Deirdre Chadwick, Moderator

Deirdre Chadwick has served as the President of the BMI Foundation since 2014, and the Executive Director for BMI Classical since 2012. Originally from St. John’s, Newfoundland, Ms. Chadwick grew up in an artistic family studying music, dance, art, and figure skating before settling on the oboe as her primary instrument by age 12. She attended the Eastman School of Music, earning two performance degrees and the Performer’s Certificate, and has also been an artist in residence at the Banff Centre for the Arts and Creativity. Before moving to New York, Ms. Chadwick enjoyed a rich performing and teaching life, serving as Principal Oboe of the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra and Contributing Faculty in Oboe and Chamber Music at Dickinson College and Susquehanna University, as well as freelance performance opportunities throughout the northeastern United States and Canada. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the National Music Council of the United States as well as a number of arts non-profits in New York City; she is also a regular volunteer with Common Justice, an organization devoted to victim reparations and alternatives to incarceration. In her spare time, she pursues triathlon, and plays bass and sings in a band. Ms. Chadwick lives in Brooklyn with her partner, her two children and two cats.

Alfons Karabuda

Alfons Karabuda is an accomplished composer with more than 30 years of experience in the music industry, he is an integral profile and driving force within the world of music. His current engagements extend across the international music industry. He is president of the International Music Council, honorary president of the European Composer and Songwriter Alliance as well as Executive Chairman of SKAP (The Swedish Association of Composers, Songwriters & Lyricists), The Global Node Stockholm and a former expert in the field of artistic rights to the UN Human Rights Council as well as in the cultural committee at the Swedish National Commission for UNESCO.

In addition, he serves as a member of the executive committee of STIM (The Swedish Performing Rights Society), KLYS (the Swedish Joint Committee for Artistic and Literary Professionals), board director of Musiksverige (Music Sweden), The Royal College of Music in Stockholm and the Global Music Vault.

Karabuda is also chairman of the Polar Music Prize Award Committee and member of the board. Karabuda was appointed expert by the Swedish Government on the report Restart for Culture – Recovery and Development after Corona in 2021.

Ole Reitov

Ole Reitov is an internationally recognized expert on artistic freedom. As appointed member of the EU/UNESCO Expert Facility on the UNESCO 2005 Convention, he facilitates workshops and panels worldwide and is consulted by international human rights and arts organizations.

As co-founder and the Executive Director of Freemuse 2013-2017, he represented the organization in the UN Human Rights Council.

A selection of Ole’s publications can be downloaded at https://www.olereitov.com/reports.
 
 
 

Charles J. Sanders

International music copyright attorney and National Music Council board chair Charlie Sanders has served as outside counsel to the Songwriters Guild of America since 2005, and as an advisor to MCNA (the united music creator group for North America) and its global, Paris affiliate, CIAM, since 2012.  He likewise advises many other music community non-profit groups, including The Native American Music Association and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, and is a trustee of the International Music Council.

For nearly two decades, Sanders previously served as counsel and executive VP to the US National Music Publishers Association, Inc., during which time he principally oversaw the collection and distribution of over $4 billion in music royalties.  He is licensed to practice in New York, California, Washington, DC and before the US Supreme Court, and is a graduate of NYU School of Law, where he served as a Brown-Derenberg Copyright Fellow (1984).

Among Sanders’ related music industry pursuits, he is a former chairman of the music industry’s leading social justice outreach group, WhyHunger/Artists Against Hunger & Poverty, the recipient of a 2014 Emmy Award for the copyright education short subject “Copy Kid,” a three-decade Grammy voting member and former governor of NARAS, and a platinum award-winning producer, musician and liner notes author.  He is also a former editor of the seminal entertainment industry treatise “This Business of Music,” a 25-year adjunct professor in NYU’s ground-breaking music business program, and writes and speaks frequently on issues of importance to the US and global music creator community.

Sanders serves as Chair of the National Music Council of the United States, and is the author of Music, Politics & History, the briefing paper developed for the NMC/IMC symposium Protecting Free Speech in the Global Music Landscape.

