COMPOSER, MUSICIAN, SOCIAL ACTIVIST

Andres Solis is a composer and sound artist. His work has focused on exploring free musical forms that intend to dilute the rigid constraints imposed by traditional musical structures. He has sought to assimilate his environment to find his own
language through computer-assisted composition, improvisation and interdisciplinary artistic collaborations. A special attraction for the performing and cinematic arts has led him to collaborate on different projects of theater, dance, video art, sound design and film music. He has also worked with prepared turntables and modified acoustic instruments in combination with analog and digital processing tools. 

His academic training started in 1989 in Mexico City at the C.I.E.M. (Musical Studies and Research Center). Then he moved to Holland to continue at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, where he studied with Clarence Barlow. Later, in Paris, with the support of a grant from the French Government, he concluded a postgraduate degree (DEA) under the supervision of Horacio Vaggione in the Department of Sciences of Performing Arts in Paris 8 University, Saint-Denis. He was co-director of the experimental music festivals AURAL and RADAR in México City. In 2012 he entered the National System of Art Creators of FONCA.

To hear some of Solis’ compositions, visit www.soundcloud.com/andres-solis71.

Scot Hanna-Weir is an Associate Professor of Music, Director of Choral Activities, and chair of the Department of Music at Santa Clara University, and Artistic Director of the Santa Clara Chorale. He is recognized for his innovative programming, his fluency with technology in performance, and his engagement with issues of equity and social justice. In addition to regularly commissioning and premiering new works, he is also an active composer and arranger himself. 

Scot regularly conducts the combined choirs of Santa Clara University and the Santa Clara Chorale in the performance of masterworks with orchestra. Recent performances include major works by Bach, Fauré, Handel, Haydn, Lauridsen, Mozart, Orff, Rutter, and Shaw, alongside world, US, and regional premieres of works by Henry Dehlinger, Scott Gendel, Jocelyn Hagen, Cecilia McDowall, Andres Solis, and Dale Trumbore.

As a composer and arranger, Scot’s works tend to present innovative fusions of technology in choral performance or highlight issues of injustice or suffering. His composition Sympathy for choir and smartphones (co-created with SCU faculty member and electronic musician Bruno Ruviaro) has been widely performed. Buck v Bell (2017), sets the text of the 1927 Supreme Court decision by Oliver Wendell Holmes that legalized the forced sterilization of the “mentally feeble”. The Wound, was commissioned by the San Diego Pro Arte Voices for their Disarm Hate project and highlights the role gun violence plays in suicide. His most recent projects include a 45-minute score for The Water Project, a collaborative theater and dance piece that examines issues around water and a choral score commissioned by the Washington, DC-based vocal ensemble, Bridge, that serves as the musical underscoring of the short film featuring a spoken-word piece by poet Nina Brewton. His most recent composition project is a setting of the text of the Obergefell v. Hodges Supreme Court decision in a multi-movement work for choir and orchestra entitled Four Principles of Marriage, premiered by the SCU Choirs, Santa Clara Chorale, and San José Chamber Choir in May 2023. Four Principles received its East Coast premiere by Allan Laiño and the Congressional Chorus in March of 2024. 

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Scot’s SCU Chamber Singers were the first university ensemble in the United States to perform a live-remote choral performance. He has presented and published on this topic and issues of pedagogy and practice in virtual choir production for organizations across the country. He has served as an advisor on virtual choirs for ChorAmor and has served in various positions for the Western Region American Choral Directors Association, including vice-chair of the 2022 and 2024 regional conferences. He is also the College and University Repertoire and Resources chair for the California Choral Directors Association.

Scot holds a Doctor of Musical Arts in choral conducting from the University of Maryland, a Master of Music in choral conducting from the University of Wisconsin, and a Bachelor of Music in choral music education from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. His major conducting teachers have included Matthew Halls, Helmuth Rilling, Edward Maclary, James Ross, Beverly Taylor, William Carroll, and Welborn Young.

AUTHOR, UNINTENDED  LESSONS OF REVOLUTION

Tanalís Padilla is a historian of Latin America at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).  Padilla’s work focuses on political and agrarian movements of modern Mexico. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego in 2001 and her B.A. from Pomona College in 1995. 

Her first book, Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata: The Jaramillista Movement and the Myth of the Pax Priísta, 1940-1962 (Duke University Press, 2008) recounts the history of an agrarian movement that turned to armed struggle during an era of Mexican history previously considered one of social and political stability. 

She is co-editor and contributor of a 2013 special issue of the Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research (JILAR), which analyzes the implications of Mexico’s recently declassified intelligence documents for postrevolutionary historiography. 

Her newest book, Unintended Lessons of Revolution: Student Teachers and Political Radicalism in Twentieth-Century Mexico, traces the history of Mexico’s rural normales, training schools for teachers.

In Mexico, Prof. Padilla is a frequent contributor to the national newspaper La Jornada and has published an edited volume entitled El campesinado y su persistencia en la actualidadmexicana (Conaculta and Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2013), an interdisciplinary and bi-national work on the Mexican countryside and it’s recent past. Después de Zapata: El movimiento jaramillista y los orígenes de la guerrilla en México (1940-1962), the Spanish translation of her first book, was published by Akal in September 2015.

Professor Padilla has received fellowships from the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas, Austin, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation and the Ford Foundation. 

