2024-2025 Program Panelists
Panel A
Daniel Fishkin
Daniel Fishkin’s ears are ringing. He has performed as a soloist on modular synthesizer with the American Symphony Orchestra, developed sound installations in abandoned church sanctuaries, and played innumerable basement punk shows. Daniel’s lifework investigating the aesthetics of hearing damage has received international press; as an ally in the search for a cure, he has been awarded the title of “tinnitus ambassador” by the Deutsche Tinnitus-Stiftung. He is the only luthier that studied with Hans Reichel, the inventor of the daxophone, a thin hardwood strip played with a bow which sounds somewhere between a badger and a cello. Daniel’s instruments have traveled the world, and are played by musicians in Canada, USA, Norway, Germany, France, Japan, Denmark, Kazakhstan, and Australia. In 2015, Daniel formed The Daxophone Consort, the USA’s only ensemble dedicated to realizing new compositions and performances with this instrument. In 2016, Daniel was awarded a Project Grant from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage to stage his lifework Composing the Tinnitus Suites on a large scale. In 2022, Daniel was awarded the P.I.G. prize from the Art Foundation of Danish designer Henrik Vibskov. Daniel received his MA in Music Composition from Wesleyan University and studied privately with composer Maryanne Amacher and with multi-instrumentalist Mark Stewart. He has taught seminars on instrument design and electronic music at Bard College and the Cooper Union. He is currently a PhD Candidate in Composition and Computer Music at the University of Virginia.
Sandy Guttman
Sandy Guttman is a writer, artist, and independent curator. She maintains an independent curatorial practice through co-directing her apartment gallery—Curb Appeal—and consults on institutional accessibility and disability art and culture. Her museum experience includes project management in performance and programs at the Museum of Contemporary Art, working as both a curatorial assistant and an assistant curator at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and holding positions in both museum education and fundraising at the Art Institute of Chicago. Guttman has received degrees in Disability Studies and Museum and Exhibition Studies from the University of Illinois at Chicago and Art History from Knox College. She is a founding editor of the arts and culture publication FWD: Museums.
Brent Woods
Brent Woods is currently President and Owner of Inner World Communications, an entertainment production company. He was formerly Senior Director of Arts and Culture at Montgomery County Community College as Theater Manager and curator of the Lively Arts Series. Mr. Woods has spent over 40 years as an Arts Administrator, Tour Manager (artist logistics), Lighting Designer, and Stage Manager. His production credits have included working with Philadelphia Dance Company (Philadanco), Contemporary West Dance Theatre, Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, Headlong Dance Theater (Hotel Pool, The Cell, and This Town is a Mystery, Freedom Theatre, and the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival. His opera credits include the Opera Company of Philadelphia (1983-1989) and the Santa Fe Opera (1987). In addition, he was a panelist on the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Entry Track Panel Review (2018) and on the PA Partners Partnership Panel (2020). Mr. Woods earned his Master’s in Arts Administration from Drexel University (2013) and Bachelor’s degree from Temple University in Theatre/Communications (Art History minor) in 1991.
Panel B
Pia Agrawal
Pia Kishore Agrawal is the Executive Director of Staten Island Arts which serves as the arts council for the borough of Staten Island. Agrawal previously served as the inaugural Curator of Performing Arts at the Momentary, a multidisciplinary contemporary art space satellite to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, AR. From 2014-18, Pia was the Program Director at the University of Houston Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts where she produced the Center’s public programming including the annual Mitchell Artist Lecture and site-specific CounterCurrent festival. Prior to her work in Houston, Pia served as the Programming Director of FringeArts (Philadelphia, PA). Agrawal has served as an advisor with the New England Foundation for the Arts’s National Theater Project, as a panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts, Creative Capital, the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, and the MAP Fund, amongst others.
Deborah Hunt
Deborah Hunt has worked as a mask maker, mask and animated forms practitioner and theatre performance artist since 1972, creating and presenting original theatre works, performances and festivals or encounters in the South Pacific, the Caribbean, Europe, and Asia. Born and raised in New Zealand, she has been based in Puerto Rico since 1990, where she founded Maskhunt Motions, a nomadic laboratory for experimental object theatre work. Hunt teaches in communities worldwide, in a practice exploring animated forms ranging from miniatures to giants in public and private spaces. She has created encounters and festivals to promote puppetry for adult audiences and published mask and puppetry manuals in Spanish and English. She often performs in unconventional places and to very intimate audiences. Hunt characterizes her work as theatre of the useless.
Joel Snyder
Dr. Joel Snyder is known internationally as one of the world’s first “audio describers,” a pioneer in the field of Audio Description, a translation of visual images to vivid language for the benefit, primarily, of people who are blind or have a vision impairment. He is a life-long member of Actors’ Equity Association and SAG/AFTRA. He spent 20 years at the National Endowment for the Arts coordinating funding of arts presenters and other multidisciplinary projects; he has served on the Maryland State Arts Council theater review panel and was appointed to the Council by Governor Moore in 2023.