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MIMI STERN-WOLFE In 1989, a series of 'Composers of the Holocaust' concerts which offered the music of lost Terezin and Eastern European composers to audiences and culminated in the CD Recording Composers of the Holocaust (1990). In 1990 she began the annual Benson AIDS Series in order to honour the memory of her friend Eric Benson and to perform (and often premiere) the works of composers afflicted with or lost to HIV/AIDS. In 1995, the concert was performed at Tully Hall and recorded for the CD release Sudden Sunsets : Highlights from the Benson AIDS Series (1996). To date, Mimi has received the New York Mayor's only Very Special Arts Award in Music for her "exceptional contribution to the arts and multicultural life of New York City." Mimi continues to perform concerts regularly on the Lower East Side. Please consider visiting Mimi's website and donating in order that she can continue to present these works in concert. GILLES DENIZOT Gilles Denizot is also the founder and General Director of OperaLab, and provides vocal tuition to talented young professionals. He recently adapted and directed three different productions of Carmen in Greece, and is working on Britten's Curlew River for Newcastle Area Chamber Opera (England). MARSHALL COID Marshall has been an Artist-in Residence with New York's Ensemble for Early Music at St. John the Divine and taught at Columbia University on their adjunct Music Faculty for two decades. His solo credits include live television broadcasts from Lincoln Center and The Kennedy Center as well as appearances at such prestigious venues as The United Nations, Library of Congress, Metropolitan Museum of Art, MOMA, The Morgan Library, The Smithsonian Museum in DC, The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, The Cloisters, Lincoln Center Great Performers, Spoleto Festival, New York Shakespeare Festival, and The International Performers Festival (Belgium). He has created roles in several premiere productions recently with The Center for Contemporary Opera in NYC and has sung the role of the Roasting Swan in "Carmina Burana" seven times to date. His many diverse Broadway credits include occasionally playing the violin on the high wire as the White-faced Clown in the original production of "Barnum.' Marshall's "Whitman Cantata" won the Dessoff Choirs 75th Anniversary Invitational Composers Competition and was premiered at Alice Tully Hall in Lincoln Center, May 2000. ROBERT KOGAN PERRY BRASS Poet Perry Brass appears in the film to read 'The Disappeance of Light'. Perry is also the librettist for the 5 song cycle 'All The Way Through Evening', composed by Chris DeBlasio, from which the film adopts its title, and from which the concluding musical number 'Walt Whitman in 1989' is taken. Hailing from Savannah, GA, Perry identified himself as a poet, novelist, playwright, and activist and has published 16 books, winning awards for his poetry, plays, and fiction. He has also been involved in the LGBT movement since 1969, when he co-edited Come Out!, the world's first gay liberation newspaper. In 1972, he co-founded the Gay Men's Health Project Clinic, the first clinic for gay men on the East Coast, still operating as New York’s Callen-Lourde Clinic. As a librettist, he has had 62 poems set to music, and his list of collaborating composers include Chris DeBlasio, Ricky Ian Gordon, Christopher Berg, Paula Kimper, Judith Cloud, and Gerald Busby. Brass’s work often deals with that intersection of sexuality, spirituality and personal politics that came directly out of his involvement with the radical queer consciousness of the late 1960s and early 1970s. His latest book is King of Angels, a Southern-gay-Jewish coming-of-age novel set in Savannah in 1963. He is currently a coordinator of the Rainbow Book Fair, the oldest LGBT book fair in the U.S. For more information visit www.perrybrass.com. |
ROHAN SPONG Rohan Spong is an Australian born independent filmmaker who graduated with Honors from the School of Creative Arts at Melbourne University. His first feature documentary T IS FOR TEACHER (2009) charted the experience of four transgendered school teachers in the American Schools and was named by two Australian reviewers as amongst the best works to screen at Australian cinemas in 2009. His second documentary feature THE SONGS THEY SANG (2010), shot in 8 countries and 5 languages, considered the experiences and music of the persecuted Jewish inhabitants of Vilna Ghetto during the Holocaust. ALL THE WAY THROUGH EVENING (2011) is his third film and he remarks: "It's a film about a number of themes - HIV/AIDS obviously, but it also speaks of the power of music, of art as activism, of getting older, of love, of loss, and of this one very extraordinary woman who has devoted some twenty years of her life to try and keep history alive in people's minds". In addition to his documentary work, Rohan has also exhibited photographic work, has created projections for theatre, and shot and directed music videos for independent artists. Rohan has taught film production and theory at tertiary institutions in Melbourne and Los Angeles and now divides his time between in his home city of Melbourne, Australia and Brooklyn, New York.
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