Arn Chorn-Pond

Arn Chorn-Pond is a musician, human rights activist, and peace advocate. He was born in Battambang province in Western Cambodia in the 1960s, and grew up in a family of artists. During the Khmer Rouge regime in the 1970s, free expression through music and arts was banned in Cambodia. 90% of the country’s artists were killed during the years of the regime, and overall around 2 million people died. Arn was separated from his family and sent to a children’s labor camp. He was taught to play propaganda music, and credits this with saving his life.

Arn believes in the vital power of music and the arts to heal and to transform; in terms of individual people, communities, and whole countries. He has dedicated his adult life to this cause – founding the organization Cambodian Living Arts in 1998. Originally, Cambodian Living Arts worked to revive the country’s endangered traditional art forms, and pass them on to the next generation. 20 years later, they offer scholarships, fellowships, grants, exchanges and more, and acting as a catalyst for creativity and innovation, helping artists today to write the stories of Cambodia’s future.

Arn Chorn-Pond is one of the International Music Council’s 5 Music Rights Champions.

For more information and to donate to the Cambodian Living Arts, please visit https://www.cambodianlivingarts.org/en/.

Dr. Ahmad Sarmast

Dr. Ahmad Sarmast is founder and director of the Afghanistan National Institute of Music.

A musician and member of a renowned musical family, he fled his country in the 1990’s, when Afghanistan’s rich musical heritage was abruptly halted by the civil war. Music was forbidden under Taliban rule from 1996 until 2001. Following the nation’s liberation from Taliban rule, Sarmast returned to Kabul to establish ANIM. ANIM offers music education in Afghan and western classical music to students regardless of gender, ethnicity, or social backgrounds.

For over a decade since its founding in 2010, ANIM flourished; its students and ensembles, including the famous all-girls’ orchestra Zohra, toured the world as a beacon of hope and a positive face of Afghanistan’s future. When the Taliban retook power in August 2021, Sarmast worked with an international coalition to rescue the 273 members of the school and re-establish it in Lisbon, Portugal.

Sarmast and ANIM are winners of the 2018 Polar Prize. He has also been named Honorary Fellow of the National College of Music, London, and has received other international honors. Sarmast and ANIM are the subject of numerous media reports in prominent international publications and documentaries.

The target of three assassination attempts, Dr. Sarmast was grievously injured in a suicide bombing at a peace concert of an ANIM ensemble in Kabul in 2014.

Dr. Sarmast received his PhD in Music from Monash University in 2005, and a Bachelor’s and Master’s of Arts from the Moscow State Conservatory.

Ahmad Sarmast is one of the International Music Council’s 5 Music Rights Champions.

For more information and to donate to the Afghanistan National Institute of Music, please visit https://www.anim-music.org.

Julie Trébault, Moderator

Julie Trébault is the director of the Artists at Risk Connection (ARC), a project of PEN America that aims to safeguard the right to artistic freedom by connecting threatened artists to support, building a global network of resources for artists at risk, and forging ties between arts and human rights organizations. She has nearly two decades of experience in international arts programming and network-building, including at the Museum of the City of New York, the Center for Architecture, the National Museum of Ethnology in The Netherlands, and the Musée du quai Branly in Paris.

Mai Khoi

Mai Khoi is an award-winning Vietnamese singer, composer, and activist. Her compositions and vocal performance represent the meeting of diverse musical traditions (Western and non-Western, acoustic and electro-acoustic, etc.) and confound listener expectations with experimental and, at times, highly improvised arrangements. In 2010, she rose to stardom after winning Vietnam’s most prestigious award for songwriting. As a popstar, Khoi released eight albums (in genres of Vietnamese pop and dance) and made regular nationally televised performances.

At the height of her fame, her engagement with activism brought her into conflict with Vietnam’s authoritarian government and transformed her artistic practice. Her artistic transformation is evident in Mai Khôi Chém Gió, a genre-splicing dissident trio she founded in 2016 that combines protest music with free jazz and lost musical traditions of Vietnam’s hill tribes. She then went on to participate in Seaphony, a project that aims to create the first pan-Southeast Asian orchestra comprised of ethnic minority musicians, as a conductor, arranger, and composer.

