Speaker Bios

Brooklyn Rider
The members of Brooklyn Rider have come together to form a string quartet that involves creative programming and exciting collaborations to illuminate music in new ways and invite audiences into a greater shared dialogue. All of the musicians have enjoyed diverse careers in music that have intersected with each other for over ten years. They have appeared as soloists with major symphony orchestras including the New York Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony, Israel Philharmonic and the Deutsche Oper Orchestra. In addition, they have taken part in many of the leading chamber music festivals in the United States and abroad.  As educators, they have had affiliations with such institutions as Princeton University, Harvard University, Rhode Island School of Design and Williams College. They have also been honored by an Avery Fisher Career Grant, the Kreisler Competition, the Menuhin competition, the Arts Recognition and Talent Search and the American String Teachers Association.

Brooklyn Rider is devoted to the exploration and expansion of the string quartet literature. They have worked with composers such as Chen Yi, Osvaldo Golijov, Dimitry Yanov-Yanovsky, Shirish Korde and Kayhan Kalhor and have collaborated with such diverse figures as violinist Jenny Scheinman, singer songwriter Christina Courtin, storyteller Ben Haggerty and visual artist Kevork Mourad. Last November, Brooklyn Rider helped to curate a week-long residency at National Public Radio’s Performance Today. In an effort to engage audiences in innovative ways, Brooklyn Rider often appears under the umbrella of outside initiatives begun by all four members of the group. This past summer they inaugurated the Stillwater Music Festival in Minnesota, offering performances and master classes to the surrounding community. In 2003 violinist Johnny Gandelsman created In A Circle , a series of performance events in Lower Manhattan that explore connections between music and the visual arts. Brothers Colin and Eric Jacobsen are the founders of The Knights, a chamber orchestra based in New York that has recently appeared at Long Island’s Beethoven Festival and premiered ‘Harmony’ in collaboration with composer/violinist Mark O’Connor.

Much of Brooklyn Rider’s desire to extend the borders of conventional string quartet programming has been through their involvement with Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble, a group dedicated to exploring the cultural intersections of the peoples along the ancient trade route. As members of  the ensemble, they have performed throughout the world, recorded two albums for Sony Classical, and have reached audiences through a series of educational initiatives, family concerts and media broadcasts. Brooklyn Rider has helped to develop a series of museum residencies sponsored by the Silk Road Ensemble that have taken them to the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art in New York City, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Nara National Museum in Japan which culminated in a special performance at the Todai’ji Temple, home of the world’s largest wooden Buddha statue. Through the ensemble, they have been exposed to a number of the world’s richest musical traditions in collaborations with Persian kemanche player and composer Kayhan Kalhor, Azeri vocalist Alim Qasimov and Chinese pipa virtuoso Wu Man.

The quartet’s name is inspired in part by the creations, interests and cross disciplinary visions of the Blue Rider group; an artistic association comprised of Vassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Arnold Schoenberg and Alexander Scriabin, to name a few. The group  draws additional inspiration from the exploding array of cultures and artisitic energy found in the borough of Brooklyn in New York City, a place they also call home.

Ben Cameron [ read his keynote ]
In 2006, Ben Cameron assumed his current position as Program Director, Arts at the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation in New York, NY.  In that capacity, he supervises a $15.6 million grants program focusing on organizations and artists in the theatre, contemporary dance, jazz and presenting fields.

Previously, he served for more than 8 years as the Executive Director of Theatre Communications Group (TCG), the national service organization for the American nonprofit professional theater, significantly expanding its programs, membership base and grantmaking activities.  Prior roles include his work as Senior Program Officer at the Dayton Hudson Foundation, Manager of Community Relations for Target Stores  (supervising its grantmaking program) and four years at the National Endowment for the Arts, including two as Director of the Theater Program.  A former theatre professional, frequent public speaker and arts activist, Mr. Cameron has received honorary degrees from DePaul University in Chicago and American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco, in addition to an MFA from the Yale School of Drama.

