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“‘Architecture is frozen music.’…There is something about when you’re exploring not knowing exactly where it’s going to go or how it’s going to turn out which creates an element of surprise and an element of intrigue.” Michael Daugherty is one of the ten most performed living American composers. Recordings of his pieces Metropolis, Deus ex Machina and Tales of Hemmingway have earned him a total of...

Michael Daugherty is one of the ten most performed living American composers. Recordings of his pieces Metropolis, Deus ex Machina and Tales of Hemmingway have earned him a total of 6 GRAMMY Awards, including Best Contemporary Classical Composition in 2011 and 2017. Daugherty has written music for orchestra, band, and chamber ensemble. He is currently a Professor of Composition at the University o...

“What interested me about this particular experience is that I didn’t have the language to attach to it in the way I had the language to attach to a later experience that I would have no trouble calling rape, but happened to me and I call Mark in the book. I didn’t know what to call that for the longest time, so I didn’t know what to feel about it, and so as a writer that interests me. When I don’...

Jeannie Vanasco is the author of two memoirs. Her latest, Things We Didn't Talk About When I Was a Girl , was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a TIME magazine Must-Read Book of the Year, and the 2020 winner of the Ohioana Book Award in nonfiction. Her debut, The Glass Eye , was honored as Indie Next and Indies Introduce selections by the American Booksellers Association. She lives in Baltim...

“People talk about the work life, the line between your work and your life and keeping them separate and keeping the balance. For me, it’s always been that my work defines who I am and who I am in my personal life also defines who I am at my workplace. I don’t know how you separate those identities because I take all my belief systems and who I am to my workplace.” Jenny Bhatt is a writer, literar...

Jenny Bhatt is a writer, literary translator, book critic, and the host of the Desi Books podcast. Her debut collection, Each of Us Killers , was out in 2020 and won a Foreword INDIES award in the short stories category and was a finalist in the multicultural category. Her debut literary translation, Ratno Dholi: The Best Stories of Dhumketu , was also out in 2020 and has been longlisted for the P...

“I try to preserve the Chinese music flavor. So, you imagine in Chinese band, the country music that people usually reserve for weddings or for big moments or for funerals. That kind of a feeling. Drums and music playing. I try to preserve it from my memory because what we have now is just a tune. You can probably recognize the tune, but the execution of translating that for a Western orchestra an...

Bright Sheng is a composer, conductor, and pianist. His work has been commissioned and performed by many prestigious institutions throughout the world, including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Kennedy Center, St. Petersburg Philharmonic, Hong Kong Philharmonic, and special commissions from the White House and for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. Sheng has collaborated with many distinguished artist...

“This particular exhibition definitely had to do with my close relationship to dance. I have collaborated a lot with choreographers for contemporary dance theater, and I was often advising collaborators, so we would create the tasks and the content of the choreography together. We would exchange the tasks. We would create the score and narrative together. Also, because I’m a pianist, which is a ve...

Kiriakos Spirou is an editor, writer, content creator, pianist and composer based in Athens, Greece. After studying music in his hometown of Limassol, and then musicology in Athens, he moved to The Netherlands to complete a master's course in Music Design at the Utrecht School for the Arts. He is currently the deputy editor of Yatzer.com, and works for various publications as a freelancer. He is a...

“There’s a lot of controversy about that idea at the moment, about whether fiction is truly empathic and how much freedom the imagination should have because, as one of my friends says, the imagination is not free. It comes from all of the places that we come from. So it’s a controversial notion, but I am firmly on the side of literature is empathic. In fact, I think that all the arts are empathic...

Janet Burroway is the author of plays, poetry, esssays, children’s books, and nine novels including The Buzzards; Raw Silk, Opening Nights, Cutting Stone (all Notable Books of The New York Times Book Review ), Bridge of Sand and Simone in Transit . Plays include Parts of Speech, Sweepstakes, Boomerang, and Medea With Child , which have received readings and productions in Chicago, New York, London...

“I think the most critical thing is education for critical thinking. The ability to listen to a political argument or an argument of any sort, on COVID, for example, or climate change, and not necessarily understand the science behind that, but to understand how to evaluate the credibility of the speaker, how to evaluate the logic of the arguments and to see whether a conspiracy theory is behind t...

