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Biography:
David Hajdu is a critic and cultural historian esteemed for his work on American music. The author of eight books of criticism, history, biography, and fiction, he is a four-time winner of the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for Music Writing and a three-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His biography of Billy Strayhorn, Lush Life, was named one of the Hundred Best Nonfiction Books of All Time by The New York Times. He is a professor at Columbia Journalism School, where he teaches a graduate seminar in Arts and Culture. Hajdu is also a songwriter and librettist for concert music whose work has been praised by Stephen Holden of the Times as "the coming together of Joni Mitchell and Stephen Sondheim with a 21st century perspective."
Anna Balas, MD is a training and supervising adult and child analyst at NYPSI and Associate Professor at The New York Presbyterian Hospital Payne Whitney Division with a private practice in NYC. She has taught on psychic trauma and on healthy and pathological narcissism. In 2022, she authored “Yearning for Intimacy: Béla Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle” in Opera on the Couch: Music, Emotional Life, and Unconscious Aspects of the Mind (Goldberg & Rather, Eds.). Her later work, “Traumatizing Societies and Resilient Children: A Personal Reflection” (2025), appeared in The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child.
Rebecca Twersky-Kengmana, MD is a graduate of the Adult Psychoanalytic Program at NYPSI and a psychiatrist in private practice. She is a member of NYPSI faculty and very recently held the position of president. She saw Sweeney Todd with the original cast in 1979 and still knows most of the play by heart.
Anthony Norman is an actor/musician from Chicago. Theatre credits include: Mark/Hard Harry in Pump up the Volume (LA), Jimmy Harper in Reefer Madness (LA revival — cast album wherever you get your music!) Broadway: The Prom (OBC). National Tour: Dear Evan Hansen (Evan) and Newsies. TV/Film: Happy’s Place, Mare of Easttown, Chicago Med, Newsies Live.
Tehela Nimroody, Ph.D.
Horowitz Sondheim Clinic Director
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