Board of Advisors
Stuart Canning
Stuart is Associate Director of Development, Individual Giving with the San Francisco Symphony. Prior to his current role at the San Francisco Symphony, Stuart served as the Director of Development for the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University. Formerly, he was the executive director of development and alumni affairs for the American University of Paris, where he worked with the president on strategic planning and media-public relations; was responsible for oversight of all major special events; and managed the directors of alumni relations and communications. Prior to working in France, he was senior international officer in principal gifts and international advancement at Brown University.
Ben Harbert
Ben is an ethnomusicologist, an avant-garde composer, and a concert-level performer on guitar, oud and Indian tabla. At Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music, Ben directed the guitar department from 1998 to 2001, helped develop classes in Arab music, taught tabla classes from 1999-2002, and developed and directed a comprehensive world music department. In addition, he acted on the education committee for the Chicago World Music Festival. His latest performance project is leading the Los Angeles Electric 8, an electric guitar chamber octet. Harbert holds a C.Phil. in Ethnomusicology and a BA in music and anthropology. He is currently an Artist in Residence at the Los Angeles Music Center as an American Music specialist and writing his Ph.D. dissertation on music in Louisiana prisons at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Kim Mondelli
Kim Mondelli is a financial advisor to government agencies and their non-profit affiliates, raising and structuring financing for real estate transactions, primarily in the fields of low-income housing and renewable energy. Kim has sat on the board of a local League of Women Voters association, and was the organization’s event coordinator. More recently, she served as the volunteer coordinator at community arts non-profit, the Red Poppy Art House, located in the Mission District of San Francisco. She has also volunteered for various community-based gardening programs, habitat restoration programs, and other arts programs. She earned her bachelors degree in electrical engineering from Cornell University and her MPP from the University of California, Berkeley.
Bahram Seyedin-Noor
Bahram is one of the school co-founders and a devoted student of classical and flamenco guitar. He was born in Tehran, Iran and has traveled and worked abroad in cities across Latin America and Russia. Bahram received his B.A. in Economics and Literature from Pomona College and his J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is currently a partner at the law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, where he focuses on litigation.
Atesh Sonneborn
Atesh is associate director, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings within the U.S. national museum complex. Previously he wrote new music for theater, film, and dance productions, managed productions and artists and produced traditional world music concerts, theatre festivals, and recordings. Sonneborn co-authored (with drummer Mickey Hart and Professor Fredric Lieberman) Planet Drum (Harper San Francisco, 1991). Articles, reviews, and photos by him appear in The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music and scholarly journals. He has taught or presented at colleges and universities in North America, Europe and the Near East, is a member of the UNESCO-advisory International Council for Traditional Music, chair of the Society for Ethnomusicology’s Audio-Visual Committee and founding member, Applied Ethnomusicology Committee.