Rabbi Adina Allen is a spiritual leader, writer, curator and teacher. She serves as Co-Founder & Creative Director of The Jewish Studio Project, a new Jewish learning and arts venture. Integrating a lifetime of experience in the creative arts with her rabbinic training, Adina provides a unique and enlivening approach to Judaism. Ordained by Hebrew College in 2014, Adina has worked as an educator at Tufts University Hillel and the Brandeis Collegiate Institute and as a chaplain at Hebrew Senior Life. Adina is a contributing writer to the Huffington Post and her original research on generating midrash was published in the CCAR Journal in 2013. Adina serves on the Board of Directors of Urban Adamah and is an alum of the Adamah Fellowship the CIRCLE Interfaith Leadership Fellowship and the Wexner Graduate Fellowship. Adina was part of a small team that developed Shira Yoga and has led workshops in diverse settings including Down Under Yoga, synagogues and community centers in Greater Boston. Contact.

Aubrey L. Glazer, Ph.D. (University of Toronto) currently serves as rabbi at Congregation Beth Sholom (CBS) in San Francisco. Aubrey has dedicated decades to researching, publishing, teaching, and performing piyyut in many iterations, as well as translating and collaborating with contemporary Hebrew poets and paytannim. A passionate and challenging teacher of Jewish mysticism, philosophy, and Hebrew poetry, Aubrey is in demand for participation in diverse educational forums, from lay learning programs to federations, seminaries, and colleges across North America, Europe, and Israel. Aubrey’s writing and research is published widely in both popular and academic forums. Aubrey enjoys playing and watching ice hockey as well as fly-fishing and hiking. He shares a passion for aesthetics as a spiritual path, especially through painting with his wife, Elyssa Wortzman (D.Min.), a Jewish artist and spiritual director who also teaches and consults in the Bay Area, along with their daughter, Talya Sahara. For more information, visit Aubrey’s Amazon Author Page or the CBS website.

Hazzanista Eliana Kissner studied Ashkenazi cantorial music as a child, opera at Hunter College and spent a year in cantorial school   She was an Arts Fellow at the Drisha Institute for Jewish Education in New York and then moved to the Berkeley, CA in 2012 with her husband. There she started her own business, performed piyut with the Safra Ensemble, and ordained herself “hazzanista”. She writes and performs her own music and collaborates with writers like Marcia Falk and Tirzah Firestone. She has participated in the Amalfi Coast Music Festival, Vocal Productions NYC, NYC Fringe Festival, Piyut North America’s Bay Area program, the Asylum Artist Retreat, and most recently received the Dorot Fellowship in Israel to develop leadership skills and study piyutim at the Center for Music of the Middle East in Jerusalem. She is the high holidays cantor at Kol Rina in South Orange, NJ. She founded and currently runs the Muslim Jewish Arts Fellowship. She is available for artistic collaboration, lectures, workshops, and interfaith projects. See Hazzanista.com for more info or read her interactive story here.

Rabbi Dorothy Richman teaches Torah throughout the Bay area, and is the rabbi of Makor Or: Jewish Meditation Center. Formerly a pulpit rabbi in San Francisco at congregations Shaar Zahav and Beth Sholom, Dorothy also worked for several years at Berkeley Hillel. She has led trips for AJWS to Central and South America and Africa and is active in Bend the Arc: A Jewish Partnership for Justice. Along with Joey Weisenberg, Dorothy has led Prayer and Music Intensive Workshops. She sings and performs, including, most recently, her one-woman show, Tefillin Supermodel. Contact.

Francesco Spagnolo, a multidisciplinary scholar focusing on Jewish studies, music and digital media, is the Curator of The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life and a Lecturer in the Music Department at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as a host for the cultural programs of Italian National Radio (RAI) in Rome. Intersecting textual, visual and musical cultures, he actively contributes to academic, cultural heritage and archival institutions, and live and electronic media in Europe, Israel and the United States, frequently lectures at academic institutions worldwide, publishes on a variety of subjects, and curates exhibitions and digital programs. Francesco holds a Laurea in Philosophy from the University of Milan (1994) and a PhD in Musicology from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2007). He is the editor of the Italian edition of Imre Toth’s Palimpsest (1998 and 2003) and of the audio-anthology Italian Jewish Musical Traditions (Hebrew University, 2001 and 2006), the author of two books (Il ballo del camaleonte, 1999; Estetica delle situazioni estreme 2000), the co-author of The Jewish World (Rizzoli, 2014), and has written numerous articles and essays on philosophy, music, film and literature in academic journals, books and encyclopedias, including Rivista Italiana di Musicologia, the Encyclopedia Judaica, and the Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World. Contact.