Biographies

A popular musician in the ’60s, Diltz never set out to take some of the most iconic photos of our era—it just happened. Fresh from a globetrotting childhood, he attended colleges in Munich, Germany; West Point, Utah; and Honolulu, Hawaii, where he became known as a musician and founding member of the Modern Folk Quartet, a group once produced by Phil Spector. This led to many friendships with emerging recording artists in the California rock communities of the ’60s and ’70s. Immersed in this world, he accidentally discovered a passion for photography, which turned into an obsession and, later, an occupation. Today, his archive is handled by Corbis as he continues to document the music scene from his base in Southern California.

Diltz is the Herb Alpert Scholar in Residence at Berklee College of Music and Boston Conservatory at Berklee for 2019 and 2020.

Since the 1960s, Elliot has been a journalist, writer, photographer, teacher, and unexpected archivist for the myriad social and cultural events that shifted American culture from that turbulent era forward. Seeing Bob Dylan plug in and go electric in 1965 at the Newport Folk Festival, watching the Beatles perform together in 1966 at Chavez Ravine in Los Angeles, and working at the legendary Woodstock Festival in 1969 cemented her impeccable “musical” credentials forever. Her passion for music and its profoundly transformative power has been an animating force in her life.

Elliot has worked at radio stations in Honolulu, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York in many positions, including news director, anchor, producer, and reporter, as well as in public relations. In 1985, she moved to television and created the position of music correspondent for NBC’s Today Show and, over the next decade, traveled the world conducting in-depth interviews and covering stories on rock’s biggest performers and events.

For the Rolling Stones’ 50th anniversary in 2012, Elliot worked with her NBC interview catalogue to create the e-book Mick & Keith: Never Stop. She also has written for USA Today about American Idol, taught a music business course at UCLA for its extension program, and conducted oral histories for the Grammy Living Legend Foundation, as well as in-depth oral histories with holocaust survivors for the USC Shoah Foundation, founded by Steven Spielberg.

Elliot’s diverse philanthropic experiences include service with the Dalai Lama Foundation, a national nonprofit for children’s public music education, and various campaigns for famine relief. In 2010, Elliot became a board member for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, where her papers are included in its archive of rock history memorabilia.

Landy’s iconic photographs of Dylan and the Band when they resided and recorded in Woodstock, New York, and his coverage of the 1969 Woodstock Festival have become synonymous with the town, the event, and the utopian spirit of the Woodstock generation. The ideals of personal and social freedom are reflected in his later genres of work, including FlowerVisions (combining elements of impressionist painting with photography), kaleidoscopic imagery, and the spiritual and artistic depth of his photo vérité book Love at Sixty, which features photos of his wife Linda with her poetic prose that lovingly captures the spontaneity of life and the wonder of love at any age.

Since 1967, Landy’s work has been exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide and published on the covers of major U.S. and international magazines and newspapers, including the New York Times, Life, Rolling Stone, and the Saturday Evening Post. He is the author of nine books, including his latest, The Band Photographs, 1968–1969, the highest funded photographic book in Kickstarter history. Landy also has created the software program LandyVision, which lets users play with music and ​video to create a new interactive musical/visual experience. He will present this work theatrically with fixed and live music, as well as releasing it as an app.

Coming soon

In 1959, Monck began lighting The Village Gate nightclub, where he met iconic performers—including Bob Dylan, who wrote “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and “The Ballad of Hollis Brown” on Monck’s typewriter. He began lighting festivals, theaters, and films throughout the ’60s, and in 1969 he was hired by Michael Lang for Woodstock, where he was asked to emcee just before the concert when organizers realized no one had been hired. After the festival, Monck toured as a lighting technician for the Rolling Stones and embarked on a unique and prolific career.

A short highlight list of the productions he has worked on include Jimi Hendrix and the Who at the Monterey Pop Festival; the Altamont Free Concert for the Rolling Stones; the Muhammad Ali vs. George Foreman boxing match, dubbed “the rumble in the jungle”; the opening and closing ceremonies of the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles; and the U.S. theater premiere of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, among many others. He has worked on several films, hosted a rock ’n’ roll talk show, and invented an innovative stage lighting technique during the Rolling Stones’ 1972 tour. Currently, he lives and works outside Melbourne, Australia, where he focuses on lighting production and design for corporate and retail groups.

Coming soon

Burke’s research centers on jazz and popular music in the United States, with a focus on the connections between music’s performance and reception and the formation of racial ideology. His work has been supported by fellowships from the American Musicological Society, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, the Social Science Research Council, and the Center for the Humanities at Washington University. He is the author of Come In and Hear the Truth: Jazz and Race on 52nd Street and Tear Down the Walls: White Radicalism and Black Power in 1960s Rock (forthcoming). Burke also is project director, researcher, and writer for the digital humanities project Music and Racial Segregation in Twentieth-Century St. Louis: Uncovering the Sources.

