Vasu Panicker (he/him) is a musician and turnaround strategist whose worked has impacted the private, public, and non-profit sectors. A native of New York City, he was a beneficiary of training from LaGuardia Arts H.S. As a former contemporary youth music educator, Vasu championed the study of experimental music for thousands of students. More recently, he has executed large-scale financial transformations in government and life sciences as a management consultant, while composing original music for live dance. Vasu lives in Austin, TX with his wife and holds degrees from City University of New York and UC-Berkeley.

Composer Shelley Washington (1991) has emerged as an important and powerful voice of her generation. Her music has been presented by leading ensembles including the Long Beach Opera company, Boston Lyric Opera company, the Kansas City Symphony, and in NPR’s Dolly Parton’s America podcast and Vox Media’s Explained on Netflix. Washington is an active performer and collaborator, co-founding the composer collective Kinds of Kings and performing in the Los Angeles based ensemble, Wild Up and in her Brooklyn-based band, Good Looking Friends. She is on faculty at New York University Steinhardt and completing her PhD at Princeton University. She lives in Brooklyn with her dog, Rodeo.

GRAMMY Award winning cellist Andrew Yee has been praised by Michael Kennedy of the London Telegraph as “spellbindingly virtuosic”. Trained at the Juilliard School, they are a founding member of the internationally acclaimed Attacca Quartet who have released several albums to Critical acclaim including Andrew’s arrangement of Haydn’s “Seven Last Words” which Thewholenote.com praised as “ . . .easily the most satisfying string version of the work that I’ve heard.” They were the quartet-in-residence at the Met Museum in 2014, and have won the Osaka and Coleman international string quartet competitions. Their newest recording of the string quartets of Caroline Shaw won a GRAMMY for best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble performance.As a soloist last season Andrew performed John Taverner’s The Protecting Veil and Strauss Don Quixote. In 2019 they won the first prize at Oklahoma University’s National Arts Incubation Lab for their pitch of a wearable garment that translates sound into vibrations for the hard of hearing. They like to make stop-motion videos of food, draw apples, cook like an Italian Grandma and have developed coffee and cocktail programs for award-winning restaurants (Lilia, Risbobk, Atla) in New York City.

Their solo project “Halfie” draws on their experience as a bi-racial and non-binary person in having access to multiple communities at once, while not feeling at home in any of them. The works commissioned and on the concerts will feature a wide range of composers all for solo cello.

They play on an 1884 Eugenio Degani cello on loan from the Five Partners Foundation.