Born in Celle, Germany, Jon has performed across four continents and has held faculty positions at major universities such as the University of Utah, Utah Valley University, and Westminster College. Regarded as an inspiring and energizing educator, Jon Paul prides himself on working with students with diverse backgrounds, experiences, cultures, and abilities.

His teachers and mentors include Eliot Fisk, Oscar Ghiglia, John Gibbons, Tom Johnson, Adam Holzman, and Bruce Holzman. Jon holds degrees in Classical Guitar Performance from The University of Texas at Austin (B.M.), New England Conservatory (M.M.), and Florida State University (D.M.A).

An acclaimed recitalist and chamber musician, Jon has performed with the Utah Opera, The Woodlands Symphony, Park City Chamber Music Festival, violinist Donna Fairbanks. He tours annually throughout the United States and Europe.  Jon was a US representative at the ICPNA Guitar Festival in Lima, Peru. He served as a guest artist at the University of Wittenberg-Halle in Leipzig, Germany. Jon has taught workshops and masterclasses at Berklee College of Music, Bridgewater State College, Connecticut Guitar Society, Aguado Concert Series, Loudoun County Public Schools, Troy State University, Brigham Young University, University of Utah, and Utah Valley University.

From 2013 to 2017, Jon served as President of Utah Classical Guitar, which brings world-class classical guitar concerts, outreach, and music education to the Utah community.

Jon and his wife, dance artist Alexandra Bradshaw Yerby are duo ‘7&1,’ and create original work featuring contemporary dance with live guitar. 

Kathryn Lockwood, Viola
Yousif Sheronick, Percussion 

DuoJalal “are fearless seekers and synthesizers of disparate instruments and cultures” (Toronto Star). The married couple’s music presents an organic amalgam of cultural traditions and musical styles. Inspired by their namesake, the 13th-century poet Jalal a din Rumi, whose visions and words brought together people of different religions, cultures, and races, duoJalal invites all communities to a diverse, stimulating inter-cultural experience. They have performed throughout the United States, Australia, and Brazil for the past eleven years. The duo regularly presents world premieres of works composed or arranged for them by composers such as Philip Glass, Andrew Waggoner, Derek Bermel, Kenji Bunch, John Patitucci, Evan Ziporyn, and Giovanni Sollima. Their performance project “The Rumi Experience” blends poetry, multimedia, and music and premiered at the Williams Center in Easton, PA. DuoJalal’s first CD, “A Different World”  (Innova Recordings), was hailed as an “exhilarating sonic and somewhat mystical experience” (Jordon Times). Of their second CD, Shadow & Light” (Bridge Records), The Toronto Star exclaimed, “If this is what world music’s future holds, bring on the party.” In 2019, duoJalal became the ensemble in residence for the “Four Seasons@Sands Point” concert series in Long Island, NY. In addition to performing, the duo offers masterclasses and clinics for strings and world drumming to both children and adults. Recent masterclasses were at Manhattan School of Music, New York University, and the Percussive Arts Society’s International Convention. 

Timothy Long is a pianist and conductor of Muscogee, Thlopthlocco, and Choctaw descent who is Music Director of Opera at the Eastman School of Music.

His early training as a pianist and violinist led to work with singers, and eventually to conducting engagements that have included companies such as Boston Lyric Opera, Wolf Trap Opera, Opera Colorado, Utah Opera, Tulsa Opera, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, Pacific Opera Victoria, City Opera Vancouver, Shreveport Opera, Opera New England, The Juilliard School, Yale Opera, Stony Brook Opera, the Maryland Opera Studio, the Oklahoma City Philharmonic, the Stony Brook Symphony Orchestra, the Stony Brook Contemporary Chamber Players, the Oregon Bach Festival Orchestra, the Prague Summer Nights Festival Orchestra, and off-broadway with The New Group.

Tim has performed as a pianist and harpsichordist at venues such as Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Merkin Hall, the Kennedy Center, National Sawdust, Jordan Hall, Wigmore Hall in London, the Alte Oper in Frankfurt, Herkules Hall in Munich, Dvořák Hall in Prague, La Halle aux Grains in Toulouse, the Mostly Modern Festival, the Moab Music Festival, the Hawaii Performing Arts Festival, the Oregon Bach Festival, the Aspen Music Festival, the Caramoor Festival, and the Dame Myra Hess Series in Chicago, among many others.

Tim is the producer, writer, and host of a podcast discussing race and music, Unequal Temperament, produced by The Foundry Arts in New York City. He is on the Advisory Board of the American Indians Musicians’ Scholarship and is a current member of the National Congress of American Indians.

A soloist musician, composer and vibrant collaborator, Laura Ortman (White Mountain Apache) creates across multiple platforms, including recorded albums, live performances, and filmic and artistic soundtracks. She has collaborated with artists such as Tony Conrad, Jock Soto, Raven Chacon, Nanobah Becker, Okkyung Lee, Martin Bisi, Jeffrey Gibson, Caroline Monnet, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Martha Colburn, and In Defense of Memory. An inquisitive and exquisite violinist, Ortman is versed in Apache violin, piano, electric guitar, keyboards, and amplified violin, often sings through a megaphone, and is a producer of capacious field recordings. 