Padilla is currently working on a book about Cuba’s medical internationalism in Latin America.

SENIOR REPORTER AND PRODUCER

Anayansi Diaz-Cortes is a senior reporter and producer for Reveal. Her work has been featured everywhere from All Things Considered to Radio Ambulante and This American Life. She is a recipient of the Overseas Press Club Award, the Edward R. Murrow Award, and the Third Coast/Richard H. Driehaus Foundation award. Previously, she produced for Radio Diaries and has done extensive reporting in both the U.S. and Mexico.
[email protected]
@anayansi_dc

Kate Doyle is a senior analyst of U.S. policy in Latin America at the National Security Archive. She directs several major research projects, including the Mexico Project, which collects U.S. and Mexican government documents on the countries’ shared histories. Since 1992, Doyle has worked with Latin American human rights groups, truth commissions, prosecutors and judges to obtain government files from secret archives that shed light on state violence.

 John Gibler is an American journalist who predominantly writes from and about Mexico. He is the author of Mexico Unconquered: Chronicles of Power and Revolt and To Die in Mexico: Dispatches from Inside the Drug War. He is also a correspondent for Pacifica Radio's KPFA in Mexico. He has reported on the ground from the Zapatistas Other Campaign, the protests against electoral fraud in Mexico City, and the uprising in Oaxaca. He has reported for Left Turn, In These Times, Common Dreams, Yes! Magazine, ColorLines and Democracy Now!. He was a Global Exchange Media fellow from 2006 to 2008. 

Gibler has also reported from Oaxaca for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the international edition of the Miami Herald. Before moving to Mexico, Gibler worked for various human rights and social justice organizations in Mexico, Peru, and California. He reported on environmental justice issues and water privatization in California for Public Citizen, Terrain Magazine, ColorLines, the Environmental Justice Coalition for Water, the Journal on Race, Poverty and the Environment and other independent media. He has been reporting on social movements since January 2006. Topics he has covered in the past include the May 4th massive police raid in San Salvador Atenco, the Uprising in Oaxaca, the Zapatista Other Campaign and the Massive Protest Against Electoral Fraud. 

He earned an MSc degree at London School of Economics during 2000 to 2001. Before that he had also lived in Japan. 

Gibler was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Latin American Studies at Hampshire College on 2013, where he taught courses such as Decolonial Thought in Latin America and Violence and Writing in Mexico's Drug War. 

Major publications 

• Mexico Unconquered: Chronicles of Power and Revolt (City Lights, 2009) ISBN 978-0-87286-493-1
• To Die in Mexico: Dispatches from Inside the Drug War (City Lights, 2011) ISBN 978-0-87286-517-4
• I Couldn't Even Imagine That They Would Kill Us: An Oral History of the Attacks Against the Students of Ayotzinapa (City Lights, 2017) ISBN 978-0-87286-748-2
• Torn from the World: A Guerrilla's Escape from a Secret Prison in Mexico (City Lights, 2018) ISBN 978-0872867529

Vince Brown was appointed as the Director of the Institute of Politics in May 2020 and is an Instructor of the Practice of Political Science at Utah Tech University.
Prior to his tenure at UT, Vince obtained his Honors Bachelor of Science from the University of Utah. Vince went on to work for a Utah Governor and United States Senator in Washington, DC.

Vince then obtained his law degree from Cornell Law School. Following law school, Vince worked as a litigation attorney for two global law firms in California, where he specialized in business and securities litigation. While in California, he served for ten years as an Administrative Law Judge for the County of San Diego and owned a locally sourced organic market, bar and restaurant.

In addition to his work at UT, Vince has a mediation business in Saint George, Utah.

Jan Nimmo was born in Campbeltown, Argyll. She still regards Kintyre as home. Her parents, Neil Nimmo and Jean McCulloch, both local to Kintyre, had an important influence on how Jan sees the world today. Neil, who left school at 11 to work on farms near his birthplace of Drumlemble and went on to work as a miner, lorry driver and shotfirer, was an enthusiastic painter of seascapes in his spare time. Jan's interest in art and manual labour stem back directly to her father. Jean, her mother, worked part time in local shops including the book shop. Jean instilled a sense of fairness in Jan which she believes still underpins and guides her work today.

Jan left Campbeltown when she was 17 to study at Glasgow School of Art where she graduated with Honours and went on to complete a Postgraduate Diploma. She became a professional artist and designer in 1986. Since then Jan has worked as an artist, exhibiting paintings, woodcuts and installations regularly. She also works as a designer and has sold textile designs in the UK, Australia, Hong Kong and New York. Her interior design commissions include a Mexican restaurant complete with artefacts and popular art which she sourced herself in Mexico (trading fairly). She has worked on many graphics and illustration projects.
Jan started to travel to Spain in 1986 and since then has returned to University to study Spanish. She is now fluent in both Iberian and Latin American Spanish and has often worked as an interpreter for Latin American visitors on speaker tours. As well as travelling through many regions of Spain, Jan has travelled extensively throughout Mexico and Cuba where she has researched popular arts and music.

Steve serves as dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Utah Tech and is the producer of the "Remember the 43 Students" art installation and campus engagement.  He designed and built the installation in late 2015 for its first public exhibition in January 2016. He also produced the film, XLIII: A Contemporary Requiem (2016), which documents his initial engagement with the issues of the 43.

[email protected]