List of writers who contribute to San Francisco Classical Voice. Click on the authors' names to see a list of their articles published by SFCV
A Los Angeles native based in the Berkeley area since 1996, Andrew Gilbert covers jazz, international music and dance for KQED's California Report, The Mercury News, San Francisco Chronicle, Berkeleyside and other publications.
Ben Kutner is a Los Angeles-based composer, music writer, and lecturer. His music has appeared at venues across the U.S. and he is the founder of the New Parnassus Ensemble.
Bill Doggett is a published scholar on race and performing-arts history with a national profile.
Brett Campbell writes about music for The Wall Street Journal, Willamette Week, Oregon Arts Watch, SFCV and many other publications.
Los Angeles-based writer Catherine Womack covers classical music and the arts for the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Magazine, Alta, SFCV, and more. Womack earned a B.M. (Queens University of Charlotte) and M.M. (Southern Methodist University) in piano performance and pedagogy and spent 10 years as a piano instructor and professor of music history before pivoting to journalism. Dog lady. Will travel for opera.
Charles Burns is a writer, multi-instrumentalist, composer, and educator living in Los Angeles. He is on faculty at the California Institute of the Arts, where he teaches music theory, and is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in composition at UCLA.
Chrysanthe Tan is a composer, violinist, and 2022 Fellow of the Rubin Institute for Music Criticism. They studied composition, violin performance, and creative writing at Stanford and California Institute of the Arts.
A historian with a music habit, CJ Ru has written for the Boston Globe, and served tours of duty at San Francisco Opera, Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra & Chorale, and Orpheus Chamber Orchestra.
Cristina Schreil is a Bay Area-based award-winning arts and culture journalist. She has written for BBC Music, Acoustic Guitar, Strings, Nob Hill Gazette, and more.
David Bratman is a librarian who lives with his lawfully wedded soprano and a wall full of symphony recordings.
Elijah Ho is a classical music contributor to Bay Area News Group, KQED, and the San Francisco Chronicle. Before moving to the Bay Area, he studied music (piano) at l’Université de Montréal. Follow him on Twitter @elijahho.
Emery Kerekes is a writer and arts administrator based in New York City. Winner of the 2022 Rubin Prize in Music Criticism, he is a founding editor and contributor for Which Sinfonia. His writings have also appeared or are forthcoming in Early Music America, Musical America, Opera News, and on his own site, Classical Music Geek. He works in The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Department of Live Arts.
Emily Wilson lives in San Francisco. She has written for many different outlets, including Smithsonian.com, The Daily Beast, 48 Hills, Hyperallergic, Latino USA, Women’s Media Center, The Observer, Alta Journal, California Magazine, and SF Weekly. For many years, she taught adults getting their high school diplomas at City College of San Francisco.
Giacomo Fiore is an Italian-born guitarist and musicologist specializing in U.S. experimentalism and intonation. He teaches at USF and UCSC.
Gil French was concert editor of American Record Guide from 2005 to 2020. He has reviewed recordings and concerts since 1988. He also served as midday classical host in public radio from 1988 to 2003.
Harlow Robinson is an author, lecturer, and journalist. His books include Sergei Prokofiev: A Biography and Russians in Hollywood: Hollywood’s Russians. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, Musical America, and Opera News. He is emeritus professor of history at Northeastern University.
Helen Wu is a pianist, teacher, and arts administrator based in San Francisco. She was a recipient of the Barbara Fritz Chamber Music Award and a writing fellow at the 2022 Rubin Institute for Music Criticism.
Ilana Walder-Biesanz reviews opera and theater for San Francisco Classical Voice, Opera Online, Bachtrack, and Stark Insider. She studied in England as a Gates-Cambridge Scholar (European Literature and Culture) and in Germany as a Fulbright Scholar (theater studies).
Iris Kwok is a journalist based in Berkeley, CA. She plays the cello and studied music, among other subjects, at the University of California, Berkeley.
