Participants

Meirigah Abubakari is a lead dancer with the Ghana National Dance Ensemble. He is a master poet and musician, playing the West African fiddle, or gonje. Meirigah "reads the room" to get inspiration for his invented lyrics.

Angela Ambrosini, born in 2000, is playing nyckelharpa as her main instrument since 2012. She studied at the European Nyckelharpa Training in Italy and is now studying at the University of Music and Theatre “Felix Mendelsson Bartholdy” in Leipzig (Germany). After her first concert with Cappella Antiqua Bambergensis she has performed in several European countries with many famous international groups such as Ensemble Oni Wytars, Vox Clamantis (with whom she recorded a CD for the label ECM), La Chimera, Tiburtina Ensemble and the singer Lucilla Galeazzi. Her preferred repertoire includes early music from the middleages to - especially - baroque, but in 2015 she participated as a musician and composer at the European Grundvig-Project ENCORE where she discovered how interesting contemporary music can be when played on the nyckelharpa. 

Marco Ambrosini, born 1964, studied violin and composition at the Musical Institute "G.B.Pergolesi" in Ancona and in the Conservatory "G. Rossini" in Pesaro, Italy. In 1982 he founded, together with Peter Rabanser, the international ensemble for Early Music Oni Wytars. Marco debuted as a soloist and nyckelharpa player in the theatre "Alla Scala" in Milan, in concerts for the Royal Swedish Concert Agency, in the Alte Oper Frankfurt, Konzerthaus Vienna, in the Philharmony in Cologne, Berlin, Moscow and in the Carnegie Hall of New York. Marco participated together with Carlo Rizzo, Jean-Louis Matinier, Valentin Clastrier and Michael Riessler in numerous concerts and radio recordings of jazz music. He was chosen by the German national radio SWF as newcomer and composer for the New Jazz Meeting 1993. Marco is ECM-artist as soloist, records for SONY music with the Ensemble Oni Wytars and works as professor for Early Music and nyckelharpa in many European Music Universities.

Patricia Beaman, a longtime teacher of Western and non-Western dance at Tisch School of the Arts and Wesleyan University, is the author of the textbook, World Dance Cultures: From Ritual to Spectacle (Routledge Press, 2017). As a Baroque, Neo-Baroque, and contemporary dancer, she has performed and choreographed in the US, Europe, and beyond. This fall, she will be a Fellow at NYU’s Center for Ballet and the Arts, researching the intersection of colonialism in 18 th century French opera-ballets. www.patriciabeaman.net

Alrick Brown is Assistant Professor of Undergraduate Film and Television at NYU. An award winning writer and director, he found his medium, film, after visiting the slave castle of Elmina, in Ghana, during two years of service with the Peace Corps in Cote d'Ivoire. His cinematic reach includes credits on the small screen as director, producer and writer on a variety of projects – ABC’s Final Witness, ESPN’s short doc series Spike Lee’s Lil’ Joint, and Investigative Discoveries Emmy-Award winning series A Crime Two Remember. Alrick’s collective body of film work has earned several honors including the HBO Life Through Your Lens Emerging Filmmaker Awardfor the critically acclaimed documentary Death of Two Sons. Alrick’s first feature, Kinyarwanda, was recipient of the prestigious Sundance World Cinema Audience Award.

Amy Horowitz is interested in disputed territories in music cultures and everyday lives. Horowitz moves between academic, music industry and social justice arts networks. Her research and courses includes global indigenous studies, music in/as disputed territory, Arab Jewish popular music, arts and human rights and divided Jerusalems. She builds coalitions across differences, and against racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, homophobia and misogyny. She co-founded Roadwork and the Sisterfire Festival and was artist representative for Sweet Honey in the Rock for nineteen years. Horowitz received a Grammy Award as reissue co-producer of Anthology of American Folk Music while acting director of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. Her book Mediterranean Israeli Music and the Politics of the Aesthetic received a Jordan Schnitzer Book Award. She created “Protest Music as Responsible Citizenship” a project featuring Pete Seeger, Harry Belafonte, Bernice Johnson Reagon and Holly Near. She is senior fellow in Israel Studies at Indiana University and co-director of GALACTIC (Global Arts Language Arts Culture Tradition Indigenous Communities) with Navajo Technical University. She holds an MA in Jewish Studies from New York University and a PhD in folklore from University of Pennsylvania.

