Lewis Hyde is a poet, essayist, translator, and cultural critic with a particular interest in the public life of the imagination. He is author of The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property and Trickster Makes This World. A MacArthur Fellow and former director of creative writing at Harvard, he is currently Richard L. Thomas Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon College and fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society

Peter Sellars is a renowned theater, opera, and festival director known for his innovative interpretations of classic works which range from Mozart, Handel, Shakespeare, and Sophocles, to the 16th-century Chinese playwright Tang Xianzu.

Dr. Maria Rosario Jackson is a senior research associate in the Metropolitan Housing and Communities Center at the Urban Institute (UI) in Washington DC and director of UI's Culture, Creativity and Communities Program. Her research focuses on urban policy, neighborhood revitalization and comprehensive community planning, the politics of race, ethnicity and gender in urban settings, and the role of arts and culture in communities. Dr. Jackson's work has appeared in academic and professional journals as well as edited volumes in the fields of urban planning, sociology, community development and the arts. Dr. Jackson has also taught graduate and undergraduate courses in social policy, planning for multiple publics, community economic development and research methods.

Clyde Casey is a visual artist and musician. He makes large movable drum sculptures and uses them to create participatory musical events. In 1988, at the corner of Wall and Boyd Streets, the site of a former gas station and parking lot, Clyde Casey created Another Planet, an outdoor cultural space, where you could find poetry, ping pong, TV, live music and jam sessions by and for people in the community, twenty-four hours a day. The spot also offered storage for belongings and free clothing. Another Planet flourished for a year, before burning down in a fire in 1989.

An LA native and artist, Manuel Compito (aka OG Man) has devoted his creative energy to spreading a self-help philosophy. His OG's N Service Association dedicates itself to uplifting the men and children of Skid Row. In 2007 OG Man launched the highly successful 3-on-3 Basketball League at Gladys Park. Other OG's N Service activities include an annual Fathers Day celebration of responsible parenting and a beautification program that brought painted trash cans to the neighborhood when the City's Sanitation Bureau failed to provide trash cans on Skid Row.

In 1970, Jeff Dietrich and Catherine Morris founded the Los Angeles Catholic Worker, a lay Catholic community of men and women which operates a free soup kitchen, hospitality house for the homeless, AIDS ministry, hospice for the dying, a newspaper, and regularly offers prophetic witness in opposition to war-making and injustice. Jeff has been active in direct service and in the development of humane services and neighborhood amenities for people living in poverty in Skid Row. The Catholic Worker's early involvement in the neighborhood has encouraged the involvement of other initiatives, including the founding of Las Familias del Pueblo and Inner City Law Center.

John Malpede directs, performs and engineers multi-event arts projects that have theatrical, installation, public art and education components. In 1985, Malpede founded the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD). LAPD 's mission is to create performances that connect lived experience to the social forces that shape the lives and communities of people living in poverty. Malpede has produced projects working with communities throughout the US and in the UK, France, The Netherlands, Belgium and Bolivia.

Malpede has received numerous awards, among them: San Francisco Art Institute's Adeline Kent Award, Durfee Sabbatical Grant, LA Theater Alliance Ovation Award, NEA, California Arts Council, City of Los Angeles' COLA Fellowship, California Community Foundation's Visual Artist Fellowship, and was a 2008-2009 fellow at MIT's Center for Advanced Visual Studies.
http://www.lapovertydept.org/

In 1999 Pete White founded LA CAN, to ensure that people living in poverty have voice, power and opinion in the decisions that impact their lives. LA CAN builds indigenous leadership within the Central City East community to address the multitude of problems faced by homeless and very low-income residents of the community, including civil rights and housing on the streets and in the hotels. LA CAN has built a broad base of informed residents that have mounted successful campaigns to defend their tenant, civil and human rights, both on the streets and in residential hotels.

http://www.cangress.org/

Jessica Catron is a cellist, vocalist, composer and educator living in Los Angeles. She received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. Her musical adventures include touring, performing, and/or recording with such notable artists as Pauline Oliveros, James Tenney, Harold Budd, Linda Ronstadt, Wilco, Dave Matthews, Devotchka, The Eels, Rebekah Jordan, and Spiritualized. In 2007, Jessica won the National A Cappella Harmony Sweepstakes as a member of the eclectic folk quartet VOCO, with whom she led community-based singing workshops throughout the US and Canada for the past five years. In addition to performance, Jessica works as a teaching artist of both voice and cello for the wonderful Harmony Project/Youth Orchestra Los Angeles (YOLA), serving hundreds of at-risk youth in Los Angeles.

http://www.myspace.com/jessicacatron

Daniel Brummel is a composer/songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, and music educator from Los Angeles. He holds a B.A. in music composition from UCLA, where he sang baritone in the concert choir under Don Neuen and studied choral composition with Paul Chihara (a former member of the Roger Wagner Chorale). As a singer with the rock bands Ozma, the Elected, and the Gowns, he has given performance tours to audiences of thousands across the United States, Japan, Italy, Austria, Slovenia, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Daniel is on the faculty at the California College of Music, where he teaches subjects such as sight-singing, songwriting, harmony, music theory, and ear training.

John Ashbery (Poet/Author) has won nearly every major American award for poetry since his second volume, Some Trees, was selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Series in 1956. Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975) received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award. Ashbery began writing about art in 1957, serving as executive editor of Art News (1965-72), and art critic for New York Magazine (1978-80) and Newsweek (1980-85). A selection of his art writings was published in 1989 as Reported Sightings.

Director's Statement: Since its publication in 1975, I've been reading John Ashbery's long poem Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, gradually encompassing its modulated proceedings and always surprised at its further depths and gorgeous highlights. The work is ostensibly a description and meditation of Francesco Parmigianino's Mannerist masterpiece, and my exploration of the poem has led me to a similar exploration of the painting.

