Michael Drapkin is the Founder and Executive Director of The Foundation for Entrepreneurialism in the Arts, Inc., a not-for-profit foundation dedicated to addressing the oversupply of arts graduates in America and the lack of demand for their skills by teaching performers how to become entrepreneurs for the arts and create demand for what they do. He will be directing the National Conference and Seminar on Entrepreneurship in Music at the Brevard Music Center in North Carolina on July 13-17, 2005.

Mr. Drapkin is a graduate of the Eastman School of Music where he studied with acclaimed master clarinet teacher D. Stanley Hasty, toured Japan with the Eastman Wind Ensemble under Donald Hunsberger, and played Principal Clarinet in the Eastman Philharmonia under David Effron. He also studied clarinet with Gary Gray, Charles Bay and Harold Wright.

Mr. Drapkin was chair of E-Commerce Management at Columbia University's Executive Information Technology Management program and taught a course on Web, Internet & E-Commerce. His students included senior managers and directors of major firms seeking to become CEO/CIO/CTOs. He was a regular lecturer on E-Commerce at the University of Chicago and for Citibank.

As a Clarinetist he was a member of the Honolulu Symphony Orchestra, as Associate Principal and Bass Clarinet and the New York City Opera Touring Company and Lake George Opera Festival, as Principal Clarinet. He has spent summers playing at Aspen and at Tanglewood as a Berkshire Music Center fellow, and is solo clarinetist and Executive Director of Music Amici, Rockland County, NY's oldest professional chamber music group and one of the finest in the New York City area. Mr. Drapkin is a Yamaha Performing Artist.

He has performed with the New Jersey Symphony, the Rochester Philharmonic, the Portland Symphony, the Long Island Philharmonic, the Brooklyn Philharmonic and with conductors Leonard Bernstein, Seiji Ozawa, Michael Tilson Thomas, Neville Marriner, Leonard Slatkin, Lucas Foss, Christopher Keene, Klaus Tennstedt, Frederick Fennell, and many more celebrated orchestras and maestros.

Mr. Drapkin is one of the most recognizable names in the bass clarinet in the United States as author of Symphonic Repertoire for the Bass Clarinet, Volume One, which has become standard literature worldwide, and his recently released Volume Two. Volume Three will be released in the summer of 2005, and his fourth series book, Transposed Orchestra Parts for the Bass Clarinet, will be released in 2006.

Mr. Drapkin is an accredited Music Performance Adjudicator with the United States Scholastic Band Association (USSBA), the Musical Arts Conference and Cavalcade of Bands. He judges music at marching band shows in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Pennsylvania. He has judged at both individual shows and at championships. He also conducts clinics and festival adjudication for concert bands, string orchestras and jazz bands for Classic Festivals & Tours. In the upcoming season, he will conduct clinics at festivals in Philadelphia, Boston, Montreal and Quebec.

He is also in demand as a guest lecturer, and for master classes at music schools and institutions across the country, including Eastman, Juilliard, University of Texas, and University of Florida.

With more than 20 years of management and technical experience at Fortune 1000 and new-media companies, Drapkin is also an expert at business solution delivery. He served as senior technologist at the web agencies Razorfish and Avalanche, and Drapkin was CTO of DMS Corp., a quarter billion dollar multinational logistics firm, where he managed technology across four continents. He was a vice president at Lehman Brothers, overseeing the firm's deployment of client/server technology, including their first company-wide data warehouse for brokerage client business intelligence.

Doreen Rizopoulos is the founder and managing partner of Magdalin Rizopoulos, Inc., an executive search practice with a focus on the financial services industry. Having worked in the field of recruiting for over ten years, she brings to the foundation her experience of understanding client objectives and the ability to provide the resources to fulfill those needs.

Ms. Rizopoulos previously served as a Vice President, Information Technology, at Lehman Brothers, where she managed the recruiting of IT professionals. She has been a featured speaker focused on career development at many forums and spent many years both coaching and developing mentoring programs for college graduates. She initially joined Lehman Brothers in 1990 as a technologist, having worked extensively within infrastructure technology both as an analyst and as a technology trainer, at financial institutions and technology-driven firms.

