The Washington Conservatory of Music is a nationally accredited community music school in Bethesda, MD and Glen Echo Park, founded in 1984 to serve the Greater DC area. At WCM, children and adults, without audition, study with performing artist faculty. Individual lessons are the cornerstone of WCM, along with Early Childhood, Jazz, Classical, Folk, Irish classes and an amateur adult orchestra.
Ramesh Raskar is an Associate Professor at MIT Media Lab, where his research investigates computational photography, inverse problems in imaging and human-computer interaction.
The Manzari Brothers, John and Leo, are performers who rocketed to overnight national stardom in 2010. Then ages 17 and 15, respectively, they co-starred with tap-dance legend Maurice Hines in “Sophisticated Ladies” at the Lincoln Theater in Washington D.C.
Sue Austin is a multimedia, performance and installation artist with a socially engaged practice. As Artistic Director and Co founder of Freewheeling she “recognises the power of starting at the ‘personal’ and finding archetypal, numinous images that ‘communicate’ through connecting with universality of human experience.”
Kaoru Ishibashi, who goes by the professional name Kishi Bashi, is a singer-songwriter, composer and performing artist who appears both solo and with groups. He plays multiple instruments including violin, keyboard and guitar, and his musical repertoire ranges from indie pop and rock to psychedelic pop. He sometimes uses Japanese singing as one of many sound layers in his creations, helping to suggest (to Western ears, at least) a sense of the ineffable.
Larry Smarr is the founding Director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), a UC San Diego/UC Irvine partnership, and holds the Harry E. Gruber professorship in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) of UCSD’s Jacobs School of Engineering. At Calit2, he has continued to drive major developments in information infrastructure– including the Internet, Web, scientific visualization, virtual reality, and global telepresence–begun during his previous 15 years as founding Director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).
Mariano Vázquez, PhD, is a researcher at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. He helps lead a multi-disciplinary, international team of 25 researchers from the fields of mathematics, physics, computer sciences and engineering. Their common goal: to better understand nature through creating a “computational world” employing the world’s most powerful supercomputers.
Max Little is an applied mathematician whose goal is to “see connections between subjects, not boundaries…to see how things are related, not how they are different.” He has a background in applied mathematics, statistics, signal processing and computational engineering. His work has been applied across disciplines like biomedicine, extreme rainfall analysis and forecasting, biophysical signal processing, and hydrogeomorphology and open channel flow measurement.
Michael J. Pazin, Ph.D., joined the Extramural Research Program of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) in 2011. Mike is part of the NHGRI team overseeing the ENCODE project, generating an encyclopedia of DNA elements from the human genome. He also manages a portfolio of grants in functional genomics.
Peter Aguero was born and raised in Southern New Jersey and currently makes his home in Queens. He’s a Moth GrandSLAM champion, regular host of Moth shows, and an instructor for the MothSHOP community program. Fulfilling the dreams of no one, he appeared shirtless on Late Night With Conan O’Brien multiple times. He’s also the lead singer of The BTK Band – an improvised storytelling rock band that performs regularly in NYC.