Read Amy’s article “Curatorial Conversations: Cultural Representation and the Smithsonian Folklife Festival”

Deborah Kapchan is Professor of Performance Studies at New York University. A Guggenheim fellow, she is the author of Gender on the Market: Moroccan Women and the Revoicing of Tradition (1996 Univ. of Pennsylvania Press), Traveling Spirit Masters: Moroccan Music and Trance in the Global Marketplace (2007 Wesleyan University Press), as well as numerous articles on sound, narrative and poetics. She translated and edited a volume entitled Poetic Justice: An Anthology of Moroccan Contemporary Poetry (2019 University of Texas Center for Middle Eastern Studies) and is the editor of two recent works:  Intangible Rights: Cultural Heritage in Transit (2014 University of Pennsylvania Press) and Theorizing Sound Writing (2017 Wesleyan University Press).

Ex-Sir Frank London is a Grammy-award winning trumpeter-composer and founder of the Klezmatics. His Yiddish-opera-in-a-Cuban-nightclub Hatuey Memory of Fireworkshopped in Havana in 2017 and will premiere at Peak Performances in September, 2018. His multi-art spectacle Salomé, Woman of Valorpremiered at Vancouver’s Chutzpah! Festival in March, 2018. His Glass House Orchestra recording, Jewish Music from Astro-Hungary, was nominated for three German Kritiks’ Best-of-Year 2017 awards. He has composed the folk-opera A Night In The Old Marketplace, Green Violin, Davenenfor Pilobolus Dance Theater, 1001 Voices: Symphony for a New Americaand music for Tony Kushner’s A Dybbuk, and John Sayles' The Brother From Another Planet. He has worked with John Zorn, Karen O, Itzhak Perlman, Pink Floyd, LL Cool J, Mel Tormé, Lester Bowie, LaMonte Young, They Might Be Giants, David Byrne and Robert Wilson, Jane Siberry, Ben Folds 5; is featured on over 400 CDs; and has been featured on HBO’s Sex And The City.

James Martin is an Associate Arts Professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts Dance Department. He has danced with Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane and Company, Claire Porter, Gus Solomons Jr., Donald Byrd/The Group, Jamie Cunningham and Tina Croll, Heidi Latsky, The New York Baroque Dance Company, and the Connecticut Ballet Company, among others. Mr. Martin has taught at many schools and festivals world wide, including with the Mark Morris Monnaie Dance Group in Brussels, the Ballet Academy of Stockholm, the Dansen Hus in Copenhagen, the Université du Québec à Montréal, the Bat Dor School in Tel Aviv, the National Institute of the Arts in Taiwan, the American Dance Festival, the White Mountain Dance Festival, Wesleyan University, James Madison University, Tulane University and Princeton University.

La Shaun Prescott is the Founder and Artistic Director of the dance company Elle NYTT, which now has branches in New York and Trinidad and Tobago. She holds an M.Sc. in Economics from the University of the West Indies (UWI), an MFA in Dance from Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, and is currently as Assistant Professor of Dance at the University of Trinidad and Tobago.  Her touring experience includes Europe, Canada, the USA and the Caribbean as lead dancer and choreographer with the world renowned Soca King Machel Montano for 7 years, as well as 22 states in USA with international artiste Pitbull. La Shaun has also taught Soca Dance and Caribbean Contemporary workshops in South Africa, Australia, London, Atlanta, Guadeloupe and Martinique, and has been contracted as Head Choreographer and Coach for a new dance and fitness program called SOKAFIT.

Joel I. Plummer is a professional educator and photographer whose work has focused on amplifying the voices of people that too often go unheard. He earned a B.A. in African American Studies and an M.A. in history at Rutgers University-Newark. He also completed the Rutgers Graduate School of Education's Supervisor's Endorsement program. For nearly twenty years he has taught history at the secondary level and for the past nine years, has taught in the Africana Studies department at Rutgers University. As a professional news and sports photographer, his work has been used by The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Daily Beast, Newsweek, NBC, CBS, Sports Illustrated, ESPN, and numerous international media outlets. His most recent project was a photo documentary that he created from the images he made while spending four years as a photojournalist covering the Black Lives Matter Movement (www.blacklivesmatterbook.com).

Valerie Naranjo broke the gender barrier in 1988, by playing gyil (African marimba) in Ghana’s Kobine Festival, and is the only non-West African first place winner there. Valerie has been in NBCs SNL Band for 22 years, and has performed in Broadway's Lion Kingand with Zakir Hussein, Carol King, Philip Glass, and The Paul Winter Consort.  She co-leads the African imbued multi-instrumental quintet Mandara. Drum! Magazine has named Valerie World Music Percussionist of the Yeartwice as well as Mallet Player  of the Year.  She teaches African percussion at NYU, and has performed in nine African countries, and at the 2010 Winter Olympics; The White House, The Jay Leno Show; Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, Royal Festival Hall and The Johannesburg Civic Theatre. She has  published several CDs including the series West African Music for the Marimba Soloist, and a collection of concerti for gyil and orchestra.