Lera Auerbach is an award-winning poet, pianist and one of most widely performed and imaginative composers of her generation. She has been commissioned to write major works for orchestra, ballet, opera, chamber music ensemble, chorus, and the theatre. The Washington Post said last year that Auerbach “offers 18th-century forms and a 19th-century sensibility (that of the brilliant virtuoso) expressed in a 21st-century vocabulary.”  Auerbach has been a composer-in-residence with the Verbier, Pacific, Lockenhaus music festivals among many others. In 1997 she was named Poet-of-the-Year by the International Pushkin Society, and was selected to be member of the Young Global Leaders by the World Economic Forum in 2007.  Lera was born in Chelyabinsk, a city in the Urals bordering Siberia and now resides in New York City.
 

Laura Elise Schwendinger was the first composer to win the prestigious American Academy in Berlin Prize fellowship. Her music has been performed by some of the leading artists of our day and at many of the world’s most prestigious venues. Her setting of in Just- spring has been performed on tour by Dawn Upshaw and Gilbert Kalish, at venues including Carnegie Hall, Wigmore Hall, the Theatre du Chatelet in Paris, the National Arts Center in Canada and at the Tanglewood and Ojai Music Festivals.

Augusta Read Thomas' deeply personal music is guided by her particular sense of musical form, rhythm, timbre, and harmony. But given this individuality, her music is affected by history — in Thomas' words, "Old music deserves new music and new music needs old music." For Thomas, this means cherishing her place within the musical tradition and giving credit to those who have forged the musical paths she follows and from which she innovates. Thomas was the Mead Composer-in-Residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra from May 1997 through June 2006, a residency that encompassed nine world premieres, culminating in the premiere of Astral Canticle — one of two finalists for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Music.