Manoochehr Sadeghi
Manoochehr Sadeghi began to study classical Persian santur (a 72-string hammer dulcimer) in Tehran when he was seven years old under the master Ustad Abol Hassan Saba. When he was 17, he joined Saba’s orchestra, and enjoyed many years as a master performer and teacher in Iran before coming to the U.S. in the late […]
Sophiline Cheam Shapiro
Sophiline Cheam Shapiro received a Diploma of Arts in classical dance from the University of Fine Arts in Phnom Penh, Cambodia in 1988, and served on the faculty there for three years before immigrating to the United States in 1991. She is among a small number of artists who survived the purges of the Khmer [...] Francisco Aguabella
Francisco Aguabella is one of the world’s most respected drummers. Born in Matanzas-Cuba, an area well-known for the richness of its African traditions, Aguabella immigrated to the U.S. in 1957. He is recognized as a high priest of the religious Afro-Cuban bata percussion, which has its roots among the Yoruba people of West Africa. He […]
Pejman Hadadi
Pejman Hadadi is a virtuoso Iranian tombak and daf (frame drum) player who has been hailed as “the finest Iranian percussionist living in the West” (KPFA Radio, Berkeley, CA). Hadadi began playing tombak at the age of ten under the masters of the instrument Asadollah Hejazi and Bahman Rajabi. In 1990, upon immigrating to the […]
Ciro Hurtado
Ciro Hurtado is a Peruvian guitarist/composer who has been actively performing since the early 1970s as a soloist and member of various groups in Peru, Mexico, Cuba, Europe and the United States. He studied in Peru with guitar master Augusto Portugal. Hurtado is currently the musical director and has produced several albums for the group […]
Liu Qi-Chao
Liu Qi-Chao is a composer and master performer on several Chinese wind, string, and percussion instruments, including the suo na, sheng and gu zheng, among others. He was born in Shandong, China, and is currently one of the most innovative and most sought after Chinese artists living the West. In his two decade career, Liu [...] Lillian Nakano
Lillian Nakano is a master of the Japanese shamisen, a long-necked, three-string lute that is the main instrument of kabuki theater and other classical narrative ballad forms of music. Nakano was raised in Hawai’i and began studing shamisen and classical dance at the age of eight. Her studies were interrupted by World War II and […]
Katsuko Teruya
Katsuko Teruya began studying kutuu (Okinawan koto, a stringed instrument), under master Nae Kochi of the Naha Koyokai in Japan. Katsuko moved to Hawai’i in the mid-1950s, and earned a Senior Teaching Certificate in 1965. In 1975 she established the Hawai’i chapter of the Teruya Shokyoku Kenkyukai. She has served as lead kutuu player in […]
Ho Chan
Ho Chan plays every instrument of the pin peat ensemble, a form of percussive Cambodian classical music. He began study at age 16 with his grandfather. In 1975, under the Khmer Rouge regime, Chan was forced into slave labor camps; he fled to Thailand in 1979 where he joined a pin peat ensemble headed by [...] Hospicio Dulnuan
Hospicio Dulnuan was born in the Ifugao Province of the Cordillera Mountains in the northern Philippines. For 45 years, he has performed the traditional Cordillera instruments including sagay-po (bamboo pan flute), kolasing/kulitong (nose flute), gangha (set of 4 and 6 brass gongs), solibao (elongated drum), libbit (short drum), tambi (zither), patang-gok (stringed bamboo zither), ungngiyong [...]