UK Alumni Camp 2025

Suzannah Park, a native of Asheville NC, is a performer teacher, activist, organizer and community leader. She comes from a family of three generations of traditional Appalachian, English and Irish singers, storytellers and dancers.

She has been touring and teaching for the past twenty plus years, both in the USA and abroad. She began singing with VH when she was twelve and touring with Northern Harmony at fourteen. One of VH most popular teachers, Suzannah became our acting Board President in 2018 and joined the executive team in 2021.

Founder and director of the Wild Asheville Community Chorus—now under the umbrella of VH—Suzannah was also a founding member of two VH alumni groups, the Starry Mountain Singers and the Starry Mountain Trio. She is also a member of the traditional music faculty and choir director at Warren Wilson College.

As an activist Suzannah wears the program director hat for a local NC non-profit, Community Roots. With a focus on environmental justice and the ‘rights of nature’ movement. She is also a counselor, teacher and organizer with a focus on women and Native liberation within the framework of the international peer-based counseling community, Re-evaluation Counseling. www.suzannahpark.com

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.

Read more about Bongani on his website: https://bonganimusic.com/

Polina Shepherd (Skovoroda) was born in a Russian Jewish family in Novosibirsk. Whilst living in Tatarstan, Central Russia in the 1980-1990s, she was one of the visible young Jewish activists during her student years, just as the Jews of Soviet Union began to turn their focus back to their roots. Helping her father to bring a Jewish community together in an industrial town Naberezhnye Chelny, recording the remaining memories of Yiddish songs from her locals, performing, forming her own band, she was learning about being Jewish in Russia. At the age of 17, she joined Russia′s first professional klezmer band after Perestroika, Simcha, and toured with them all over the Former Soviet Union, at the same time studying her musical heritage further. By her early 20s she was a Yiddish choir leader, composer, bandleader, an international touring musician and festival organiser. Having witnessed the phoenix of Jewish culture rising from the ashes of Communism and helping it is flourish and develop throughout the FSU, she is now part of the international world of Ashkenazi culture.

Polina moved to the UK in 2003. Her choral work is united by the umbrella of The Polina Shepherd Vocal Experience and covers many aspects of vocal music from large scale choirs to smaller chamber groups, from highly arranged and conducted pieces to on spot choral improvisation.

Read more here: https://www.polinashepherd.co.uk/about/