Janos Gereben appreciates news tips, corrections, and words of encouragement at [email protected].
Jasmine Liu is a writer and journalist from the San Francisco Bay Area who comments on literature in translation, contemporary art, classical music, and more. More of her work is available at www.jasmineliu.blog.
Jason Victor Serinus regularly reviews music and audio for Stereophile, SFCV, Classical Voice North America, AudioStream, American Record Guide, and other publications. The whistling voice of Woodstock in She’s a Good Skate, Charlie Brown, the longtime Oakland resident now resides in Port Townsend, Washington.
Jeff Kaliss has featured and reviewed classical, jazz, rock, and world musics and other entertainment for the San Francisco Chronicle and a host of other regional, national, international, and web-based publications.
Jeffrey Day is a writer in the UC Davis College of Letters and Science communications office. Prior to joining the university in 2014, he had a long career as an arts journalist in the Southeastern U.S. He is recipient of a National Arts Journalism Fellowship at Columbia University and a National Endowment for the Arts Classical Music Fellowship.
Jeremy Reynolds (@Reynolds_PG) is the classical-music critic and reporter at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and a former editorial board member. He also edits Opera America Magazine and writes for Symphony magazine, Early Music America magazine, Opera magazine, and others.
Jim Farber wrote his first classical music review in 1982 for the Los Angeles Jewish Journal. Since then, he has been a feature writer and critic of classical music, opera, theater, and fine art for Daily Variety, the Copley Newspapers and News Service, and the Los Angeles Newspaper Group (Media News).
Jonathan Curiel is an award-winning author and journalist who has written widely about Islam, the Middle East, foreign affairs, visual art, film, music, and other subjects during a career that has produced two books and thousands of articles. Read more at his website.
Jonathan Leal is a writer and musician originally from the Rio Grande Valley. Currently based in Los Angeles, he writes and teaches at the University of Southern California. His first book, Dreams in Double Time, is forthcoming from Duke University Press.
Josef Woodard is a veteran journalist-critic-author (writing for the Los Angeles Times for 25 years), is an ongoing contributor to DownBeat magazine, and has written for many other music publications, including Rolling Stone, The Strad, and Chamber Music, as well as the Santa Barbara Independent in his hometown.
Katelyn Simone is a New York City-based writer and oboist working at the intersection of art and social impact.
Ken Iisaka is a pianist, a software engineer, and bon vivant living in Foster City.
Laura Stanfield Prichard is a musicologist based in the Boston Area. She is a Visiting Researcher at Harvard and gives frequent lectures for the San Francisco Symphony, San Francisco Opera, and Chicago Symphony.
In an operatic career that has spanned 30 years, Layna Chianakas has portrayed over 50 roles, directed throughout the United States, and currently maintains a private voice studio of singers aged 14–64. She holds a Master of Music in vocal performance from the University of Illinois and served for 10 years as head of the Voice Department and Opera Theatre at San Jose State University.
Lev Mamuya is a Los Angeles-based writer, musician, and arts administrator. His pieces on music, food, and popular culture have been featured in outlets such as The Drift and San Francisco Classical Voice. He has performed extensively as a cellist across the U.S., including recent engagements with the Semiosis Quartet and Castle of Our Skins.
Lily O'Brien is a freelance writer and editor with a passion for the performing arts. She has written feature articles and previews for a variety of publications including Downbeat, JazzTimes, Marin Arts & Culture, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Marin Independent Journal, and Strings magazine. She is a singer who has performed professionally in a variety of genres, and an avid world traveler and bicyclist.
Lisa Hirsch is a Bay Area music writer. She studied music at Brandeis and Stony Brook and blogs about classical music and opera at Iron Tongue of Midnight.
Lisa Houston is a feature contributor to Classical Singer magazine and San Francisco Classical Voice, and the founder of SingerSpirit.com, a website for singers.
