New England Residential Adult Camp

Based in Brattleboro, Vermont, Brendan Taaffe has been leading singing workshops around the world since 2004.

An active composer, he specializes in American harmony styles and Zimbabwean makwayera style singing. In 2011, Brendan spent a month working with choirs in Zimbabwe to document songs from that tradition.

Brendan is a founding member of the Bright Wings Chorus and directs Turtle Dove, an organization that runs singing camps for adults. Brendan is also a multi-instrumentalist on guitar, fiddle, banjo, and mbira and holds an M.A. in performance from the Irish World Music Centre at the University of Limerick.

Bongani Magatyana is a professional singer /music director /composer /theatrical producer living in Khayelitsha Township in Cape Town, South Africa.

He was born in Cape Town in a township called Old Crossroads. His father was a self-taught choir conductor in the Old Apostolic Church and taught hims son how to read and write tonic solfa music notation at a young age. Today Bongani conducts a 120-voice OAC choir himself, as well as a community male choir and a large children's choir. A dancer as well as singer, and he is particularly adept at communicating the elusive rhythms of South African songs.

Currently Bongani teaches at the Zolani Centre in Langa Township, leads an educational musical theatre company and the Khayelitsha Children's Choir, and continues to compose music in a variety of genres, bringing vibrant performances to communities across Cape Town.

Bongani’s folk-inspired choral compositions—popular pieces for South Africa’s major choral competitions—are sung by choirs around South Africa and internationally. Both Yale and Harvard Universities have commissioned Bongani to write choral works for their ensembles.

Nadia Tarnawsky has been studying Eastern European singing techniques for over three decades. She spent much of 2017 and 2018 in Ukraine as a recipient of a Fulbright award. She has taught Ukrainian village style singing in workshops for the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, Ukraine, the Center for Traditional Music and Dance in New York city, Village Harmony in Vermont and Oregon, the Kitka Women's Vocal Ensemble in San Francisco, and the Dunava Ensemble in Seattle among others. In 2011 she received a Traditional Arts Fellowship from Artist Trust and an Artist Support Residency from Jack Straw Productions. In 2002 she received a Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship which allowed her to travel to Ukraine to collect folk songs and folklore. She sang under the tutelage of Yevgeny Yefremov with Ensemble Hilka of New York in commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the Chornobyl disaster in Ukraine. A recording of this repertoire was released on the Smithsonian Folkways label.