Mavis Anderson, Latin America Working Group • Washington, DC
Mavis Anderson is Senior Associate at the Latin America Working Group, which encourages US policies towards Latin America that promote human rights, justice, peace and sustainable development. Her focus with LAWG is on Cuba, an area of work she has had for ten years.
Beth Boone, Miami Light Project • Miami, FL
Beth Boone is Artistic and Program Director of the Miami Light Project, an 18 year old non-profit cultural organization which presents dance, music and theater performances by artists from around the world and which engages in community-based work with south Florida artists and students of all ages. Under her direction, the MLP successfully sued Miami-Dade County to overturn a law making it illegal for public funds to be used to present artists living in Cuba.
James Early, Smithsonian Institution Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage • Washington, DC
James Early is Director of Cultural Heritage Policy at the SCFCH and a member of the Board of Transafrica and the Institute for Policy Studies. He has worked on cultural issues related to Cuba for many years, and has facilitated contact between African American political leaders and their Cuban counterparts.
Rob Gibson, Savannah Music Festival • Savannah, GA
Rob Gibson is Artistic Director and Chief Executive Officer of the Savannah Music Festival, one of the largest and most diverse music festivals in the southeastern United State. He previously directed Jazz at the Lincoln Center in New York, where he worked with many Cuban music acts throughout the 1990s.
José Griego, Northern New Mexico College • Española, NM
José Griego is a native New Mexican and is President of Northern New Mexico College and is an ethnomusicologist, musician and curator. He has traveled to Cuba and has worked to bring about exchange activities between northern New Mexico communities and the island.
Suki John, PhD, Specialist on Cuban Dance • Ft. Worth, TX
Suki John spent the 1990s dancing and choreographing in Havana. She has worked with the Ballet Nacional de Cuba, Danza Contemporánea de Cuba, and Compañia de la Danza Narciso Medina. Her dance writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Village Voice, Dance Magazine, Pointe, Dance Research Journal, and Ballet-tanz International.
Mike Kappus, The Rosebud Agency • San Francisco, CA
Mike Kappus is President of The Rosebud Agency, an international booking agency that works extensively with international performing artists visiting the United States. This included handling Cubanismo, which toured the US four times and whose last projected tour was canceled due to the change in US policy in 2004.
Bill Martínez, Immigration Attorney & Arts Presenter • San Francisco, CA
Bill Martínez began working with Cuban artists in 1993 when he took the case of Grupo Mezcla to court. His work with Mezcla and other Cuban musicians played a major role in opening doors for Cuban artists to enter the US. He went on to handle processing of approximately 85% of Cuban performing artist visa applications to the State Department. He is also a founder of Cubasi!, which organized the Music Bridges exchange project in 1999, as well as the performance of Audioslave in 2005, both in Havana.
Ann Rosenthal, MultiArts Projects & Productions • New York, NY
While working with the Suitcase Fund in 1992, Ann Rosenthal organized the historic three month US tour of the Cuban folkloric group Los Muñequitos de Matanzas. The tour exposed large numbers of US citizens to Cuban music and dance for the first time, and played a major role in creating the US market for Cuban performing art. From 1994-2002, as Executive Director of MultiArts Projects & Productions, she continued to produce North American tours for Los Munequitos de Matanzas as well as for Grupo Vocal Desandann from Camaguey and for Los Fakires from Santa Clara. Ann Rosenthal also organized delegations of performing arts presenters, artists and educators to conduct curatorial research in various cities in Cuba in 1995 and again in 2000.
Bernard Rubenstein, Conductor, Copland/Gershwin New Music Group • Santa Fe, NM
Bernard Rubenstein is a world class conductor who began traveling to Cuba in 2003. Since that time, he has traveled to Cuba five times to conduct orchestras in Havana, Santiago de Cuba and Holguin. He is presently Music Director of the Fargo-Moorhead Symphony Orchestra, and is a member of Santa Fe Sister Cities Executive Committee with which he continues to work for closer relations between Santa Fe and its sister city Holguin, Cuba.
Hector Cruz Sandoval, Filmmaker/Producer (KordaVision) • Los Angeles, CA
Hector Cruz Sandoval is a documentary film producer and director, and is currently touring his multiple award-winning documentary KordaVision. The film covers the life and times of Cuban fashion photographer Alberto Díaz (Korda), who began chronicling the Cuban revolution in 1958 and in 1960 took the historic image of Ernesto Ché Guevara now known to the world.
Cynthia Semon, Media Consultant/Music Promoter • Los Angeles, CA
Cynthia Semon is a Los Angeles-based publicist who co-founded Cubasi! with San Francisco attorney Bill Martínez in 1999, and who was a producer of the Music Bridges project in 1999 and the performance by the rock supergroup Audioslave in Havana in 2005.
Isabel Soffer, World Music Institute • New York, NY
Isabel Soffer is Director of Programming at the World Music Institute, a non-profit concert presenting organization dedicated to the research and presentation of traditional and contemporary music and dance from around the world. Much of her work has focused on artist immigration for work purposes.
Ned Sublette, Author & Independent Scholar • New York, NY
Writer / musicologist / singer-songwriter Ned Sublette first traveled to Cuba in January 1990. Author of Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo and The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square, he produced dozens of documentaries on Cuban music for the public radio program Afropop Worldwide. He was co-founder of Qbadisc, the record label that pioneered the marketing of contemporary Cuban music in the United States in the early 90s, and led several Afro-Cuban cultural study trips to Cuba prior to the change in U.S. travel regulations at the end of 2003.
Erica Zielinski, Lincoln Center Festival • New York, NY
Erica Zielinski is General Manager of the prestigious Lincoln Center Festival of the Lincoln Center in New York, an annual 3-week summer festival that presents opera, dance, music, theater and performance art. She had ample experience working with Cuban performing artists booked at the Center up until 2003.
