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The Boston Pops Gospel Choir was originally brought together to perform in the first Gospel Night at POPS in 1993. Gospel Night is a result of the vision and commitment of the Boston Symphony Orchestras Cultural Diversity Committee. This vision was particularly championed by the late Vondal M. Taylor, Jr. (1954-95), who was Vice-Chair of the Cultural Diversity Committee, and an overseer of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The Cultural Diversity Committee, in its effort to increase the diversity of Symphony Halls patronage, developed Gospel Night to appeal to a broader-than-traditional audience. Gospel Night has since become an annual event that continues to feature the choir. After the death of Vondal Taylor in 1995, Brother Dennis Slaughter, who had performed with the choir since 1993, decided to develop Boston Community Choir as an entity outside of Symphony Hall. Through his efforts and musical direction, the Boston Community Choir has become well-known throughout the Boston area for its inspired and uplifting performances.

The Choir of Men and Boys was founded in 1909. The boys are students aged 8-14 who attend St. Albans School. Through the National Cathedral School, the Choir of Men and Girls was founded in 1997 as the first of its kind in the United States and is open to students from 7th to 12th grades. The men of the choirs are professional musicians from the greater Washington area who sing countertenor, tenor, and bass to complete the traditional choral sound. Together the choirs set a high standard for liturgical worship in this country.

Alan Lightman was born in Memphis, Tennessee in 1948 as son of Richard Lightman, a movie theater owner, and Jeanne Garretson, a dancing teacher and volunteer Braille typist. From an early age, he was entranced by both science and the arts and while in high school, he began independent science projects and writing poetry. He won state-wide science fairs and was the state winner of the National Council of Teachers of English literary award. In 1966, he graduated from White Station High School in Memphis. Lightman received his AB degree in physics from Princeton University in 1970, Phi Beta Kappa and Magna Cum Laude, and his PhD in theoretical physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1974. He has received three honorary degrees.

Robert P. Gittens is an attorney who serves as Vice President for Public Affairs at Northeastern University. His extensive public sector experience includes service as Cabinet Secretary for the Executive Office of Health and Human Services, Commissioner for the Massachusetts Department of Youth Services, First Assistant District Attorney for Suffolk County, Chairman of the Massachusetts Parole Board, and Deputy Chief Legal Counsel to the Office of the Governors Legal Counsel. Mr. Gittens is a member of the Court Management Advisory Board.

She has traveled extensively, has written non-fiction on South African subjects and made TV documentaries, collaborating with her son Hugo Cassirer on the television film *Choosing Justice: Allan Boesak*. She was responsible for the script of the 1989 BBC film, *Frontiers*, and for four of the seven screenplays for a television drama based on her own short stories, entitled *The Gordimer Stories 1981-82*. She has also published, in forty languages, thirteen novels and ten short story collections. Her first short story was published at the age of fifteen in the liberal Johannesburg magazine, *Forum*, and during her twenties, her stories appeared in many local magazines. In 1951 the *New Yorker* took one of her short stories. Her short story collections include "A Soldier's Embrace" (1980); "Something Out There" (1984); and "Jump and Other Stories" (1991). *Loot* (2003), is a collection of ten short stories widely varied in theme and place. Nadine Gordimer's subject matter in the past has been the effect of apartheid on the lives of South Africans and the moral and psychological tensions of life in a racially-divided country, which she often wrote about by focusing on oppressed non-white characters. She was an ardent opponent of apartheid and refused to accommodate the system, despite growing up in a community in which it was accepted as normal. Her work has therefore served to chart, over a number of years, the changing response to apartheid in South Africa.

Ann Dumas, an independent scholar and curator based in London, is co-curator (with Timothy Standring) of Inspiring Impressionism. Her field of interest is 19th and early 20th century French painting. She is affiliated with the Royal Academy of Arts with whom she has curated a number of exhibitions, including Matisse: His Art and His Textiles, and 1900: Art at the Crossroads, and Paris: Capital of the Arts for which she was co-curator. For the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Dumas curated The Private Collection of Edgar Degas and From Czanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant Garde. Also a consulting curator for the Columbus Museum of Art, Dumas recently curated Renoirs Women and The Last Landscapes of Degas for that institution. She began her career as a research assistant at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, and worked as an associate curator at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Dumas studied the history of art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, England.

David Brenneman was appointed director of collections and exhibitions in 2006, in addition to his role as the Frances B. Bunzl Family curator of european art, which he assumed in 1995. He also has been the managing curator of the Louvre Atlanta exhibit.

Julia Forbes is the Head of Museum Interpretation at the High Museum of Art. She manages the development of all materials used by visitors to learn about the Museum's permanent collection and special exhibitions, including the new Greene Family Learning Gallery. She has held education positions at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery, Washington National Cathedral, the Walters Art Museum, and the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. She has developed exhibitions in a team setting and participated in the creation of interactive spaces for families in a wide range of museum settings. She served as the Eastern Region Director in the Education Division of the National Art Education Association, and was honored as the Eastern Museum Educator of the Year for 1998. She has degrees in Art History and Cultural Anthropology from the University of California at Santa Barbara and a Master's Degree from the George Washington University in Art History/Museum Training.

Chip Simone has been making photographs for more than four decades. His interest in photography began in the mid-1950s and he was formally educated in the visual arts and the history and traditions of creative photography at the Rhode Island School of Design from 1964-67. Chip studied with world-renowned photographer Harry Callahan who inspired him to develop a personal way of seeing and to let photography give meaning to his life. Chip first exhibited work in 1966 at the Hallmark gallery in New York City. In 1973 he was a founding member of NEXUS, Atlantas first photography gallery. In 1980 his work was exhibited at the Winter Olympic Games in Lake Placid, NY. In 1982 he received a Photographers' Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1985 The French Ministry of Culture exhibited his work at the Chapelle De La Sorbonne in Paris, The Refectoir Des Jacobin in Toulouse, and The Centre Daction Culturelle in Angouleme as part of the Atlanta in France cultural exchange. In 1996 he published *On Common Ground, Photographs from the Crossroads of the New South*. Chips photographs are included in the permanent collections of Atlanta's High Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art (NY), The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, The Houston Museum of Fine Art and The Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia.