Chen Tao is a Visiting Professor of Chinese Music at the Bard College Conservatory of Music. He is an internationally acclaimed Chinese flutist, music educator, composer, and of Chinese orchestra; founder and director of Melody of Dragon, Inc., and of Melody of Dragon & the Youth; artistic director and conductor of the Chinese Music Ensemble of New York and conductor of New Jersey Buddha’s Light Youth Chinese Orchestra; director of New York Guqin Association; and executive chairman of the New York Chinese Music Instruments International Competition since 2015. He is also a 27th-generation musician of Zhi-Hua Buddhism music. On the faculty of Bard’s US-China Music Institute, Chen Tao teaches dizi and directs the Conservatory’s Chinese Ensemble. Read more here.

Andrew Quintman is a scholar of Buddhism in Tibet and the Himalaya, and associate professor in the Department of Religion and the College of East Asian Studies at Wesleyan University. He writes, teaches, and lectures about Buddhist literature and history, sacred geography and pilgrimage, and visual cultures of the Himalayan region. His work addresses the intersections of Buddhist literary production, circulation, and reception; the reciprocal influences of textual and visual narratives; and the formation of religious subjectivities and institutional identities. His book The Yogin and the Madman: Reading the Biographical Corpus of Tibet’s Great Saint Milarepa (Columbia University Press, 2014) won the American Academy of Religion’s 2014 Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion in Textual Studies and the 2015 Heyman Prize for outstanding scholarship from Yale University. It also received honorable mention for the 2016 E. Gene Smith book prize at the Association for Asian Studies. In 2010 his new English translation of The Life of Milarepa was published by Penguin Classics and is in its twelfth reprint. He currently serves as the President of the Board of Directors of the Buddhist Digital Resource Center (BDRC) 

Mingmei Yip received her PhD in musicology from the University of Paris (Sorbonne). A master performer on the Qin, she has given lectures and performances at venues such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Carnegie Hall, the New York Philharmonic, Columbia University, Oxford University, Shanghai Conservatory of Music, Beijing University, the University of Paris, Amsterdam University, Oberlin Conservatory, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the China Institute in New York. Dr. Yip has served as consultant for Beijing’s Chinese Qin Association 北京中国古琴会, director for Chinese Kun Opera and Guqin Research Association 中国古琴昆剧研究会理事, artistic consultant for New York Cultural Art Association, as well as on the academic board of the Chengdu International Qin Conference. Dr. Yip has also published fourteen books, with two on the qin.

She is also accomplished as a painter and calligrapher. A one-person show of her paintings of Guan Yin (the Chinese Goddess of Compassion) and calligraphy was held at the New York Open Center Gallery in SoHo in 2002. Dr. Yip was lecturer and senior lecturer of music at Chinese University of Hong Kong and Baptist University respectively, and in 2005, an International Institute of Asian Studies fellow in Holland researching on the qin. As a Visiting Professor on the faculty of the US-China Music Institute at the Bard College Conservatory of Music, she teaches Chinese music literature and history. Read more here.

Zhai Fengjian is an associate researcher in the China National Academy of Fine Arts. She works under the guidance of Professor Tian Qing, the director of the Chinese Intangible Cultural Heritage Protection Center, and has devoted her career to the protection and preservation of Buddhist cultural resources in China.