Robert Hurwitz has been in charge of Nonesuch Records since September, 1984. From 1975 until that time, he ran the American operations of ECM Records. His first job in the record business was at Columbia (1972-74). He grew up in Los Angeles, where he was trained as a pianist; and graduated with a degree in history at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1971. He has lived in New York since 1971.
     Nonesuch Records, founded in 1964, pursues a broad mission, including classical music, contemporary music, jazz, traditional American and world music, music theater and dance. Since coming to Nonesuch, Hurwitz has signed the composers John Adams, Louis Andrissen, Philip Glass, Henryk Gorecki, Steve Reich, and John Zorn; performers including Don Byron, Bill Frisell, the Kronos Quartet, Gidon Kremer, the Gipsy Kings, Mandy Patinkin, Dawn Upshaw, Caetano Veloso and the World Saxophone Quartet. He has also worked with Astor Piazzolla and Stephen Sondheim. 
     Among his most recent signings to the label have been the singer Audra McDonald, the theater composer Adam Guettel, songwriter Randy Newman and the band The Magnetic Fields. Among the other artists on the Nonesuch roster are Laurie Anderson, Emmylou Harris, Wilco, Youssou N'Dour, and Richard Goode. The company also has a long-standing association with World Circuit Records, which released the Buena Vista Social Club, and counts among its artists Ibrahim Ferrer, Ruben Gonzalez, and Oumou Sangare.

     Valerie Geller is president of Geller Media International, working with news, talk, and personality programming for both radio and television. In Europe, she has worked with both commercial and public broadcasting, including El Grupo Radio Centro, Mexico City, Mexico; CFRB, Toronto, Ontario, Canada; Charivari, Nuremburg, Germany; Radio Z, Zurich, Switzerland; SSR & SRI, Switzerland; Warsaw, Poland; and Vienna, Austria.
     Geller's background includes all radio formats from adult contemporary, top 40 CHR, to country and news/talk. She ran the news department at KIOI in San Francisco and helped launch the talk format at KFI in Los Angeles. In 1990 she programed WABC in New York. 
     She began her career as a radio journalist, a field in which she has won several awards. She was elected to the board of directors of the Associated Press Broadcasters and held a board seat for the Radio Television News Directors Association in California. Geller has also written about radio for Billboard Magazine, Radio and Records, The M Street Journal, and Music and Media.
     Geller is the author of two books, Creating Powerful Radio: A Communicator's Handbook for News, Talk, Information & Personality, and Powerful Radio Workbook: Prep, Performance, Post Production Planning. 

     Bobby McFerrin is one of the natural wonders of the music world. A ten-time Grammy Award winner, he is one of the world's best-known vocal innovators and improvisers, a world-renowned classical conductor, the creator of one of the most popular songs of the late 20th century, and a passionate spokesman for music education. His recordings have sold over 20 million copies, and his collaborations with Yo-Yo Ma, Chick Corea, the Vienna Philharmonic, and Herbie Hancock have established him as an ambassador of both the classical and jazz worlds. 
     Born to opera singer parents in New York in 1950, where his father, Robert McFerrin Sr., was the first African-American male soloist at the Metropolitan Opera, his family moved to Hollywood in 1958. 
     In recent years Bobby McFerrin he has combined his love of improvisation with his conducting skills, extending his vocal journeys to larger groups of singers - whether trained or not. McFerrin's solo concerts have always included audience participation; McFerrin sees them not as "singalongs" but as a genuine collaborative process of making music in the moment. 

     Graham Dixon is part of the management team of BBC Radio 3, where he is occupied primarily with international relations and development projects. Formerly, he was a programme editor in charge of the early music output ofthe network. In this role he produced numerous radio programmes, including a record company co-production which won a Gramophone award in 1996. He is vice-chairman of the European Broadcasting Union Music Group, which exists to facilitate collaboration between broadcasters across national boundaries. He was responsible for the launch of the radio service of night-time music which can now be heard in 11 countries across Europe as Euroclassic Notturno.
     Since completing a Ph.D. on music in 17th-century Rome, and a period of university teaching, Dixon has continued to research and publish extensively on pre-Classical music, including major discoveries concerning the works of Handel and Monteverdi. 
     He continues to play Baroque organ music for enjoyment, develop his languages, and escape from London to the remote coast of East Anglia.