Robert Axelrod is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Public Policy at the University of Michigan where he has taught for over 4 decades. Receiving a PH.D. at Yale in Political Science, he is best known for his work and research concerning the evolution of cooperation and political behavior into the modern age, including topics like international and cyber security. He is an award-winnin...

Benh Zeitlin is a writer, director, and composer based in New Orleans, Louisiana. His films include the four-time Oscar nominated Beasts of the Southern Wild, Wendy , and the short Glory at Sea .  He composes music for his own films and others such as Brimstone & Glory and Mediterranea .  He also works to help emerging filmmakers making 'impossible' projects through the Court 13 collecti...

“For autistic individuals, there’s really sort of two paths. There are those today, about 35% percent of 18 year olds with an autism diagnosis who do go on to college or some form of post-secondary education, and then those who don’t. Of those who don’t and want to work, there’s about a 55% unemployment rate. And those who go to college and then look for employment afterwards, there’s about a 75 t...

President and Founder of Integrate Autism Employment Advisors ("Integrate"), co-author of The Neurodivergent Job Candidate: Recruiting Autistic Professionals and An Employer’s Guide to Managing Professionals on the Autism Spectrum (2017) and frequent speaker on autism employment. Prior to founding Integrate in 2010, Ms. Scheiner held senior management positions in the financial services industry....

“In origami design, historically people have always used their intuition. They probably started by folding traditional shapes or folding designs by others, developed an intuitive understanding of how the paper behaves and then from there they can explore that intuition to create new shapes. That was the way design worked for years and years, that was the way it worked for me, but I eventually hit...

Robert J. Lang has been working with origami for over fifty years and is now recognized as one of the world’s leading masters of the art and one of the pioneers of the marriage of origami with mathematics and technology. He has consulted on applications of origami to medical devices, airbag design, and space telescopes, is the author or co-author of twenty-one books and numerous technical articles...

"When I was younger, I never really thought of living past twenty-five…I felt like I was in a movie. I thought that I was living this movie idea of things and there’d be gunshots around you. You hear it hitting the concrete, and you’re like ‘Oh, shit’. Seriously, I didn’t think of it as real life. When you’re young, the idea that I’d known people that were killed early, you go to prison. These jus...

David Tomas Martinez is the author of two collections of poetry, Hustle and Post Traumatic Hood Disorder , both from Sarabande Books. Martinez is a Pushcart winner, CantoMundo fellow, a Breadloaf Stanley P. Young Fellow, NEA poetry fellow, and NEA Big Read author. Martinez lives in Brooklyn. · davidtomasmartinez.com · www.creativeprocess.info

“To not honor that we are all creative, beautiful, interesting deep, rich individuals. We’re not zeros and ones on a spreadsheet. We’re not scientifically explained. We are not mathematically judged. We are imperfect blobs of emotion and bone and spirit and life and when we come together there is nothing greater than the chemistry and the alchemy of musical theater… There’s a joy, there’s a bounce...

Most highly noted for his stunning work in musical theater, Gavin James Creel is a Tony & Olivier Award-winning actor, singer and songwriter. On Broadway, he’s performed in shows including Throughly Modern Millie, Hair, The Book of Mormon, Waitress and Hello, Dolly!, his performance in which won him his first Tony Award. Creel is also a LGBTQ+ activist, having done much to raise awareness and figh...

“I always find it an ironic thing to think about the fact that Fred Rogers was colour-blind. He could barely tell a blue from a grey. I was young and to him I was a child and I certainly played the role of a child and he played the role of parent… He was profoundly patient.” Dr. François Clemmons is perhaps best known as Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood ’s Officer Clemmons. He made history as the first...

Dr. François Clemmons is perhaps best known as Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood ’s Officer Clemmons. He made history as the first African American actor to have a recurring role on a children’s television program. He received a Bachelor of Music degree from Oberlin College, a MFA from Carnegie Mellon University, and an honorary degree from Middlebury College. In 1973, he won a Grammy Award for a record...