Artists

• Lidiya Yankovskaya

  Conductor / Co-Host

  Conductor Lidiya Yankovskaya is a fiercely committed advocate for Slavic masterpieces, operatic rarities, and contemporary works on the leading edge of classical music. Since her appointment as Elizabeth Morse and Genius Music Director of Chicago Opera Theater in 2017, Yankovskaya has led the Chicago premieres of Jake Heggie’s Moby-Dick, Rachmaninoff’s Aleko, Joby Talbot’s Everest, Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta, and Mark Adamo’s Becoming Santa Claus, as well as the world premiere of Dan Shore’s Freedom Ride. Her daring performances before and amid the pandemic earned recognition from the Chicago Tribune, which named her 2020 Chicagoan of the Year. Yankovskaya’s 2022–23 season includes a series of major orchestral debuts, including performances with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, National Symphony Orchestra, Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Sacramento Philharmonic, Knoxville Symphony, and Richmond Symphony, as well as the New York Philharmonic. She returns to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for their MusicNOW series, conducting a work by CSO composer-in-residence Jessie Montgomery. She also makes her Santa Fe Opera debut in a new production of Dvořák’s Rusalka, Staatsoper Hamburg with Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, and English National Opera, conducting a new staging of Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. She leads the world premieres of Paola Prestini’s Edward Tulane at Minnesota Opera and Justine F. Chen’s The Life and Death(s) of Alan Turing at Chicago Opera Theater, where she also conducts the Chicago premiere of Szymanowski’s Król Roger. Lidiya Yankovskaya has recently conducted Bizet’s Carmen at Houston Grand Opera, Mozart’s Don Giovanni at Seattle Opera, Donizetti’s Pia de’ Tolomei at Spoleto Festival USA, Weber’s Der Freischütz at Wolf Trap Opera, Ricky Ian Gordon’s Ellen West at New York’s Prototype Festival, and Kamala Sankaram’s Taking Up Serpents at Washington National Opera and Glimmerglass. Recent concert engagements include Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Dallas Symphony Orchestra, Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra, Omaha Symphony, and Rhode Island Philharmonic, as well as Julia Wolfe’s Anthracite Fields with Bang on a Can All-Stars and the Choir of Trinity Wall Street at Carnegie Hall. An alumna of Dallas Opera’s Hart Institute for Women Conductors and the Taki Alsop Conducting Fellowship, Yankovskaya served as assistant conductor to Lorin Maazel, assisted Vladimir Jurowski via a London Philharmonic fellowship, and was featured in the Bruno Walter National Conductor Preview. She is a two-time recipient of the Solti Foundation U.S. Career Assistance Award.

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• Habib Azar

  Director

  Seven-time Emmy Award winner Habib Azar’s directing work spans a wide range of mediums, from contemporary opera to film and television. His stage credits include the world premiere staging of Du Yun’s Angel’s Bone, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Music, with the International Contemporary Ensemble. He also directed the American stage premiere of Georg Fredrich Haas’s Atthis with Opera Cabal at The Kitchen. He has directed multiple New York Philharmonic Young People’s Concerts.

  
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• Angélica Negrón

  Co-Host

  Angélica Negrón is a Puerto Rican–born composer and multi-instrumentalist. She writes music for voices, orchestras, and film as well as robots, toys, and plants. Negrón is known for playing with the intersection of classical and electronic music, unusual instruments, and found sounds.

  
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• Ken Kaissar

  Scriptwriter

  Ken Kaissar’s plays have been performed or developed by the Philadelphia Theatre Company, Delaware Theatre Company, Phoenix Theatre Company, Fusion Theatre Company, Jewish Repertory Theatre, Urban Stages, and Passage Theatre. His play The Victims or What Do You Want Me To Do About It (published by McFarland & Company, Inc.) was developed by Golden Thread Productions and Silk Road Rising. His adaptation of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales was commissioned by Columbia University. His other plays include A Modest Suggestion (available on Amazon), Liberal Arts, and A Leg Up, which just enjoyed a world premiere at the Bristol Riverside Theatre. He holds a BFA in directing from Carnegie Mellon University and an MFA in playwriting from Columbia University. Kaissar is a co-producing director at the Bristol Riverside Theatre (brtstage.org), and the host of the podcast The Audition Helper, available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

  
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• El Puente

  Community Partner

  El Puente is a human rights organization based in the primarily Latinx community of Los Sures Williamsburg, Brooklyn. For over four decades, El Puente has fought for social justice initiatives through the use of artivism, youth development, and grassroots community building. With a commitment to inspire and nurture the next generations of leaders for peace and justice, El Puente has bridged the worlds of health, education, and the arts with activism and community empowerment. Since its beginnings, El Puente has been focused on achieving environmental equity and climate justice for communities in Williamsburg, Bushwick, and Puerto Rico. Campaigns have included monitoring and addressing poor air quality, creating community gardens and green spaces, shutting down the building of a 50-story trash incinerator, and the founding of El Puente’s Latino Climate Action Network in Puerto Rico. Focused on the use of education for liberation, El Puente has established three NYCHA public housing–based cornerstone community centers, holistic youth leadership centers, MS 50 / El Puente Community School, as well as the El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice. El Puente has and continues to provide pre-professional training to hundreds of youth annually in the visual arts, theater, dance, and music within a culturally grounded context and using art as a tool to educate, uplift, and mobilize the communities they serve. They also support El Puente CADRE, a collective of community artists of color. El Puente creates murals, performances, and cultural events that address relevant social justice campaigns that promote equitable community, sustainability, and self-determination.

  
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