In addition to his not for profit work, he has lectured on theatre aboard the Queen Mary 2 as an Oxford Lecturer on three separate cruises, has spent 11 seasons as a panelist on the opera quiz feature on the Live from the Metropolitan broadcasts from New York, has twice ridden his bicycle from Minneapolis to Chicago to raise money for AIDS relief services, and is currently a member of the Tony Awards Nominating Committee.

Lynne Conner
Lynne Conner is a theatre historian, playwright and arts consultant. She is Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre Arts at the University of Pittsburgh, where she teaches courses in theatre and dance history and dramatic literature. Her publications include the books Pittsburgh in Stages: Two Hundred Years of Theater (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007) Spreading the Gospel of the Modern Dance: Newspaper Dance Criticism in the United States, 1850-1935 (University of Pittsburgh Press), and In the Garden of Live Flowers, co-authored with Attilio Favorini (Dramatic Publishing Company), as well as articles in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance, Crucibles of Crisis (University of Michigan Press, 1995), The International Dictionary of Modern Dance, Metamorphosis, High Performance, Theatre Studies, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Pittsburgh Magazine, the Pittsburgh Press and other journals.

As an arts consultant, her current research interests are focused on studying the history of audience behavior and psychology in order to design more effective audience enrichment programming for today’s cultural consumers. As the principal investigator for The Heinz Endowments Arts and Culture Program Arts Experience Initiative, she has been invited to lecture on the topic for the Southwest Arts Conference, Grantmakers in the Arts, Dance USA, the American Symphony Orchestra League, and the Bolz Center for Arts Administration at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She published a short essay on the subject in the Grantmakers in the Arts Reader (Winter 2004) and a chapter in Engaging Art: The Next Great Transformation of America’s Cultural Life, co-edited by William Ivey and Steven Tepper (Routledge, 2007). She was recently selected as a Salzburg Seminar Fellow for “Cultural Institutions Without Walls: New Models of Arts-Community Interaction” and in October 2007 will join an international group of artists, cultural managers, public sector representatives to identify particularly imaginative and effective new models of arts and community interaction and identify ways in which these models might be replicated elsewhere or adapted to other contexts.

Dr. Conner is an award-winning playwright (including the 2002 Kennedy Center/ATHE David Mark Cohen National Playwriting Award and a Jane Chambers 2002 Honorable Mention Award) whose plays have been produced by Mainstreet Theatre in Houston, Theatre-Hikes in Chicago, The Actors Guild of Lexington, William and Mary College, Slippery Rock University, Smith College, The Pittsburgh Playhouse, The University of Pittsburgh Repertory Theatre, the Three Rivers Arts Festival, Quantum Theatre, Prime Stage, Gemini Theatre, The Three Rivers Shakespeare Festival Young Company, among others. As the resident playwright for Carnegie Mellon University’s Interactive Theatre Company, she has written a dozen short plays on workplace issues and has been honored with a Pennsylvania Economy League Learning and Development Award.

Patrick Markle
Patrick Markle is the co-founder and CEO of Figaro Systems Inc, which is the global leader in display technology for the performing arts. What started as a back-of-the-napkin technology solution has now been installed 20,000+ times worldwide. Figaro Systems' multilingual displays are featured in performing arts venues around the world from the Royal Opera House Covent Garden to La Scala to Denver's Ellie Caulkins' Opera House. These synchronous devices allow individuals to create personalized cultural experiences by choosing translations and information in their language.

Patrick has over 22 years of experience in theatre and opera. Prior to Figaro, Patrick was Production Director for San Francisco Opera and served as a member of the executive management team. He was Technical Director for The Santa Fe Opera from 1990 to 1998. And, from 1985 to 1990, he was Assistant Technical Director for the Metropolitan Opera.

Patrick earned his Masters of Fine Arts Degree from Yale School of Drama and his B.A. from Niagara University. Mr. Markle received a Fellowship for Artists from the Japan Foundation, during which he researched the influence of Western Opera on Kabuki Theatre. Patrick has been twice published in JATET, Japan and has guest lectured at Yale University and Harvard School of Music.

Figaro Systems expands audiences with a technology amenity which increases both understanding of and appreciation for the performing arts.