Alleyne teaches in the Department of Recording Industry at Middle Tennessee State University. He is the author of The Encyclopedia of Reggae: The Golden Age of Roots Reggae (2012) and a contributing editor of Rhythm Revolution: A Chronological Anthology of American Popular Music—1960s to 1980s (2015). He is currently writing The Essential Hendrix, a compendium on legendary guitarist Jimi Hendrix. He has lectured internationally, publishing book chapters and articles in Popular Music & Society, Rock Music Studies, Popular Music History, Ethnomusicology Forum, and Billboard magazine, among many others.

Bell is an archivist and author on Jimi Hendrix, concentrating particularly on the details of his existing recordings. He has published numerous articles in Hendrix magazines such as Jimpress and UniVibes, and also has contributed to several books on the guitar legend. He has archived and circulated many original recording masters, including Hendrix’s last performance at a small club in London, England. A physicist by training, Bell works as a scientist in his other life in Pasadena, California, developing new technologies for space missions.

Emblidge is an Associate Professor in the Department of Writing, Literature and Publishing at Emerson College. He has over two decades of experience as a book editor and publisher, including a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship. Prior to joining the Emerson faculty, he was Editor in Chief at The Mountaineers Books, Seattle.

Kramer works at the intersection of historical scholarship, cultural criticism, the arts, and digital technology. He teaches at Middlebury College, where he is acting director of the Digital Liberal Arts Initiative. He is the author of The Republic of Rock: Music and Citizenship in the Sixties Counterculture (2013).

Kuligowski is a professor at the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. He has conducted fieldwork in Poland, Hungary, Germany, Spain, and Serbia, among other countries. He also is editor-in-chief of Czas Kultury, a quarterly Polish sociocultural magazine. He has created television programs and hosted talk shows. During his years as a student, he wrote poems and played guitar in a punk rock group.

Prior is associate director of institutional research in Berklee’s Office of Institutional Research and Assessment. Her areas of specialty include survey research and data analysis, with a particular interest in diversity and inclusion. Most recently, she was the lead author of the Berklee Institute for Creative Entrepreneurship (BerkleeICE) report on women in the music industry. Prior holds a master’s degree in comparative literature from the University of Colorado Boulder and a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her interests include gardening, photography, Star Wars, and supporting live music.

Restrepo’s research interests include the adoption of European music in colonial Colombia and the flourishing of the Italian madrigal in 16th-century Spain. Her work has appeared in many peer-reviewed journals, including Early Music and Revista de Musicología. Restrepo also has presented papers at national conferences of the Renaissance Society of America, Society for American Music, and the American Comparative Literature Association, among others. Her edition of the Requiem Masses of Juan de Herrera, Chapelmaster and Composer at the Cathedral of Santa Fe de Bogotá, is available through the Instituto Colombiano de Cultura.

Shiga is a doctoral candidate at Keio University in Japan, where he studies American literature, particularly Indian American writer Jhumpa Lahiri. His main interests are Asian immigrants, post-colonialism, and popular music. He is currently affiliated with the Department of American Studies at Brown University as a Fulbright visiting researcher. Shiga has published several articles about Lahiri. His article for the Journal of the American Literature Society of Japan will be reprinted in Trans-Pacific Cultural Studies, to be published in summer 2019.

Bower is an assistant professor of psychology at Berklee College of Music. Her research utilizes mixed methodology to uncover the ways in which social relationships can encourage socioemotional development throughout the lifespan. Her previous work includes publications and presentations on the strategies parents utilize to respond to and encourage their children’s spontaneous prosocial behaviors, and how parental responses relate to prosociality in the preschool context, as well as the longitudinal relations among adolescent social behaviors, sociometric status among the peer group, and later reports of life satisfaction in adulthood. More recently, Bower’s work has focused on creating engaging learning environments through the use of play, games, and contemplative strategies in the college classroom. She is excited to continue her work incorporating technology to explore the humanities, and to develop materials that challenge and engage individuals in their personal growth.

Marshall is an assistant professor in the Liberal Arts Department at Berklee College of Music, where he teaches music history with a focus on the African diaspora, as well as popular music and dance in the Americas. An ethnomusicologist by training and a technomusicologist by calling, Marshall coedited Reggaeton(2009), and has published in journals such as Popular Music and Small Axe while writing for media outlets such as Vulture and The Wire—as well as on his acclaimed blog, Wayne and Wax.

Mulvey is an associate professor in the Professional Music Department at Berklee College of Music. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English and a master’s degree in education from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. A 25-year veteran of the college’s Counseling and Advising Center, Mulvey has been a faculty member for 19 years. He attended the Woodstock Festival at age 17, a month before his first semester in college. He continues to be active in music as a singer and guitarist for the band Exit 42.

Peknik is associate professor of history at Berklee College of Music, where she teaches America from the Jazz Age to MTV and The History of Music Cities. Peknik is the author of French Louisiana Music and Its Patrons: The Popularization and Transformation of a Regional Sound, which examines the development of that region’s music from national and international perspectives. She has authored chapters and edited volumes on education and history. She is chair of the Law and Culture Area for the American Culture Association and the American Popular Culture Association. Peknik earned her doctorate in American intellectual history from Boston University, and holds a master’s degree in poetry, having studied with Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott.

Coming soon