She has performed at The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Guggenheim, and The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, Artists Space, The Stone residency, The New Museum, imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, The Toronto Biennial, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, among countless established and DIY venues in the US, Canada, and Europe. In 2008 Ortman founded the Coast Orchestra, an all-Native American orchestral ensemble that performed a live soundtrack to Edward Curtis’s film In the Land of the Head Hunters (1914), the first silent feature film to star an all-Native American cast. Ortman is the recipient of the 2022 Forge Project Fellowship, 2022 United States Artists Fellowship, 2022 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists, 2020 Jerome@Camargo Residency in Cassis, France, 2017 Jerome Foundation Composer and Sound Artist Fellowship, 2016 Art Matters Grant, 2016 Native Arts and Culture Foundation Fellowship, 2015 IAIA’s Museum of Contemporary Native Arts Social Engagement Residency, 2014-15 Rauschenberg Residency, and 2010 Artist-in-Residence at Issue Project Room. She was also a participating artist in the 2019 Whitney Biennial. Ortman lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Composer, cellist, vocalist, educator and GRAMMY and NAMA nominated performer Dawn Avery has worked with musical luminaries Luciano Pavarotti, Sting, John Cale, John Cage, R. Carlos Nakai and Joanne Shenandoah. Of Mohawk descent, she participates in Longhouse ceremonies and is dedicated to language preservation, archival recordings and future generations of Indigenous composers and scholars.
Her chamber music often employs elements of sacred and world music. Avery has had her music performed in such places as the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian, North Dakota Contemporary Museum of Art, University of Maryland, Memorial University, Juilliard School, Colorado College, UCLA, Merkin Hall, Lincoln and Kennedy Centers, and in Canada, Italy and Germany.

Her works for wind quintet EngleWinds can be heard on the recording Tulpe. Avery recorded the North American Indian Cello Project, Vol. I (band camp) featuring works by Native composers, commissioned by the Ford Foundation and the American Composer’s Forum. She has also composed music for award-winning films with Rich/Heape Productions, Miramax, Smithsonian and PBS. Avery’s theatre works include Spiderwoman Theatre and Heather Henson’s (of the Jim Henson legacy) production of Ajijaak on Turtle Island. The latter Indigenous based project led to a short run at the New Victory Theatre on Broadway. Most recently, she wrote two short operas on Indigenous themes: Trials and Tears commissioned by the New Music Alliance Theatre with Ojibwe librettist Ty Defoe for the Phillips Gallery Bicentennial and Sacajawea: Woman of Many Names, music for Imagining The Indian (Ciesla Fdn film documentary). The recording for her vln/pno duo that is about the symbiotic relationship between women and the water is dedicated to the Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women is coming out this March (Duo Concertante). Dr. Avery holds a PhD in Ethnomusicology with research on the application of Indigenous Theory to Native Classical Composers and their compositions.

Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate, is a classical composer, citizen of the Chickasaw Nation in Oklahoma and is dedicated to the development of American Indian classical composition. His Washington Post review states that “Tate is rare as an American Indian composer of classical music. Rarer still is his ability to effectively infuse classical music with American Indian nationalism.”

Tate is Guest Composer/Conductor/Pianist for San Francisco Symphony Currents program Thunder Song: American Indian Musical Cultures and was recently Guest Composer for Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Balcony Bar program Home with ETHEL and Friends, featuring his commissioned work Pisachi (Reveal) for String Quartet.

Recent commissions include Shell Shaker: A Chickasaw Opera for Mount Holyoke Symphony Orchestra, Ghost of the White Deer, Concerto for Bassoon and Orchestra for Dallas Symphony Orchestra, Hózhó (Navajo Strong) and Ithánali (I Know) for White Snake Opera Company. His music was recently featured on the HBO series Westworld.

Over the last four decades, Béla has made a point of boldly going where no banjo player has gone before, a musical journey that has earned him 15 GRAMMYs in nine different fields, including Country, Pop, Jazz, Instrumental, Classical and World Music. But his roots are in bluegrass, and that’s where he returns with his first bluegrass tour in 24 years, My Bluegrass Heart.

My Bluegrass Heart is the third chapter of a trilogy which began with the 1988 album, Drive, and continued in 1991 with The Bluegrass Sessions. The project features a who’s who of some of the greatest instrumentalists in bluegrass music’s history alongside some of the best of the new generation of players mandolinists Sam Bush, Sierra Hull, and Chris Thile; fiddlers Michael Cleveland and Stuart Duncan; celebrated multi-instrumentalist Justin Moses, bassists Edgar Meyer and Mark Schatz, and the amazing Bryan Sutton and Molly Tuttle on guitar.

Described as an “excellent soloist” of “great virtuosity” (NY Concert Review), delivering “thrilling” performances (Boston Globe), Venezuelan violinist Rubén Rengel is quickly gaining recognition as a remarkably gifted artist. Rubén has appeared as a soloist with the Philadelphia Orchestra, Detroit Symphony, Houston Symphony, New Jersey Symphony, Venezuela Symphony, among others. This season he appears with the Dallas Symphony and the New York String Orchestra. Rubén was the winner of the Robert F. Smith Prize at the 2018 Sphinx Competition and has been featured at Carnegie Hall, Severance Hall, the Kennedy Center, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and the Library of Congress. As a passionate chamber musician, he has performed with artists such as Joseph Silverstein, Pamela Frank, Peter Wiley, David Shifrin, Joel Krosnick, Timothy Eddy, and Gilbert Kalish. He has appeared at the Brevard Music Festival, the Evnin Rising Stars at the Caramoor Center, Music@Menlo, and the Perlman Music Program.

In addition to classical music, Rubén enjoys performing other genres such as Venezuelan folk music, Latin American music, and Jazz. He also has an interest in conducting and enjoys performing as a violist. Rubén’s teachers and mentors include Iván Pérez Núñez, Jaime Laredo, Paul Kantor, and Mark Steinberg. Currently, Rubén is a Fellow at Carnegie Hall’s Ensemble Connect.