Lou Fancher is a San Francisco Bay Area writer. Her work has been published by WIRED.com, Diablo Magazine, Oakland Tribune, Contra Costa Times, InDance, East Bay Express, Oakland Magazine, SF Weekly, and others. She is a children's book author, designer and illustrator, with over 50 books in print. Also a choreographer, ballet master and teacher, she coaches professional ballet and contemporary dance companies in the U. S.
Louise T. Guinther, longtime senior editor at Opera News, is a freelance writer on the arts.
Melissa Hudson Bell is a choreographer, teacher, performer, and scholar based in Oakland. A dance nerd through and through, she holds an MFA in Experimental Choreography and a Ph.D. in Critical Dance Studies. She has taught at Santa Clara University, UC Berkeley, and University of San Francisco and has written for the San Francisco Chronicle, In Dance, and Life as a Modern Dancer.
Michael Zwiebach is the senior editor/content manager for SFCV. He assigns all articles and content, manages the writing staff, and does editing. A member of SFCV from the beginning, Michael holds a Ph.D. in music history from the University of California, Berkeley.
Journalist Molly Colin writes about the arts and cultural trends.
Nicholas Jones, professor emeritus at Oberlin College, is a teacher, lecturer, and translator living in the Bay Area. He sings and plays recorder, violin, and viola da gamba in a number of early-music groups.
Paul Kotapish is the managing editor for SFCV. You can learn more here or at guitarfish.net.
Peter Feher is SFCV’s managing editor. He can be reached at [email protected].
Rebecca Wishnia is a freelance violinist and writer.
Richard S. Ginell writes regularly about music for the Los Angeles Times, Musical America.com, and Classical Voice North America. He has also contributed to Gramophone and The Strad, among many other publications. In another lifetime, he was chief music critic of the Los Angeles Daily News. He is also the author of the recently released book Makin’ a Joyful Noise: The Lives and Times of the (Slightly) Fabulous Limeliters.
Scott Cmiel is Chair of the guitar and musicianship departments at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music Preparatory Division and Director of the guitar program at San Francisco School of the Arts.
Simon Cohen is a Ph.D. student in musicology at UC Berkeley. A recent transplant from New York, he previously was head of classical programming at WKCR-FM. He can be reached at [email protected].
Stephen Shaw has been a passionate lover of classical (and jazz, same thing) music for 60 years, while pursuing a career in public education, civil rights, and high tech on both coasts. He’s written on politics, as well as an unpublished novel (centered in Silicon Valley). This is his first music review.
Steve Osborn, a children's writer by day, moonlights as a violist and music critic.
Steven Vargas is a Los Angeles-based journalist, dancer, and actor whose work focuses on the intersections of media, social justice, and performance. He has written for the Los Angeles Times, Dance Magazine, USA Today, E! News, and more.
Steven Winn is a San Francisco-based writer and critic and frequent interviewer for City Arts & Lectures. His work has appeared in Gramophone, Musical America, Opera, Symphony, and the San Francisco Chronicle.
Tamzin Elliott is a composer and writer based in Los Angeles and a doctoral student at the University of Southern California.
Tim Greiving is an arts journalist in Los Angeles who specializes in film music. He regularly produces radio features for NPR and Classical KUSC, and writes for the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post.
Tom Jacobs is a former senior staff writer for Santa Barbara-based Pacific Standard magazine, and a former staff writer for the Los Angeles Daily News and Santa Barbara News-Press. He tracks and analyzes trends in the arts and social sciences, with an emphasis on psychology, the role of culture and the cultivation of creativity. A native of Chicago, he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in journalism from Northwestern University.
Victoria Looseleaf is an award-winning international arts journalist who covers dance, music, theater and the visual arts. Publications she has contributed to include the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and KCET Artbound. Her children’s/coffee table book, Russ & Iggy’s Art Alphabet, was published by Red Sky Presents.
Yoshi Kato is an independent journalist from the South Bay who covers both popular and performing arts-oriented music and arts and entertainment in general. He tweets and is on Instagram as @yoshi140.