Nominated and featured by Art New England Magazine on the cover of the 2019 New Emerging Artists Series, Darren Cole is one of the most exciting young video artists working today.  As a Director of Photography, Cole completed a music video for the Violent Femmes' "I'm Nothing" starring Stefan Janoski which premiered at the MKE (Milwaukee) Film Festival. Cole was also a contributor in the camera department on the film "Markie in Milwaukee" which was Honorable Mention for the Grand Jury Award at SlamDance in 2019. Producing films for director Nora Jaenicke, Cole has produced four films in the past three years with "Proof" still in festival circulation. The quartet of stories ("Joyce", "Whales", "Between Seconds", and "Proof") has been the recipient of over 40 international awards. Most recently, Cole was Co-Producer for "Streaming Outta Fenway" featuring Boston's own Dropkick Murphys and a Double Play with Bruce Springsteen which reached 9 million viewers globally. The show raised $750,000 for multiple charities during the wake of Covid-19 this past spring. It was also the first ever musical performance to be lived-streamed from a major U.S. stadium. As a Visiting Assistant Professor at MassArt, Cole researches the intersection of art and technology as a tool for communication that promotes equity and social justice. 

Patricia-Maria Weinmann has worked with many national opera companies and festivals including Utah Opera, Opera on the James, Syracuse Opera, Florida Grand Opera, Seagle Music Colony, Boston Lyric Opera, Central City Opera, Opera Boston, Ashlawn Opera Festival, the American Opera Project, Opera Providence, and Mississippi Grand Opera.  She has collaborated on a number of premier performances including Daniel Pinkham’s The Cask of Amontillado, the staged orchestral premier of Scott Wheeler’s The Construction of Boston and Wheeler’s Democracy as a work-in-progress for the American Opera Project in New York.  Recent directing engagements have included Miss Havisham’s Wedding Night, Hansel and Gretel, Cosi fan tutte, The Mikado, The Pirates of Penzance, Cole!, Cenerentola, Carmina Burana, L’elisir d’amore, Sweeney Todd, Don Pasquale and Faust and Marguerite (BOC). Over the past 20 years, Weinmann served on the faculties of both Boston Conservatory and the New England Conservatory of Music.  As a guest director and coach for Utah Opera’s Young Artist Program and a faculty member of American Institute of Musical Studies in Graz, Austria, she continues to train some of the most promising young singers in the United States and abroad. 

Greg Smucker is a director and teacher of theater and opera. He studied with the late Wesley Balk, a noted pioneer in the field of singer-actor training. Greg was co-founder and artistic director of 15 HEAD, a critically acclaimed experimental theater company in Minneapolis and served as managing director of Theatre for Young America in Kansas City, a professional theater for children. Greg served for seven years on the faculty of the Opera Studies Department at New England Conservatory of Music and is currently a faculty member of the American Institute for Musical Studies in Graz, Austria.  As a freelance director, Greg has directed productions and workshops for theaters and opera companies in Boston and the Twin Cities.

Tian Hui Ng is Music Director of the Pioneer Valley Symphony, the Victory Players, a contemporary music ensemble supported by the Massachusetts International Festival of the Arts, and resident conductor of the Boston New Music Initiative. An advocate of new music, he has assisted in and premiered new works by Pulitzer and Rome Prize winners Curt Cacioppo, Aaron Jay Kernis, David Sanford, and Joan Tower among many others. Since his first opera, Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress at age 20, he has conducted many new works including unusual firsts like the first Nigerian opera in Yoruba, Irin Ajo in 2018. His passion for inter-disciplinary and intercultural music making has led to a rich array of work for ballet, film, theatre, installation art, modern dance, animation, sculpture and even sand painting, in a career that spans Europe, Asia and North America. In 2020, he looks forward to the culmination of a three-year commissioning project, El Puerto Rico, celebrating the musical heritage of Puerto Rico, a collaboration with White Snake Projects on Elena Ruehr's Cosmic Cowboy, and the restoration of Thomas de Hartmann's Piano Concerto.