Suzy Drapkin blends a unique collection of counseling, administrative, business, financial, and entrepreneurial skills. Her expertise has allowed her to apply her skills in the public sector as a clinical and career counselor, educational trainer, vocational evaluator and rehabilitation coordinator, as well as in the business world as an executive recruiter and consultant.

As a consultant and vice president with Drapkin Technology, Ms. Drapkin is currently engaged as Program Director of School-Based Mentoring for Big Brothers Big Sisters of Rockland County, Inc. She is responsible for overseeing several college mentoring collaboratives with at-risk high school students. She also leads groups for middle school-aged students in job search skills, economics, conflict resolution and affirmation skills in conjunction with the Rockland County Nyack YMCA. In addition, she is responsible for overseeing corporate finance and recruitment of personnel for Drapkin Technology.

Previously held positions included career counselor, vocational evaluator and transitional counselor for Putnam/Westchester BOCES, Rehabilitation Coordinator for White Plains Mental Health Services and public school teacher. She has experience working with dislocated workers, welfare-to-work programs, the economically disadvantaged, displaced homemakers, chemically dependent, victims of domestic violence, incarcerated, physically handicapped, learning disabled, emotionally disturbed and mentally handicapped individuals.

She holds certification in tobacco prevention/cessation and conflict resolution facilitation, as an Adkins Life Skills Trainer, adult education instruction and several career assessment programs. Ms. Drapkin has a B.S. in Special Education from Southern Connecticut State College and a M.S. in Rehabilitation Counseling from Sargent College of Allied Health Professions at Boston University.

Katherine C. Askew is a specialist in real estate technologies, project management, and private real estate investment. She is the Founder and CEO of Real Estate Strategic Technologies, a consulting group that focuses on the impact of technology on real estate-related businesses. Services include process redesign, vendor analysis, and the planning, implementation, and management for both technology and construction projects.

For nineteen years, Ms. Askew has managed technology-driven transitions. She directed the Research and Information Management department at CB Richard Ellis, the world's largest real estate services company. Previously she served as Senior Vice President, Operations, at MCY Media Group. In this capacity, she managed the ongoing development and support of all technology at MCY. Ms. Askew joined MCY from iNautix Technologies, the Internet-development division of Donaldson, Lufkin and Jenrette, where she directed the end-to-end delivery of large-scale, cross-platform, web software projects for the brokerage house. As Program Director at Eastman Software she oversaw the delivery to market of eight major software products, including the company's legacy imaging and workflow product and the introduction of a new collaborative, messaging-based product line. Earlier, Ms. Askew was the Process Architect for Wang Software where she was responsible for organizational development, process improvement, and change management. From 1991 to 1996, she served as Manager of Marketing and Sales at Sigma Imaging Systems.

Ms. Askew has been honored with the Outstanding Teacher Award from Columbia University where her thirteen-week project management course is a core requirement in Columbia's Executive IT Management Program.

Growing up as the son of music-loving scientists in Los Angeles, John Bruce Yeh eventually found himself fulfilling the role of musical explorer. He pursued pre-medical studies at UCLA, where he won the Frank Sinatra Musical Performance Award and performed as Principal Clarinet of the American Youth Symphony under Mehli Mehta. He entered the Juilliard School of Music in 1975 and also studied in Aspen, Marlboro, and Tanglewood. In 1977, at the age of 19, he was invited to join the Chicago Symphony Orchestra as solo Bass Clarinetist by Sir Georg Solti. He currently serves the Orchestra as Assistant Principal and Solo E-flat Clarinet. Constantly striving to find new types of expression in music, John organized Chicago Pro Musica in 1979, which would eventually win the Grammy Award for "Best New Classical Artist" in 1986. John has performed concertos by Stravinsky, Nielsen, Bernstein, and Carter with the Chicago Symphony and as a soloist with other orchestras in such diverse locations as Taipei�s National Concert Hall and the Great Philharmonic Hall in Saint Petersburg, Russia. He recently co-founded the innovative visual-music quartet, InVenTionS, together with his wife, clarinetist Teresa Reilly, and mime artists T. Daniel and Laurie Willets. His many solo and chamber music recordings, including the recently released "Clarinet Chamber Music by Hindemith" on Cedille Records (see www.cedillerecords.org), have earned wide critical acclaim and he continues to appear as guest artist on chamber music series and festivals around the world. See the website: www.inventions4.com for more information.