Hiroko Tamano, protégé of Butoh founder Hijikata Tatsumi, and her husband Koichi Tamano are responsible for introducing the Butoh dance form to the western United States. They have performed at venues internationally and joined Kitaro on his world tour.

Eva Soltes received decades-long dance and music training from the legendary Bharatanatyam master T. Balasaraswati and her family. She is a faculty member of the Balasaraswati Performing Arts Institute in Chennai, India and founder/director of Harrison House Music, Arts & Ecology.

The Chia Café Collective is dedicated to protecting, restoring and advocating for California native plant communities and environments. They believe in a way of life connected to honoring and building reciprocal relationships between the natural environment and the indigenous people of southern California. The Chia Café Collective’s cookbook Cooking the Native Way invites us to experience the Native American cultures of Southern California through their foods.

Lou Harrison (1917-2003) was one of the most unconventional and visionary composers of the 20th Century. In addition to being an important contributor to the American Music pantheon, Harrison was an accomplished poet although lesser-known for his writing. Harrison’s unbounded thinking blossomed into the creation of a profound body of work that dissolved ethnic boundaries. Well into his 80’s Harrison continued to explore new art forms and realized his long-time dream of building a straw bale house in the desert.

Dylan Mattingly is the founding executive and co-artistic director of the new music performance group Contemporaneous. Mattingly’s commissions include works for the L.A Philharmonic, the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, the Berkeley Symphony, the Del Sol String Quartet, John Adams, Marin Alsop, and Sarah Cahill. He was awarded the prestigious Charles Ives Scholarship by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Ezra Laderman Prize and the Philip Francis Nelson Prize. Mattingly graduated from The Yale School of Music, where he studied with David Lang, Martin Bresnick, and Christopher Theofanidis, and is mentored by composer John Adams. Thomas Bartscherer has collaborated with Contemporaneous on two previous projects including the narration for Dylan Mattingly’s The Bakkhai. He is a research associate on the Équipe Nietzsche at the Institut des Textes et Manuscrits Modernes (Paris) and is the Peter Sourian Senior Lecturer in the Humanities at Bard College.

The New York-based Duo YUMENO – koto/shamisen musician and singer Yoko Reikano Kimura and cellist Hikaru Tamaki, have been performing as a duo since 2008. Their work has been featured in the New York Times, Chamber Music America Magazine, the Japan Times, Hōgaku Journal and on NPR. Recipients of the Chamber Music America Classical Commissioning Program grant and of the Aoyaman Foundation’s Baroque Saal Award, Duo YUMENO has performed at Carnegie Hall, the John F Kennedy Center, Los Andes University, and the University of Cambridge among other prestigious venues. As a soloist, Kimura performs with numerous string quartets, chamber ensembles and chamber orchestras. Tamaki currently serves as the principal cellist of the Berkshire Opera Festival Orchestra and is a member of the Albany Symphony.

Luciano Chessa’s works have been commissioned by NYC’s Performa, the U.S Library of Congress and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Chessa’s Orchestra of Futurist Noise Intoners has toured internationally since 2009 to sold out houses including at RedCat in Los Angeles, the New World Center in Miami, Radial System/ Maerzmusik-Berliner Festspiele, the ArtScience Museum in Singapore, and Lisbon’s Municipal Theater. Chessa conducted the world premiere of Julius Eastman’s Symphony No. II at Lincoln Center, which was described by the New York Times as “radiating Cosmic Grandeur”. His work has been featured on NPR, Artforum, Frieze and Art in America among other international publications. His compositions are exclusively published by Berlin’s Verlag Neue Musik and have been released by labels Sub Rosa and Stradivarius.