Explore Panels By Creative Discipline

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Music
Performance

Original
Music

Photography

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Visual Art

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Film

Creative
Writing

Dance

Previous Original Music Panelists

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  • 2025 Panelist
    Christopher Luna-Mega is a composer from Mexico City. Interested in focused listening, performance strategies, audio technology, and interdisciplinary collaboration, his work analyzes sounds and data from natural and urban environments and translates them into notated music for performers and electronics in various forms of media.

Christopher Luna-Mega

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  • 2025 Panelist
    Beth Custer is a San Francisco based composer, performer, bandleader and recording artist. Beth is a member of the live music-to-silent film ensemble the Club Foot Orchestra, the 4th world music group Trance Mission, and the trip-hop duo Eighty Mile Beach. She leads the clarinet quartet Clarinet Thing and co-leads the funky ensemble Russian Telegraph named after two of San Francisco's hills.

Beth Custer

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John Loose

  • 2025 Panelist
    John Loose is the Director of Audio Production at Dolby and helped kick-start the computer game industry's adoption of Dolby audio. Since 1999, he has worked as a composer, surround mixer, and mastering engineer on hundreds of DVDs, Blu-rays, and media demos, as well as serving as a re-recording mixer for feature films. Among the first to mix music in Dolby Atmos, he is also a trained classical percussionist and Mannes College of Music graduate who has toured globally and appeared on 40 CDs across various genres.

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Sarah Cahill

  • 2025 Panelist
    Sarah Cahill is a pianist, radio show host, lecturer, and new music advocate. She has commissioned and premiered over seventy compositions for solo piano, and recent performances include The Barbican Centre in London, The National Gallery of Art, and an NPR Tiny Desk concert. Sarah’s radio show, Revolutions Per Minute, can be heard every Sunday evening on KALW in San Francisco. She is on the faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

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Zachary James Watkins

  • 2025 Panelist
    Zachary Watkins is an Oakland based composer, electronic musician and educator. He holds degrees in Composition and Electronic Music from Cornnish College of the Arts and Mills College where he studied with practicing composers and musicians from aronud the world. Recent Kronos String Quartet commissions "Peace Be Till" and "Black Body Radiance" are regulary performed by the renowned quartet. His 2024 album "Affirmative Action" is released by Sige Records and documents three concerns: social practice / collaboration, notation and tuning.

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Giacomo Fiore

  • 2024, 2025 Panelist
    Giacomo is an Italian-born guitarist and musicologist who teaches a wide range of historical and practical music courses at the University of San Francisco and UC Santa Cruz. He has premiered more than two dozen new works for justly-tuned, electric, and classical guitars, and released several recordings for Populist, Cold Blue, Pinna, Spectropol, Paper Garden Records, and his own impressum. Giacomo is a member of Ninth Planet New Music (the chamber group formerly known as Wild Rumpus), and an occasional performer for New Music Works, sfSound, and other Bay Area ensembles.

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Dylan Mattingly

  • 2023, 2024 Panelist
    Dylan is a composer who creates music which offers ecstatic, transformative experience and provides an opportunity to alter the way we see our world and place within it. His music has been described as “a historic triumph of aspiration” by the SF Chronicle and “the most poignantly entrancing passages of beautiful music in recent memory” by LA Weekly. As Executive Director of the ensemble Contemporaneous, Dylan’s work creates an opportunity for other composers to follow their own wildest dreams. He holds a B.A. in Classics from Bard College, a B.M. in Music Composition from the Bard College Conservatory of Music, and an M.M. from the Yale School of Music.

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  • 2023, 2024 Panelist
    Jessica is the Founder and Music Director of the San Francisco Philharmonic, Curator and Scholar in Residence with the San Francisco Opera, Cover Conductor with San Francisco Symphony and serves as board member of the Association of California Symphony Orchestras (ACSO). She has been featured on NBC's The Today Show, PBS News Hour Weekend, and KQED. More recently, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) named Jessica 1 of 100 Honorees for 2023 for her contribution to the arts in the Bay Area. She is publishing her first bilingual children's book with Lil' Libros (book company) in Winter 2024.

