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Ian is a leading education and policy adviser who was recently appointed Deputy Chief Executive of the British Council for School Environments. Formerly the director of Big Picture consultancy and head of policy for the extended schools charity ContinYou, he has been involved in national policy development, social innovation projects and developing leadership and change in the field of education and children's services. With 10 years experience in the voluntary sector, he has led a number of high profile projects for the National College for School Leadership, written publications and resources for the Department for Children, Schools and Families and Welsh Assembly Government, led innovative consultancy projects such as Every Special School Matters and spoken at a number of conferences and seminars in the UK and USA, including the Learning with Excitement Conference at Harvard University.

Karen Pittman is the Executive Director of the Forum for Youth Investment in Washington, DC. She is a sociologist and recognized leader in youth development.

Peter Vanderwarker is an internationally-regarded architectural and editorial photographer. His work appears regularly in *Architectural Record* and *Architectural Digest* magazines, among others. His photography work is found in the collections of the Boston Athenaeum, the MIT Museum, and the Boston University Art Gallery. He is also the author /co-author and photographer of several books, and is a columnist for *the Boston Sunday Globe*'s Cityscapes. Mr. Vanderwarker holds a bachelor's degree in Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley. He was a Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design from 1996-1997.

Carol Becker is Professor of the Arts and Dean of the School of the Arts at Columbia University. She is the author of several books and numerous articles. Her books include: The Invisible Drama: Women and the Anxiety of Change (with numerous foreign editions), Zones of Contention: Essays on Art, Institutions and Anxiety, Surpassing the Spectacle: Global Transformations and the Changing Politics of Art. She is also the editor of The Subversive Imagination: Essays on Art, Artists, and Social Responsibility. Her most recent collection of essays: Thinking in Place: Art, Action, and Cultural Production.

Jean Trounstine earned her B.A. at Beloit College and her M.F.A. in Theatre Arts at Brandeis University. She is currently a professor of humanities at Middlesex Community College in Lowell Massachusetts, specializing in writing, literature and theatre courses. With grants from the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, Trounstine developed a humanities-based theatre arts program at Framingham Women's Prison, where she directed several productions. Drawing from music history, women's history, art, literature and drama, the program was offered at the prison for ten years, most recently earning college credit in collaboration with Boston University. Her work in prison with The Merchant of Venice was nominated for a prestigious Schwartz Award, considered by the Foundation as the most successful project funded in 1988. It is the basis of her book *Shakespeare behind Bars: The Power of Drama in a Women's Prison* (2001). With Robert Waxler, she co-authored *Finding a Voice: The Practice of Changing Lives Through Literature* (U Michigan, 2005). She helped to establish this program in Massachusetts, where criminals are sentenced to a literature seminar and probation instead of jail and it is now in many other states and in England. *Changing Lives* was honored in 2004 by the New England Board of Higher Education as an exemplary program in New England and received a grant from the Massachusetts Foundation for Humanities. Trounstine has been the subject of over fifty news articles both locally and nationally, and at conferences for educators, probation officers, judges, legislators, theatre practitioners, and writers, she speaks about her work with offenders and is received enthusiastically.

Alan Schneider, tenor, has performed in opera, operetta, and music theatre productions with many groups in his native New England, including the North Shore Music Theatre, Opera New England, and Commonwealth Opera. Last season he made his Boston Lyric Opera debut as the Second Jew in Salome, and returned in September to sing the Comte de Lerme in Don Carlos.

Lorenzo Mariani has been the Artistic Director of the Teatro Massimo di Palermo since 2005 and studied at Harvard and Florence University. Mariani's first direction was *Bluebeard's Castle* at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, where he has since also directed *L' Heure Espagnole*, *Le Comte Ory*, *La forza del destino*, and *Aida*. The last two of these were conducted by Zubin Mehta. In 1998 the Ferrara Festival began with his direction of *Don Giovanni* with Claudio Abbado conducting and Simon Keenlyside and Bryn Terfel in the leading roles. In the same year he also directed *La bohome* in Cagliari. In the United States he has directed *La bohome* at Chicago's Lyric Opera and *Rigoletto* at Boston's Lyric Opera. He has also directed in Shanghai and Tokyo and at such festivals as the Bergamo Donizetti.

Dan French is the executive director of the Center for Collaborative Education, a non profit organization dedicated to working with networks of schools engaged in reform. The Center is the National Turning Points Center, which works with regional centers and middle schools across the nation to adopt the Turning Points design, a comprehensive and rigorous middle school reform model that is based on ten years of research and practice in implementing the Turning Points principles. Formerly, Dan was the director of Instruction and Curriculum for the Massachusetts Department of Education.