In recognition of her work at the intersection of art and activism, she was awarded the Václav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent. In 2019-2020, Mai Khoi was Artist in Residence at SHIM NYC. In 2021 she was Artist Protection Fund Fellow at the Global Studies Center of Pittsburgh University. In 2022 Mai Khoi was awarded Roosevelt Four Freedoms for Freedom of Speech. In the US, Mai Khoi has performed at Joe’s Pub, National Sawdust, and Lincoln Center.

Pamela Lopez

Pamela Lopez is a former actress with an MA in Arts Administration (2011) from Columbia University. As a leader in the field, she has worked in organizations such as Centro Cultural Gabriela Mistral (GAM) in Chile. Currently, she lives in Buenos Aires working as an independent consultant. As an academic, she teaches several university courses dedicated to arts management, planning, and marketing. She is also a researcher, specializing in performing arts.

Farida Shaheed

Farida Shaheed, a sociologist by training and activist by choice, was the United Nations’ first Special Rapporteur for cultural rights from 2009 to 2015. She dedicated a report in 2013 to the freedom of artistic creativity. Artistic expressions were also highlighted in other reports on, for example, copyright and advertising. In August 2022, she assumed responsibilities as the UN Special Rapporteur for Education.

Based in Pakistan, she heads Pakistan’s leading women’s rights organization, Shirkat Gah – Women’s Resource Centre. Widely published, she is the recipient of several national and international human rights awards.

Sara Whyatt

Sara Whyatt is a campaigner and researcher on freedom of artistic expression and human rights. She headed the writers’ association PEN International‘s freedom of expression program for over 20 years, during which time she campaigned for thousands of writers worldwide who had been imprisoned, attacked and even killed. She is now working on projects exploring the ways that artistic freedom is curtailed across the world, providing her expertise to a wide variety of organizations, including UNESCO, Council of Europe, International Federation of Arts Council and Cultural Associations, and the Swedish Arts Council as well as smaller arts and human rights organizations working to support threatened artists.

Mark Ludwig

Mark Ludwig is the founder and executive director of the Terezin Music Foundation (TMF), established in 1990 in remembrance of those thousands of leading musicians, composers, conductors, songwriters and other artists of Europe interned at Theresienstadt concentration camp near Prague during the Second World War. Those creators and artists were featured in Nazi propaganda efforts intended to obscure the on-going horrors of the Holocaust, after which nearly all were murdered at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp.

Mr. Ludwig, a Fulbright Scholar and celebrated violist emeritus with the Boston Symphony, has in tribute dedicated his professional life over the past three decades to developing TMF into a world-class, non-profit organization committed to documenting, preserving and advancing the resilience of the human spirit as expressed in the music and the arts created by victims of the Holocaust. Among its many programs, TMF sponsors the commission of musical works by young, emerging composers of all cultural backgrounds to act as agents of inspiration, healing, and transformation in the consciousness of future generations of artists and audiences.

TMF has likewise developed a number of education programs utilizing the music and history of the Terezin artists as powerful tools in the ongoing struggle against racism and intolerance. This effort has led to the creation of a widely adopted teaching curriculum entitled “Finding a Voice: Musicians in Terezin,” used in schools throughout the US and elsewhere to provide a forum in which issues such as intolerance, human rights and artistic freedom can be examined through music and discussion. Since the fall of 2001, Mr. Ludwig has served as an Adjunct Professor at Boston College lecturing on Art and Music During the Third Reich.

In 2022, the internationally-renown Steidl Verlag published Mr. Ludwig’s latest book, OUR WILL TO LIVE (www.our-will-to-live.org). It is accompanied by 200+ rarely seen works by imprisoned Terezin artists, and vintage recordings by survivors.

For more information and to donate to the Terezin Music Foundation, please visit www.terezinmusic.org.

