Elena Park
Founder & CEO
Throughout her colorful career, Elena Park has looked for ways to explore ideas, tell an array of stories, and connect the worlds of arts, culture, media, and technology. She has created award-winning music and culture programs for the Metropolitan Opera and WNYC Radio, curated and hosted performances and talks for venues from National Sawdust to the Kennedy Center, and produced tributes such as the Jessye Norman Celebration at the Met. The daughter of Korean immigrants, she has worked as a strategic advisor for clients ranging from Meyer Sound to Cambodian Living Arts, the Phnom Penh-based NGO.
In recent days, her projects have pivoted to the digital sphere with MTT25: An American Icon for the San Francisco Symphony and Joyce DiDonato’s Met concert live from Bochum, Germany. For Stanford Live, she served as an Executive Producer for its 10-show digital series last fall, featuring musicians including the Kronos Quartet, Zakir Hussain, Chanticleer, and Vân-Ánh “Vanessa” Võ, whose program she directed. She is now working as a Strategic Advisor for San Francisco Opera, a company where she spent early formative years.
In normal times, her lively performance and conversation series, NationalSawdust+, taps artists and thinkers including Laurie Anderson, Marina Abramovic, Yo-Yo Ma, Nico Muhly, Caroline Shaw, Patti Smith, Esperanza Spalding, and Carrie Mae Weems. Featuring unusual pairings, crossing disciplines, and spanning musical genres, NS+ is often tied to contemporary events and issues of race, gender, and equity, with partners such as PEN and London Review of Books. She has created evenings for Guggenheim Works + Process and for the Kennedy Center, where she has been an Artistic Consultant on a variety of initiatives since 2015. With the Kennedy Center, National Sawdust, and the Apollo Theater, Lumahai Productions created the pilot episode of a new podcast, Active Hope, which launched in February 2021.
For the Metropolitan Opera, Elena is Executive Producer of its international Saturday radio broadcasts and Supervising Producer for The Met: Live in HD, a role she has held since the series launch in 2006; typically, it is seen in more than 70 countries around the world. Before founding her independent production company, she was Assistant General Manager at the Met, supervising creative content, marketing and public relations, and special audience initiatives at a time of institutional reinvention.
Prior to the Met, she was Executive Producer, Music & Culture, for WNYC Radio, developing culture stories and producing live broadcasts as well as national specials spanning Walt Whitman: Song of Myself and The Ring and I: The Myth, The Passion, The Mania. Film and TV credits include Music Producer for the feature film Bel Canto (starring Julianne Moore, voiced by Renée Fleming) and Creative Consultant for amazon’s Golden Globe-winning Mozart in the Jungle.
Previous work includes stints at Brooklyn Academy of Music, and as editor-in-chief of andante.com, with additional writing for outlets such as Playbill and the San Francisco Chronicle (including interviews with artists such as Fiona Shaw, Bill T. Jones, Clive Owen, Philip Glass, and Yoko Ono).
In addition to serving on grant panels for organizations such as MAP and the Jerome Foundation, she speaks regularly at conferences in the U.S. and abroad, including Theater * Future Encounters forum (in Taiwan, presented by the Koo Foundation in 2019), ISPA (Seoul, Korea) and Classical: NEXT, where she served on the 2016 jury for the Rotterdam conference.
ODED LEV-ARI
CONTENT STRATEGY & DEVELOPMENT
A highly skilled and creative thinker about content and business strategy, Oded Lev-Ari has participated in the creation and production of podcasts, live events, and music for media, and served as Director of Content for classical music startup andante.com.
As a music and composer, he has earned tremendous praise; in a feature about his work, DownBeat magazine stated that “Putting lightning in a bottle is what Oded Lev-Ari specializes in." Born in Tel Aviv but a longtime resident of New York City, his work drew comparisons to jazz sound painters Gil Evans and Maria Schneider to tango nuevo king Astor Piazzolla and contemporary classical composers. Beyond those descriptions, Oded has his own, individual soundprint, one of cinematic richness and open-hearted lyricism.
Oded directs and owns the Anzic Records label, alongside iconic clarinetist Anat Cohen.
His numerous record producing credits include Cohen’s Luminosa, vocal trio Duchess’ self-titled debut and woodwind sage Marty Ehrlich’s A Trumpet in the Morning. He served as musical director for a Billie Holiday tribute concert starring Madeleine Peyroux, Bucky Pizzarelli Ron Carter and others at Brazil’s Tudo e Jazz festival.
RAS DIA
PROGRAMMING & PRODUCTION
Ras Dia is an arts administrator from Harlem, New York City. He is the Co-Director of the Frederick R. Koch Foundation's Townhouse Series, Creative Producer of Heartbeat Opera's BREATHING FREE (nominated for a 2021 Drama League Award), and the Assistant Producer of Little Island, a new public park and arts organization developed by the Diller-von Furstenburg Family Foundation. Ras has previously served as the Assistant Producer of the Metropolitan Opera’s Live in HD series, as the Managing Director of the New York City Master Chorale, and as the Artists-in-Residence Producer at National Sawdust, where he co-created and curated SAUCE, a series of artist sessions, in partnership with beer and CBD beverage companies. He serves as a 2021-22 Artist Scholar at the Manhattan School of Music (MSM), and is a graduate of the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, and Purchase College (SUNY). Ras has appeared as a guest speaker and panelist for organizations including the National YoungArts Foundation, Amherst College, the Black Artists Fund, MSM, and OPERA America.
SIOBAHN SUNG
PROGRAMMING & PRODUCTION
Siobahn Sung is a Korean-American Brooklyn-based California native who enjoys a varied career, in which she engages in projects that are multiplanar and non-traditional. She is enthusiastic about performance, storytelling, and congruence across the arts. Whether in a temporary pop-up space or the main stage of a hallowed opera house; a radio station in a Bushwick lot, or a Flatbush dance hall, her main operative is to always be a consummate connector of people, an uplifter of community, and a forerunner for identifying that which activates the creative impulse.
JEFF TANG
PROGRAMMING & PRODUCTION
Jeff Tang’s practice as a creative producer is rooted in his deep delight in the cross-pollination of artistic disciplines, a dedication to the redirection of the cultural narrative, and an ambition to re-center historically underrepresented voices and values in the arts.
Recent producing credits include as Executive Creative Producer for Iphigenia, a new opera, currently in development, by jazz icons Wayne Shorter and esperanza spalding, with set designs by the architect Frank Gehry; and as lead producer for composer Mason Bates’s genre-bending KC Jukebox series at the Kennedy Center.
As the Associate Producer for the NationalSawdust+: performance and conversation series in Brooklyn, he’s worked with poets, scientists, filmmakers, musicians, mixologists, and jugglers, and his previous role at the Metropolitan Opera saw him on the producing team for the award-winning international Live in HD and radio broadcasts, and as a catalyst for public programming, audience engagement, and social impact.
For virtual audiences, he produced The Heart of the Song for The Dallas Opera, featuring the music and stories of a trio of star tenors from Mexico; and with Lumahai Productions, he’s developing and producing Active Hope, a virtual event and podcast series created with The Apollo Theater, The Kennedy Center, and National Sawdust.
As a composer, his music theater work has been seen in New York, London, Minneapolis, and Chicago, and his music for podcasts has been commissioned for projects by Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine and Rainn Wilson’s SoulPancake production houses.
He serves on the Equity Committee of the newly-formed Creative & Independent Producer Alliance (CIPA), and is a proud member of Peoplmovr, a creative studio specializing in involvement that centers anti-racism and equity in its commitment to collective liberation.