Alfred E. Eckes, Jr., is Ohio Eminent Research Professor in Contemporary History, Ohio University, Athens, Ohio. A specialist in political and international economic history, he teaches History, Contemporary History, and International Business in the Executive MBA program. In 2003 Cambridge University Press will publish his next book, Globalization and the American Century, co-authored with Prof. Thomas Zeiler of the University of Colorado. Eckes served as commissioner and chairman of the U.S. International Trade Commission during the Reagan Administration.

A recognized expert and authority on Broadway musicals, Didier Deutsch has produced numerous cast album reissues for several record labels. For the past 35 years, he has also been a drama critic on Broadway and has contributed many articles on the Americanmusical theatre. He was nominated for a Grammy award for his work on the 12-CD boxed set, Frank Sinatra: The Columbia Years, released by Legacy in 1995, and 1999's 26-CD commemorative boxed set, Sony Music 100 Years: Soundtrack For a Century.

Mark Fuerst is the Senior Partner in Public Radio Management (PRM), which he founded in 1996. PRM is the only national consulting group focused entirely on understanding and applying internet technology to the needs of public broadcasting. To that end, Mark serves as Executive Director, PRISA, the Public Radio Internet Station Alliance, which in January, 2003, was reorganized to serve Radio and PTV as the IMA: Integrated Media Assocation.

     Ted Libbey is Director of Media Arts Programs for the NEA. A well-known commentator on National Public Radio's Performance Today, Libbey heads a major NEA initiative to provide quality arts programming on radio and television. Libbey supervises the panel selection and grantmaking process for the area of media arts (film, television, and radio) and provides professional leadership to the field.
     Libbey's published works include The NPR Guide to Building a Classical CD Collection; Symphonic Portraits: A Classical Portfolio; Isaac Stern: A Carnegie Hall Tribute; histories of Carnegie Hall and the National Symphony Orchestra; as well as the forthcoming NPR Encyclopedia of Classical Music. He has served as an editor of Schwann Inside, High Fidelity, and Musical America magazines, and as a music critic for the New York Times and the Washington Star.
    Libbey attended Yale University as a Yale National Scholar majoring in history, the arts, and letters and graduated with honors in 1973. He then pursued graduate studies in music at Yale and Stanford University. A native of Washington, DC, Libbey lives in Rockville, MD, with his wife, Janet Lee.

     Marcia Alvar cofounded PRPD and served as its first national chair from 1987 to 1990. She has successfully programmed a variety of public radio stations, including WBFO in Buffalo, KTOO in Juneau, Alaska, and KUOW in Seattle. From 1990 to 1997 Alvar hosted “Upon Reflection,” a weekly television interview program which aired on Seattle’s PBS affiliate. Before joining PRPD as its president in 1998, Alvar helped design and launch “The Savvy Traveler” for Marketplace Productions.

     Evans Mirageas (AMPPR president, 1979) was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan and graduated from the University of Michigan in 1976 with a liberal arts degree. His varied career in the arts has embraced record retail, radio production with the nationally renowned WFMT in Chicago, symphony administration as Artistic Administrator to Seiji Ozawa at the Boston Symphony and artistic leadership as Senior Vice-president of one of the premier classical labels, The Decca Record Company. While with Decca he signed artists of great promise such as Renée Fleming, Angela Gheorghiu, Andreas Scholl, and Matthias Goerne, among others, and re-signed well known international artists Cecilia Bartoli and Riccardo Chailly to long-term contracts. 
     He has directed the European launch of the American Internet arts ticketing agency CultureFinder.com and is working with the celebrated Russian-born conductor Semyon Bychkov as Artistic Advisor. He is Artistic Advisor to both the Brooklyn Philharmonic and the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestras, an award-winning record producer and a popular lecturer and presenter. Evans Mirageas accepted the post of Artistic Director of the Classical Public Radio Network in December 2001.