Jessica Bejarano

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Costas Dafnis

  • 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 Panelist
    Costas is a Greek-American composer, director and sound designer based in San Francisco. Costas has had the opportunity to support youth creativity in film, theater and music through his work at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, San Francisco Art Institute, Young People's Symphony Orchestra, University of the Redlands, Festival Napa Valley, The Bay School of San Francisco, and the Berkeley Symphony.

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  • 2023, 2024, 2025 Panelist
    Ruby is a rapper, songwriter, and spoken word artist from the Bay Area, CA. Her latest single, "Switch," featured on the new NBA2K24 video game and soundtrack. She was a songwriter on Seasons 1 and 2 of the Fox Network's hit show, The Cleaning Lady. In 2018, Ruby co-founded the Pinays Rising Scholarship program aimed to uplift Filipina American youth in the arts, education and activism, and in October 2023, she launched a new record label, Bolo Music Group, where she serves as co-founder and CEO.

Ruby Ibarra

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  • 2022, 2023, 2024 Panelist
    June Bonacich has been teaching at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music in the precollege division since graduating with a master's degree in composition. June's specialty is working with very young students, teaching them musicianship and composition in an age-appropriate manner. Creativity to June is joy in process and believes that this joy can be triggered again and again as one looks or listens to the things that we created in the past.

June Bonacich

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  • 2022, 2023 Panelist
    BZ Lewis is a six-time Emmy Award winning composer who has produced bands and artists all over the world through his recording studio, Studio 132. He has a B.A. in Music from the University of Texas at Austin, and is a voting member of the Grammy awards. BZ enjoys giving back and sharing his experiences in the music biz, and learns something from everyone he works with.

BZ Lewis

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  • 2022, 2023 Panelist
    Gabriella Smith began studying piano when she was 8 and started composing music when she was 11. She recently released her first full-length album, Lost Coast, with cellist Gabriel Cabezas, named one of NPR Music's "26 Favorite Albums of 2021 (So Far)" and a "Classical Album to Hear Right Now" by The New York Times. Her love of music comes from a love of play exploring new sounds on instruments, building compelling musical arcs, and connecting listeners with the natural world.

Gabriella Smith

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  • 2021 Panelist
    Chris Sampson has enjoyed a diverse career in music as an educator, songwriter, performer, producer, arts administrator and author. In 2009, Sampson founded the Popular Music program at the USC Thornton School of Music. He serves as the songwriting instructor for the GRAMMY Foundation education programs and the National YoungArts Foundation. Sampson is a lifetime voting member of the Songwriters Hall of Fame, a member of BMI and serves on the advisory board for the Orange County High School for the Arts and Los Angeles County High School for the Arts.

Chris Sampson

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  • 2021, 2022 Panelist
    Bob Schleeter has performed with the top jazz, soul, rock, and blues artists in the SF Bay Area, and was inducted into the Iowa Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2018. From 1990 to 2017, he built and led the highly esteemed Marin Academy music program. Bob continues to be amazed and inspired by the work of young people and is happy to support them in their development.

Robert Schleeter

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Arkadi Serper

  • 2021, 2022 Panelist
    Arkadi Serper is the Director of Piano and Composition and Music Theory at The Crowden School, and teaches at the San Francisco Conservatory in the Preparatory Department. He has written and published choral music for Kairos Youth Choir and compositions in original musical theatre. Arkadi's compositions have been produced by several major orchestras, and he continues to perform as a pianist locally and internationally.

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  • 2023 Panelist
    Edward Schocker is a composer and performer who creates music with made/found materials and alternate tuning systems. His music has been performed at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Stanford Lively Arts, Internationales Klangkunstfest in Berlin, East/West Festival in Tokyo and Culture Station Seoul 284 in South Korea. Edward is creating a new multimedia work for ensemble PHASE for the San Francisco International Arts Festival.

Edward Schocker

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  • 2022 Panelist
    Amber Morris has been a performing vocalist for over 40 years and has taught voice in the SF Bay Area for the last 19+ years. She counts Grammy and Emmy Award Nominees, Winners, and Platinum Hit songwriters among her clientele and prepares clients for auditions, recroding sessions, festival stages, and tours. Amber is extremely passionate about the power of creativity and cultivating authentic individual expression in the artist.

Amber Morris