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David Pinansky 2006│ May the Words Honorable Mention Geela Rayzel Raphael 2008 │ Angels Carry You Lance Rhodes 2008│ Psalm 29 Transcontinental Music Ken Richmond 2006│ Psalm 92 • Sefirat Ha-Omer Honorable Mention 2004│ 'Al Ken Nekave • Kevod'kha Malei 'Olam • Yigdal Hernan Rog 2004│ Modim Anahnu Lakh Lawrence Rush 2004│ Sim Shalom
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Jeff Marder plays keyboards for Cirque du Soleil’s O in Las Vegas, Nevada. He toured as the associate conductor for the national tour of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, having also played keyboard for the Broadway production. He toured in 1999 and 2000 as music director of the Big Apple Circus Stage Show and from 1993 to 1999 as pianist for the Harlem Spiritual Ensemble. His Friday Evening Jazz Shabbat Service has been performed numerous times at congregations in the New York and Philadelphia areas, and his Song of Miriam was premiered by Cantor Barbra Lieberstein. At age 12, Jeff made his piano debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra at the Academy of Music. He has also been a visiting artist/lecturer at Middlebury College and Kenyon College. Jeff holds music degrees from William Paterson University and New York University.
Claudia Mikail, MD, MPH has medicine on her mind and music in her heart. Her love of Jewish music began in the Junior Choir at the Old Westbury Hebrew Congregation in New York. At Princeton University she studied music composition, wrote musical theatre for the Triangle Club, and founded the Hillel Jewish Singing Group for which she composed erev Shabbat melodies, later recorded as Songs of Sinai. She has won awards from the National Young People's Music Composition Contest, the New York State Music Competition Contest, and the Newsday Teen Talent Competition. She performs her works, which typically blend Sephardic/Mizrahi and European motifs, at synagogues and at benefits for Jewish philanthropies. She is a recipient of the Annual Achievement Award from the IJWO Jewish Women’s Organization of Los Angeles. 
After completing his undergraduate studies at California State University, Northridge, and Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Hazzan Keith Miller studied hazzanut with renowned Cantors Allan Michelson, z''l, and Meir Finkelstein in Los Angeles. Hazzan Miller was accepted into the Cantors Assembly in 1996 and received Hazzan- Minister commission in 1999. Since 1993, Hazzan Miller has been hazzan and director of education at Kehillat Ma'arav in Santa Monica, California. He has served on the Board of Directors of Los Angeles Hebrew High School, as co-chair of the Bureau of Jewish Education Religious School Principal Council, and as Cantors Assembly representative to the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism. He is currently treasurer of the Cantors Assembly, Western Region.
Wendy Morrison is a Maryland native from a family in which everyone sang and played a musical instrument. Having learned to play piano from her mother when she was five, she later learned to play accordion, whistle, concertina, and banjo. She attended high school in South America and learned Hebrew as an adult. A member of Tikvat Israel in Rockville, Maryland, she tutors b'nai mitzvah, and teaches Hebrew at a local Hebrew school. She also teaches music and repairs accordions at the House of Musical Traditions in Takoma Park. A performer with two Klezmer bands, Klezmos and Klezcentricity, she began composing Jewish music around 1999. She founded the band Shalshelet (not affiliated with the Shalshelet Foundation) in 2002. Several of her compositions were performed and presented in workshops at the 2004 Festival. 
Orit Perlman is a singer, cantorial soloist, and composer who specializes in Jewish musical traditions. She studied voice at the Rubin Academy of Music, Tel Aviv University, and completed the program for Israeli cantorial soloists through Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem. She has led tefilah and life-cycle ceremonies all over Israel, and is now based at Congregation Ohel Avraham in Haifa. In collaboration with HUC Jerusalem’s Sadna program, she created the CD Tefilotai, and she continues to teach childhood educators on the topic of prayer. Her performances in Israel and the United states highlight hazzanut, melodies in Hebrew, Aramaic, Yiddish, Ladino, and her own compositions. She lives with her family on the Carmel in Israel. 
Howard Pfeifer has worked extensively in Chicago and Los Angeles as a pianist, composer, arranger, and musical director in television commercials, feature films, variety shows, T.V. series, and record albums. He began his musical studies at age 4. As a young performer he won several piano competitions including all divisions of the prestigious Society of American Musicians, a feat not repeated in the 50 year history of the competition. At age 12 he was a vocal soloist in a performance of Leonard Bernstein's Chichester Psalms with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Choir under the direction of Seiji Ozawa. He has worked on over 1000 commercials (as pianist/composer/music director), and arranged and performed for TV series and variety shows including The Chipmunks (over 150 songs for their TV series in the 1980s), The Lennon Sisters Christmas Special, Fame, The Pink Panther, and CBS Television Christmas Classics. Among the performers he has worked with are Shawn Kolvin, Patti LaBelle, Vonda Shepard, Johnny Cash, BB King, Johnny Frigo, Karen Carpenter, Aretha Franklin, Jim Brickman, Shari Lewis, Mel Torme, Dom DeLuise, and Marie Osmond. 
