Magda Bogin
Director

New York-based Magda Bogin is a novelist, translator and journalist who has taught in the graduate writing programs of Columbia, Princeton and City College and, most recently, in Mexico. A former Kellogg National Fellow and recipient of fellowships from the NEA, NYFA and NYSCA, she is the author of the novel Natalya, God's Messenger (Scribner) and has published numerous translations, including Isabel Allende's House of the Spirits. Fluent in Spanish, English, French, Italian and Russian, she is the founder and director of Under the Volcano and has conceived and run writing master classes and public literary events in both the US and Mexico for many years. Bogin is currently at work on an opera based on the Mexican Day of the Dead, with music by composer Paola Prestini, with whom she co-directs the annual opera lab México Canta. A serious amateur cellist,she has increasingly moved toward integrating writing and music while continuing to run writing workshops both on and offline.

Paola Prestini
Co-Director, México Canta

Paola Prestini's compositions have been called "radiant...[and] amorously evocative" by The New York Times. She a composer, director and one of the founders of VisionIntoArt, an interdisciplinary collective that has created over 40 multimedia productions worldwide. Her music has been performed by ensembles such as The New York City Opera, Ensemble ACJW, the Claremont Trio, and the Kronos Quartet, in venues such as Carnegie Hall, The Whitney Live, and Joe's Pub, in commissions ranging from Concert Artist Guild to Carnegie Hall. Ms. Prestini has taught and created curricula for the American Composers Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, the New York City Opera, and the American Symphony Orchestra League, and is an advocate for music education in schools. She is also the Associate Director of the prestigious Making Score program of the New York Youth Symphony. A graduate of the Juillard School, she has received numerous awards from NYSCA, ASCAP and LMCC.

Mario Bellatín

Mario Bellatín was born in Mexico City in 1960 and has lived in Peru and Cuba, where he studied film. He has written more than thirty works of fiction and been translated into over a dozen languages. Known as a singular and risk-taking storyteller, he has been the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and won two important literary prizes in Mexico, the Premio Xavier Villaurrutia and the Premio Nacional de Mazatlán de Literatura. His novels and novellas include Mujeres de sal, Canon perpétuo, Efecto invernadero, Damas chinas, Poeta ciego and Salon de belleza (Beauty Shop). He founded the la Escuela Dinámica de Escritores, is a grantee of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte de México, and is currently a member of the board of Documenta Basel 13. He has begun to publish his own books.

Donna Di Novelli

As a librettist and lyricist, Donna DiNovelli's work has been presented at the New York City Opera, the Public Theater and Joe's Pub. She has collaborated with Randall Eng for many years, most notably on Florida (New York City Opera; Lyric Opera Cleveland; and a Frederick Loewe Foundation Reading, directed by David Herskovits). Her stage play, The First Eff (Mark Taper Forum) was excerpted in "New Monologues For Women; by Women", Heinemann Press. She has won commissions, fellowships and grants from the Manhattan Theater Club, ASCAP, Mabou Mines, Houston Grand Opera, the BBC, the MacDowell Colony, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Atlantic Cneter for the Arts. A member of the faculty of the Graduate Musical Theater Writing Program at Tisch School of the Arts (NYU), di Novelli also teaches playwriting at the O'Neill Theater Center, and was a visiting professor at Brown University, where she earned an MFA working with Paula Vogel.

Ana Lara

Mexican composer, radio producer and cultural promoter Ana Lara has written numerous works for stage, orchestra and chamber ensembles that have been performed throughout the Americas, Asia and Europe. She has been composer-in-residence of the National Symphony Orchestra of Mexico and a grantee of the Mexican Ministry of Culture, the USA/Canada/Mexico Creative Artists' Residency Program and the Rockefeller Foundation at Bellagio. She founded the Festival Internacional Música y Escena in 1998 and continues to direct it as well as to host a renowned weekly radio program devoted to contemporary music. Ms. Lara attended the Conservatorio Nacional de Música, where her teachers included Daniel Catán and Mario Lavista. Her post-graduate work was with Wlodzimierz Kotonski and Zbigniew Rudzinski at the Warsaw Academy of Music, on a Mexican-Polish study grant. She also holds a degree in ethnomusicology from the University of Maryland.

Missy Mazzoli

Missy Mazzoli has been called "one of the new wave of scarily smart young composers," and has numerous awards, grants and commissions to her name, including a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She writes for melodicas, out-of-tune guitars and electronics as well as orchestras and string quartets to create a unique and personal sound. After studying composition with John Harbison and Richard Cornell at Boston University, she was a Fulbright scholar at the Royal Conservatory of the Hague, where she studied with Louis Andriessen, Martijn Padding and Richard Ayres. Her music has been performed by the Kronos Quartet, the Minnesota Orchestra, the Spokane Symphony and many others. Also active as an educator, arts advocate and performer, Mazzoli is executive director of the MATA Festival of New Music, founded by Philip Glass, Lisa Bielowa and Eleonor Sandresky. She currently teaches composition at Yale University, where she studied with Aaron Kernis, Martin Bresnick and David Lang, and is working on a large scale multi-media opera, a collaboration with composers Judd Greenstein and David T. Little and filmmaker Stephen Taylor.

Royce Vavrek

Royce Vavrek is a multi-disciplinary narrative artist from Grande Prairie, Alberta, Canada, whose work has been hailed as "wildly dramatic and... exhilarating" by the New York Times. His opera/music theater libretti include Dog Days (Zankel Hall, New York City Opera VOX); Bully Pulpit (Metropolis Opera Project); Vinkensport, or The Finch Opera (Bard Conservatory); The Hunger Art (American Lyric Theater, Center City Opera Theater); and Nora at the Altar-Rail (A.L.T.). As a filmmaker, Vavrek wrote and directed From Sky and Soil (Corus Young Filmmakers Initiative), I Will Not Be Sad Anymore (Quebec Cooperative Filmmakers Initiative), Pig and Bear (Frigid Fest NY) and Good Woman, a collaboration with American fashion designer Marc Bouwer. Artistic Director of the opera-theater company The Coterie, founded with soprano Lauren Worsham, Vavrek earned his undergraduate degree Concordia University, in Montreal and holds an MFA from New York University.

RECENT FACULTY

Russell Banks
Ruth Behar
Breyten Breytenbach
Sandra Cisneros
Carolyn Forché
Jessica Hagedorn
Joyce Johnson
Pura López Colomé
Grace Paley
Lourdes Portillo
Tomás Segovia
Juan Tovar
Chuck Wachtel

RECENT GUEST READERS & PRESENTERS

Jean Franco
Salvador Guzmán
Edith Lara
Robert Nichols
Alberto Palacios
Mark Probst