Alfons Karabuda, Moderator

Alfons Karabuda is an accomplished composer with more than 30 years of experience in the music industry, he is an integral profile and driving force within the world of music. His current engagements extend across the international music industry. He is president of the International Music Council, honorary president of the European Composer and Songwriter Alliance as well as Executive Chairman of SKAP (The Swedish Association of Composers, Songwriters & Lyricists), The Global Node Stockholm and a former expert in the field of artistic rights to the UN Human Rights Council as well as in the cultural committee at the Swedish National Commission for UNESCO.

In addition, he serves as a member of the executive committee of STIM (The Swedish Performing Rights Society), KLYS (the Swedish Joint Committee for Artistic and Literary Professionals), board director of Musiksverige (Music Sweden), The Royal College of Music in Stockholm and the Global Music Vault.

Karabuda is also chairman of the Polar Music Prize Award Committee and member of the board. Karabuda was appointed expert by the Swedish Government on the report Restart for Culture – Recovery and Development after Corona in 2021.

Andra Matei

Andra is the Founding Director of Avant-Garde Lawyers (AGL). She is an art and free speech lawyer based in Paris. Her core expertise relates to creating unique legal strategies and the mobilization of teams that include both legal and art experts to best protect artists and the creation process. Alongside legal practice Andra lectures in human rights strategic litigation, artistic freedom and the rights of artists. In 2021, Andra received the Pro Bono Prize of the Paris Bar and the Quebec Bar for her work to defend artists facing harassment and censorship worldwide.
 
 
 

Diana Ramarohetra

Diana Ramarohetra is currently working at UN Resident Coordinator in Madagascar as a Project Manager. Prior her appointment in Madagascar, she was in charge of the International Fund for Cultural Diversity (IFCD) at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris which aims to foster the creative industries. From 2014 to 2018, she was the Program Manager at Arterial Network, the largest pan African network for creative sector based in South Africa. Among other achievements, she led the implementation of Artwatch Africa Project in 23 African countries for the protection and promotion of Artistic Freedom. She was a member of the Artists at Risk Connection’s Advisory Committee (USA).

Diana has worked in the arts and cultural sectors for a decade. In addition to her position at UNESCO and Arterial Network, she was the Secretary General of the French Institute in Rwanda. She started her professional path in 2004 as a cultural journalist in her home country Madagascar.

Diana holds a master’s degree in International Relations from Lyon, a master’s degree in Cultural Management from Alexandria and a Bachelor’s in communication from Antananarivo.

Ole Reitov

Ole Reitov is an internationally recognized expert on artistic freedom. As appointed member of the EU/UNESCO Expert Facility on the UNESCO 2005 Convention, he facilitates workshops and panels worldwide and is consulted by international human rights and arts organizations.

As co-founder and the Executive Director of Freemuse 2013-2017, he represented the organization in the UN Human Rights Council.

A selection of Ole’s publications can be downloaded at https://www.olereitov.com/reports.

Sanjay Sethi

Sanjay Sethi is the co-Executive Director and co-founder of Artistic Freedom Initiative (AFI), overseeing coordination of its advocacy programs and legal services in Europe and the United States. As Director, Mr. Sethi spearheaded AFI’s relocation program for global at-risk artists and initiated the first country-by-country human rights report series focusing on freedom of artistic expression. He recently initiated AFI’s strategic litigation program, designed to challenge restrictions to creative freedom before the European Court of Human Rights and EU Court of Justice.

Since 2010, Mr. Sethi has also served as the managing partner of Sethi & Mazaheri, LLC, dedicating his legal practice to immigration, asylum, and art law. In 2021, the firm was awarded New York State pro bono law firm of the year. He is admitted to practice law in New York, New Jersey, Washington DC and the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Mr. Sethi is currently a Supervising Attorney for University of California, Berkeley School of Law Arts and Innovation Representation program. He received his BA in economics and international studies from Northwestern University, MA in International Affairs from Columbia University, MA in Slavic Cultures from Columbia University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and JD from University of Miami School of Law. Mr. Sethi also holds certificates in Art and Cultural Heritage Law from Georgetown University Law Center and non-profit management from Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy.