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Born in Beirut in 1949, Amin Maalouf has lived in France since 1976. After studying sociology and economics, Maalouf joined the Lebanese daily An-Nahar, for which he travelled the world covering numerous events, from the fall of the Ethiopian monarchy to the last battle of Saigon. Forced to emigrate by the war in Lebanon, he settled in Paris, where he resumed journalism, and from where he started to travel again, from Mozambique to Iran and from Argentina to the Balkans. He became editor of the international edition of An-Nahar, then editor-in-chief of the weekly Jeune Afrique, before giving up all his posts to dedicate himself to literature. (more…)

Luca Mendoza (17) a junior at Crossroads School, studies Jazz piano with Alan Pasqua, classical piano with Rina Dokshitsky and plays in Lee Secard’s Colburn Jazz ensembles and Evan Avery’s Crossroads A Band. Luca is the 2016 National YoungArts Finalist for Jazz piano and Merit Jazz composition winner. Also this year, Luca won the Jazz performance LA Music Center Spotlight Award after being the Honorable Mention Spotlight recipient in 2015. He received an Outstanding Solo Award at the Monterey NextGen Jazz Festival and four Downbeat Magazine Student Music Awards for composition. He has been chosen for the 2016 Monterey NextGen Jazz Orchestra, and was a participant in the Vail Jazz Workshop and Brubeck Jazz Colony. Luca has also been a part of the Colburn Musical Encounters for five years, fostering music education throughout Los Angeles inner city schools. His other awards include first or honorable mentions in the Southwest Youth Music Festival and Glendale classical competitions as well as a solo award and first place in the Fullerton Jazz Festival. He has also recently performed at the Panama Jazz Festival and chamber music with the Elizabeth Mandell Music Institute during a live radio broadcast.

Andrew Moses (17) is a composer and clarinetist from Los Angeles. Hailed at age 13 as “an artist to watch” and “a musician of enormous talent”, his compositions have been performed, premiered, and read by groups such as the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Calder Quartet, and the Argus Quartet. Andrew has been a Composer Fellow with LA Phil since 2013, and continues in 2016-2017 as an LA Phil Senior Fellow. His chamber works have been performed in concert as part of the 2015 Hear Now Festival of New Music in Los Angeles, by wild Up at the Regent Theater as part of the LA Phil’s “Next on Grand” Festival, as part of the Yellow Barn Young Artists Program in Vermont, and in readings by the Los Angeles Master Chorale and Los Angeles Philharmonic Chamber Ensembles. The LA Phil premiered two short symphonic works of his at Walt Disney Concert Hall in the past two seasons. Upcoming projects include a commission by the LA Phil for their groundbreaking Green Umbrella new music series to be premiered in October and conducted by John Adams. He has participated in masterclasses with composers such as Kaija Saariaho, John Corigliano, Magnus Lindberg, Christopher Theofanidis, and Esa-Pekka Salonen; and he is currently a student of Andrew Norman. As a clarinet student of Dr. Margaret Thornhill, Andrew made his solo New York City recital debut last year at the home of Charles and Susan Avery Fischer as part of iPalpiti Musicales. He has been featured twice on From the Top on NPR and is a recipient of From the Top’s Jack Kent Cooke Young Artist Award. He was a winner of the 2014 Young Musicians Foundation National Debut Concerto Competition, the Torrance Symphony Orchestra Concerto Competition, the Beverly Hills Auditions, and the Midland National Young Artist Competition. Andrew has thrice participated in the Yellow Barn Young Artists Festival in Vermont; and he is a Junior of iPalpiti Artists International. Andrew has appeared as a concerto soloist with several area orchestras, having performed as concerto soloist in the Walt Disney Concert Hall at the age of 11. Committed to serving the community through Arts Leadership Initiatives, the California Senate joined in recognizing his contributions to the local arts and presented Andrew with the “Making a Difference Award”. In his spare time, he enjoys taekwondo (he is a third degree black belt), poetry, and his community of faith.

Pauline Oliveros, composer, performer and humanitarian is an important pioneer in American Music. Acclaimed internationally, for four decades she has explored sound — forging new ground for herself and others.

Through improvisation, electronic music, ritual, teaching and meditation she has created a body of work with such breadth of vision that it profoundly effects those who experience it and eludes many who try to write about it. (more…)

Claudia Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry including Citizen: An American Lyric and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely; two plays including Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue; numerous video collaborations, and is the editor of several anthologies including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind.For her book Citizen, Rankine won both the PEN Open Book Award and the Pen Literary Award, the NAACP Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Citizen was the first book ever to be named a finalist in both the poetry and criticism categories and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Citizen also holds the distinction of being the only poetry book to be a New York Times bestseller in the nonfiction category.

Among her numerous awards and honors, Rankine is the recipient of the Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize and fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts. She lives in California and is the Aerol Arnold Chair in the University of Southern California English Department.

Kaija Saariaho is a prominent member of a group of Finnish composers and performers who are now, in mid-career, making a worldwide impact. Born in Helsinki in 1952, she studied at the Sibelius Academy there with the pioneering modernist Paavo Heininen and, with Magnus Lindberg and others, she founded the progressive ‘Ears Open’ group. She continued her studies in Freiburg with Brian Ferneyhough and Klaus Huber, at the Darmstadt summer courses, and, from 1982, at the IRCAM research institute in Paris – the city which has been most of the time her home ever since. (more…)

Christine Southworth (b. 1978) is a composer and video artist based in Lexington, Massachusetts, dedicated to creating art born from a cross-pollination of sonic and visual ideas. Inspired by intersections of technology and art, nature and machines, and musics from cultures around the world, her music employs sounds from man and nature, from Van de Graaff Generators to honeybees, Balinese gamelan to seismic data from volcanoes.

Southworth received a B.S. from MIT in 2002 in mathematics and an M.A. in Computer Music & Multimedia Composition from Brown University in 2006. In 2003 she co-founded Ensemble Robot, a collaborative of artists and engineers that design and build musical robots. She is the general manager of the MIT-based Gamelan Galak Tika, and has composed several pieces for the group and performed at venues including Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, EMPAC, the Cleveland Museum of Art, several Bang on a Can Marathons, and the Bali International Arts Festival. (more…)