I decided to set the poem for six voices with projected text and images, as a way of arraying its juxtapositions, embodying its tonal shifts in different voices and keeping Parmigianino's painting in view as the poem proceeds, that it might offer some further illumination of the work.

Jim Paul (Director) is a poet and writer, author of several books, including Medieval in LA and Elsewhere in the Land of Parrots. He teaches in the English Department at Hunter College in New York and is House Manager of the Ancram Opera House, where this Ashbery work was first produced in 2009.

Joan Arnold (Reader) is a teacher of yoga and the Alexander Technique with a private practice in NYC. She has written essays and features for New York Woman, American Photo, Self, New Age Journal and others. Joan is Executive Director of the Ancram Opera House.

http://www.ancramoperahouse.com/

Tom Curwen (Reader) is an award-winning staff writer and editor at the Los Angeles Times. He was editor of the Outdoors section, a writer for the features section and deputy editor of the Book Review. He has a master's degree in Creative Writing from USC and was a recipient of a 1991 Academy of American Poets prize. In 2002, he received a Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for mental health journalism.

David Kipen (Reader), author of The Schreiber Theory: A Radical Rewrite of American Film History, and translator of Cervantes' The Dialogue of the Dogs. Until January 2010, he was the Literature Director of the National Endowment of the Arts, where he directed the Big Read and the Guadalajara Book Festival initiatives. He also served from 1998 to 2005 as book critic, and before that book editor, for the San Francisco Chronicle. His introductions to the WPA Guides to Los Angeles and San Francisco are forthcoming.

Louise Steinman (Reader) is curator of the ALOUD series for the Library Foundation of Los Angeles. She is the author of two books and performed for many years with her own theater company, SO&SO&SO&SO and toured internationally with Ping Chong and the Fiji Company.

http://www.louisesteinman.com/

Beth Thielen (Technical Director) is known for her one-of-a kind artist books. She has worked as artist and educator with at-risk populations. Her work is in the Library of Congress, the Getty Museum of Art and various collections and museums.

Terry Wolverton (Reader) is author of seven books: including Embers, a novel in poems, which she is adapting as a jazz opera; Insurgent Muse: life and art at the Woman's Building, a memoir; The Labrys Reunion and Bailey's Beads, novels; and three collections of poetry. She has also edited fourteen literary anthologies, including Mischief, Caprice, and Other Poetic Strategies. She is the founder of Writers At Work, a creative writing center in Los Angeles.

http://www.terrywolverton.xbuild.com/

Alex Ross has been the music critic of The New Yorker since 1996. His work has also appeared in The New Republic, The London Review of Books, Lingua Franca, and The Guardian. From 1992 to 1996 he was a music critic at The New York Times. He has received two ASCAP-Deems Taylor Awards for music criticism, fellowships from the American Academy in Berlin and the Banff Centre, and a Letter of Distinction from the American Music Center for contributions to the field of contemporary music.

Maira Kalman is an award-winning artist, illustrator, and product designer. She has illustrated numerous covers for The New Yorker magazine and has written and illustrated more than a dozen children's books. Her articles and illustrations have appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, Interview, and many other publications. Kalman has designed products for the Museum of Modern Art under the M&Co. label, fabric for Isaac Mizrahi, accessories for Kate Spade, and sets for Mark Morris Dance Group. She currently writes a monthly illustrated blog, Principles of Uncertainty for the New York Times which can be seen on the M&Co website and is known for her illustrations accompanying the iconic English grammar text, The Elements of Style. She teaches graduate design at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

Louise Steinman is curator of ALOUD at Central Library and co-director of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities USC. She is the author of two books: The Souvenir: A Daughter Discovers Her Father's War and The Knowing Body: The Artist as Storyteller in Contemporary Performance. Her writing has appeared in Los Angeles; West Magazine; New York Times Syndicate; L.A. Weekly; Salon.com and other publications.

A native of Kazakhstan, Timur Bekbosunov is an emerging interpreter of contemporary music in America. He has made solo appearances with Los Angeles Philharmonic, Hollywood Bowl, Bang on a Can All-Stars, Israeli Opera/YAP, American Repertory Theater, Walt Disney Concert Hall, DeVotchKa band, Rosanna Gamson Dance Company, among others. Timur has worked and collaborated with many renowned composers, including Thomas Ades (Powder Her Face), Evan Ziporyn (A House in Bali, Oedipus), Anne LeBaron (Crescent City, Silent Steppe Cantata), Silvano Bussotti (Silvano Sylvano), Anthony Davis (Revolution of Forms), Gian-Carlo Menotti (Five Songs), Meyer Kupferman (In a Garden), Gil Shohat (Songs of Darkness) and Geoffrey Pope (The Stone House). He is currently recording his debut album, The Collection, and collaborating on a Total Eclipse (Kristian Hoffman) project with filmmaker Sandra Powers.
www.theoperaoftimur.com

James Conlon is Music Director of LA Opera, the Ravinia Festival, and the Cincinnati May Festival. One of today's preeminent conductors, he has cultivated a vast symphonic, operatic and choral repertoire, and developed enduring relationships with many of the world's most prestigious symphony orchestras and opera houses. He has appeared as guest conductor with virtually every major North American and European orchestra and has been a frequent guest conductor at the Metropolitan Opera for over thirty years. Conlon has devoted himself to extensive programming of works of composers whose compositions were suppressed by the Nazi regime and for his efforts received the Anti-Defamation League's Crystal Globe Award. He is the winner of two Grammy awards for conducting LA Opera's production of Weill's Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny on DVD and received France's highest distinction - the Légion d'Honneur - from then-President of the French Republic, Jacques Chirac in 2002.