David M. Pinansky has been composing for more than 25 years. Born in Portland, Maine, he has an undergraduate degree in music from Colby College and a law degree from New England School of Law in Boston. In addition to his instrumental works, he has composed more than a dozen pieces for the synagogue which have been heard in services and performances throughout the country. In 1982 he was the Grand Prize winner of the Second Biennial Jewish Composers Contest. He was a commissioned composer for the 1986 national convention of the American Conference of Cantors and Temple Guild Musicians. In 1988, the Texas Bach Choir premiered a new setting of L'Cha Dodi for choir, solo and organ. In 1994, his music was featured at a special service for Jewish Music Month at the Northern Virginia Hebrew Congregation, and in 1996, he was guest artist at the Greater Baltimore Cantors Association where nine of his works were presented. In 2001, he was one of three composers in residence for the Reston Chorale’s Seasonal Celebration concert in Reston, Virginia. In May 2004, Silent Prayer was first presented in honor of the retirement of Rabbi Rosalind Gold. In 2005, he was guest composer for the Sabbath of Song at Temple Emanu El in Houston, Texas. He is a member of the Guild of Temple Musicians.
Rabbi
Geela Rayzel Raphael, a songwriter/liturgist, was ordained at the
Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. She also studied at Indiana
University, Brandeis, Pardes and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Currently she is the Rabbi of Beth Israel Congregation in Woodbury,
NJ. She consults with the Jewish Women's Spirituality Institute and
InterFaithways: an Interfaith Family Support Network of Greater Philadelphia.
She teaches in numerous locations in the area as well. She performs
with the a cappella trio MIRAJ, which recently released the CD Healing
Chants for the Soul, and with Shabbat Unplugged. She can also be
heard on her CD, Friday Night Revived. 
Born in Fairfax, Virginia, Lance Rhodes grew up in Ormond Beach, Florida. His musically active family included a grandfather who was a pianist and composer and played sixteen instruments, and a grandmother who was an actress and singer. He wrote his first major composition in high school, a symphonic poem for 23 instrumental parts which he conducted at graduation. He received a Bachelors of Music from the University of Miami in 2003. While there, he directed several music groups, composed soundtracks for several student films, and headlined as the main performer/composer for events such as the March of Dimes Walk and University of Miami 9-11 Vigil. For a brief period after graduation he worked as a free-lance arranger for Warner Brothers Publications. During that time he wrote the theme-song for Comedy Night School, a national television show. He graduated from the H. L. Miller Cantorial School at the Jewish Theological Seminary and currently serves Congregation Brith Shalom in Bellaire, Texas.
Cantor Ken Richmond served for two years as hazzan of the Midway Jewish Center, in Syosset, NY, and is now back in Red Sox territory as cantor of Temple Israel of Natick, MA. A violinist and singer, he has been founding and directing klezmer bands for years, including the Yale Klezmer Band, the Klezmaniacs, and Fish Street Klezmer. For his senior project at JTS’s H.L. Miller Cantorial School, he composed a new klezmer Friday night service, in collaboration with his wife, Shira Shazeer. He has been serving as a member of the Rabbinical Assembly’s Mahzor Committee, where he is composing congregational melodies for newly-inserted liturgical poems. 
Hernan Rog was born in 1965 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Trained in piano and organ at the Manuel de Falla Conservatory of Music in Buenos Aires, he has served as choir director and organist for numerous congregations in the Argentine capital, including 12 years at the Ohr Hadash Hebrew Congregation. Rog comes from a family of musicians and hazzanim, and has been a member of numerous musical ensembles playing Jewish music as well as jazz. Modim Anahnu Lakh is one of several liturgical pieces he has composed.
Lawrence Rush is a composer and lyricist as well as a professional singer and actor. His choral compositions include a complete Friday night Shabbat service for cantor, choir, and organ and Kedusha for cantor and large chorus. He has composed art songs, popular songs, and musicals. He is currently a member of the BMI Musical Theater Workshop and is working on a new musical and an opera. As a performer, he was a full-time member of the San Francisco Opera chorus and has performed many roles in both opera and musical theater. Most recently, he was seen as Bob Cratchit in the national tour of Scrooge, the Musical. He has sung tenor in Park Avenue Synagogue's Shabbat quartet for many years.