Britney Jean Spears is an American singer. Often referred to as the "Princess of Pop", she is credited with influencing the revival of teen pop during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Spears has sold over 150 million records worldwide, making her one of the world's best-selling music artists. She has earned numerous awards and accolades, including a Grammy Award, 15 Guinness world records, six MTV Video Music Awards, seven Billboard Music Awards, the inaugural Radio Disney Icon Award, and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Her heavily choreographed music videos earned her the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award.
Natalie Hershlag, known professionally as Natalie Portman, is an Israeli-born American actress. She has had a prolific film career from her teenage years and has starred in various blockbusters and independent films, receiving multiple accolades, including an Academy Award and two Golden Globe Awards.
Fred Wesley is an American trombonist who worked with James Brown in the 1960s and 1970s, and Parliament-Funkadelic in the second half of the 1970s.
Pamela Suzette Grier is an American actress and singer. Described by many as cinema's first female action star, she achieved fame for her starring roles in a string of 1970s action, blaxploitation and women in prison films for American International Pictures and New World Pictures. Her accolades include nominations for an Emmy Award, a Golden Globe Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, a Satellite Award and a Saturn Award.
Ivy Benson was an English musician and bandleader, who led an all-female swing band. Benson and her band gained prominence in the 1940s, headlining variety theatres and topping the bill at the London Palladium, and became the BBC's resident house band.
Augusta Read Thomas is an American composer and University Professor of Composition in the Department of Music at the University of Chicago, where she is also director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Composition.
Sophie Solomon is a British violinist, songwriter and composer who fuses many different musical influences into her music. She was artistic director of the Jewish Music Institute, SOAS from 2012 to 2015 and is now Chief Marketing Officer at high-growth music technology start-up ROLI.
Natalie Dessay is a French soprano, best known as an opera singer before her retirement from opera stage in 2013. She gained wide recognition after her portrayal of Olympia in The Tales of Hoffmann in 1992, and then performing at leading stages, such as the Paris Opera, Vienna State Opera, and the Metropolitan Opera.
Jim Campilongo is a New York roots rock guitarist, known for recording a series of mostly instrumental albums. He is also known for being a member of The Little Willies with Norah Jones.
James Robert Rotondi was an American jazz trumpeter, composer, arranger, educator, and conductor.
Luis Diego Bonilla is an American jazz trombonist of Costa Rican descent. He is also a producer, composer, and educator.
Metropolitan Opera Live in HD is a series of live opera performances transmitted in high-definition video via satellite from the Metropolitan Opera in New York City to select venues, primarily movie theaters, in the United States and other parts of the world. The first transmission was of a condensed English-language version of Mozart's The Magic Flute on December 30, 2006. Many of the video recordings are later rebroadcast via public television as part of the Great Performances at the Met series, and most are made available for streaming at Met Opera on Demand, a collection which also includes earlier SD video telecasts and audio recordings from Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts.
Hazmat Modine is a musical group based in New York City and led by singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Wade Schuman. Their music is rooted in blues and also touches on folk, jazz and World music. The most recent lineup of the band circa 2015 features harmonica, tuba, trumpet, saxophone, drums and two guitars, as well as solo and harmony vocals.
The Notebook is a 2004 American romantic drama film directed by Nick Cassavetes, from a screenplay by Jeremy Leven and Jan Sardi, and based on the 1996 novel of the same name by Nicholas Sparks. The film stars Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams as a young couple who fall in love in the 1940s. Their story is read from a notebook in the present day by an elderly man, telling the tale to a fellow nursing home resident.
Catherine Russell is an American jazz and blues singer. She is best known for her 2016 album Harlem on My Mind.
Alicia Amanda Vikander is a Swedish actress. She is the recipient of various accolades, including an Academy Award, and nominations for two Golden Globe Awards and three British Academy Film Awards. She is best known globally for playing the British heroine Lara Croft in the 2018 reboot Tomb Raider.
Bernie Tom Collins is an American music producer and publisher in Nashville, Tennessee who has received three CMA Awards as Producer of the Year, and seven Grammy nominations. He produced a steady stream of country music hits over a 30-year span from artists including Ronnie Milsap, Barbara Mandrell, Sylvia, Tom T. Hall, Jim Ed Brown, James Galway, Marie Osmond, and Steve Wariner. Collins served as chairman of the Board of the CMA in 1979 and 1980.
Greg Morrow is an American drummer, percussionist, session musician, mixing engineer, and vocalist.
Joseph Peter Daley is an American educator, jazz musician, composer and arranger known for his work with the tuba, trombone and euphonium.
