Music and the New England Conservatory. He lives in New York City with his wife and their daughter.

Giselle Ty

Giselle Ty is a theater and opera director who specializes in experimental, interdisciplinary, and site-specific work. She has directed productions for Boston Lyric Opera, Houston Grand Opera (HGOco), Center for Contemporary Opera, the Peabody Essex Museum, West Edge Opera, NYU Tisch School of Drama, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Harvard University. Engagements as associate and assistant director include projects with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Tanglewood Music Festival, American Repertory Theatre, Gotham Chamber Opera, l’Opéra National de Bordeaux, and London’s Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.

Her recent staging of Erwartung transformed Schönberg and Pappenheim’s monodrama into a dance-theater piece for seven performers, and was praised as “riveting” (Opera News), “boldly revisionist”, and “superb” (San Francisco Chronicle).

Giselle studied orchestral music and art history at Northwestern University, and has trained in various theater techniques with former resident artists at the American Repertory Theatre, SITI Company, and l’École Jacques Lecoq in Paris.

Julia Adolphe

Julia Adolphe is a composer whose music is hailed as “alive with invention” (The New Yorker), “colorful, mercurial, deftly orchestrated” (The New York Times), displaying “a remarkable gift for sustaining a compelling musical narrative” (Musical America).

Her works are performed across the U.S. and abroad by renowned orchestras and ensembles such as the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Cincinnati Symphony, LA Chamber Orchestra, Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, Brooklyn Youth Chorus, Verona Quartet, soprano Hila Plitmann, and pianist Gloria Cheng, among others. Current projects include a chorus and orchestra piece for the Cincinnati Symphony, a string trio for the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and a comic opera for all ages entitled A Barrel of Laughs, A Vale of Tears, based on the novel by Jules Feiffer with libretto by Stephanie Fleischmann. Awards include a 2017 ASCAP Young Composer Award, a 2016 Lincoln Center Emerging Artist Award, a 2016 OPERA America Discovery Grant, and a 2015 Charles Ives Scholarship from the Academy of Arts and Letters. Adolphe is a native New Yorker living in Nashville.

Raja Feather Kelly

Raja Feather Kelly is a choreographer and director, and the Artistic Director of the dance-theatre-media company the feath3r theory–for which Kelly has created 16 premieres, most recently WEDNESDAY. He is also an Off-Broadway choreographer whose collaborators include Lileana Blain-Cruz, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Sarah Benson, and Michael R. Jackson. Recent works include We’re Gonna Die, Macbeth In Stride, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning productions Fairview and A Strange Loop (which also won two Tony Awards including Best Musical).

Current projects include On Sugarland, SUFFS, and Lempicka (forthcoming). His accolades include three Princess Grace Awards, an Obie Award, an Outer Critics Circle honor, a Creative Capital award, and many others.

David Cote

David Cote is a playwright, opera librettist, and theater critic based in New York City. His operas include Blind Injustice (Cincinnati Opera); Three Way (Nashville Opera and BAM); The Scarlet Ibis (Prototype Festival and Chicago Opera Theater); and 600 Square Feet (Cleveland Opera Theater). His plays include The Müch, Saint Joe, and Otherland (National Playwrights Conference finalist).

David also wrote the text for Nkeiru Okoye’s Black Lives Matter monodrama for baritone and orchestra, Invitation to a Die-In. Recordings include Blind Injustice (NAXOS), Three Way (American Modern Recordings) and In Real Life (AMR). David’s TV and theater reviews appear in The A.V. Club, Observer, 4 Columns, and American Theatre. He was the longest serving theater editor and chief drama critic of Time Out New York. He’s also the author of popular companion books about the Broadway hits Moulin Rouge! The Musical, Spring Awakening, Jersey Boys, and Wicked.