Christine Mori is Bravo Niagara!’s Founding Artistic Director. An accomplished pianist and Toronto native, she began her early musical studies at the Royal Conservatory of Music, Mozarteum Salzburg, Aspen Music School, and Tanglewood Institute before moving to New York City to attend The Juilliard School. Upon her graduation from Juilliard, Christine went on to spend thirty years as the pianist with the Florida Orchestra, where she performed with the likes of Bobby McFerrin, Marvin Hamlisch, Nigel Kennedy, Roberta Flack, Henry Mancini, Victor Borge, and Isaac Stern. In 2012, Christine returned to her Canadian roots with a desire to utilize her knowledge and expertise in producing innovative concert experiences of the highest calibre.

Bravo Niagara! Co-Founder and Executive Director, Alexis Spieldenner is driven by an entrepreneurial spirit and lifelong love of music. A fourth-generation Japanese Canadian, Alexis is the recipient of the 2016 Lincoln M. Alexander Award, presented by Lieutenant Governor Dowdeswell, for demonstrating leadership in eliminating racial discrimination and promoting positive social change. Alexis holds a bachelor’s degree in International Comparative Studies from Duke University, where she graduated with high distinction. Alexis is a Fellow of the DeVos Institute of Arts Management in Washington, D.C. led and founded by Michael Kaiser.

Howard Reich is the Emmy Award-winning producer-writer of three documentaries and author of six books. He served on the jury for the Pulitzer Prize in Music four times, including the first time a jazz composition won, Wynton Marsalis’ “Blood on the Fields” (1997). Howard covered music and the arts for the Chicago Tribune from 1978 to 2021. Howard’s most recent book is “The Art of Inventing Hope: Intimate Conversations with Elie Wiesel.” Wiesel, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Holocaust survivor, spent the last four years of his life in dialogue with Howard, the son of Holocaust survivors. The book probes Wiesel’s final thoughts on a subject that loomed over both men’s lives. Howard uncovered his parents’ unspoken Holocaust stories in the book and documentary “Prisoner of Her Past,” which has aired more than 500 times in 140-plus markets across the United States (via PBS) and beyond.

Described as a "self-assured voice" (Barczablog) with a "masterful control over his idiom" (Classical Music Sentinel), Kevin Lau has established himself as one of Canada’s most versatile and sought-after young composers. Awarded the 2017 Canada Council’s Victor Martyn Lynn-Staunton Award for outstanding achievement in music, Kevin’s work has been commissioned by almost every major orchestra in Canada, and his work has been performed internationally in the USA, Denmark, France, Germany, Austria, and the Czech Republic. In 2021, he will assume the role of composer in residence for both the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra (Winnipeg, MB) and the River Oaks Chamber Orchestra (Houston, TX). He was recently appointed composer for the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra’s 2021 original production of The Spirit Horse Returns, a multi-disciplinary show highlighting the history of the Ojibwe horse through the eyes of Indigenous artists, musicians, and storytellers.

In 2016 he composed the score for the National Ballet of Canada’s original full-length ballet Le Petit Prince, featuring choreography by NBOC Principal Dancer and Choreographic Associate Guillaume Côté. His second ballet score, Dark Angels, was commissioned by the National Arts Centre Orchestra for its Encount3rs project in 2017, and was described as “riveting” (Ottawa Citizen) and “extraordinarily accomplished” (Artsfile). His most recent large-scale work, an opera-oratorio (Bound) commissioned by Against the Grain Theatre, was hailed by the Globe and Mail as “a brilliant creation.”

Yosuke Mino began his dance training at the Akiko Kanamaru Ballet Studio in Japan. He moved to Canada in 1998 to train at the Royal Winnipeg Ballet School Professional Division and became an Apprentice of the RWB in 2002. Mino spent one season with The Boston Ballet before returning to the RWB where he was promoted to Soloist in 2006.

Mino’s repertoire includes the Jester in Swan Lake, Bluebird in The Sleeping Beauty, Jack Seward and Wolf in Dracula, Mercutio in Rudi van Dantzig’s Romeo + Juliet, and Papageno in Mark Godden’s The Magic Flute. Mino has also had a number of roles created on him; he premiered the roles of Peter in Peter Pan, Toulouse-Lautrec in Moulin Rouge® – The Ballet and White Rabbit in Wonderland. In the 2012/13 season he was selected by choreographer Twyla Tharp to dance the role of King of the Underworld in Twyla Tharp’s The Princess & The Goblin. Recently, Mino stretched his choreographic wings, creating the work Kevät for the 2012/13 Q Dance, and the pas de deux Revelry/Rivalry for the RWB mixed repertoire performance of Pure Ballet

Aaron Tsang is a Canadian composer for film and mixed media who has provided original music and audio services to over 70 films, videogames, television shows, and commercials. Aaron’s music and sound design work for games can be found in franchises such as: Shrek (DreamWorks Pictures), Ghostbusters (Sony Pictures), and The Smurfs. More recently, Aaron’s work can be found in “Shuyan Saga”, a graphic novel style 3D action videogame starring Kristin Kreuk (Smallville) as the titular Shuyan. The game features a full orchestral soundtrack and was nominated by the Canadian Screen Awards in 2018 for “Best Original Interactive Production for Digital Media”. Aaron’s music has also appeared in many television commercials. Notable clients include: Mercedes-Benz, Tim Hortons, Cineplex, Novartis, and MasterCard. In 2020 the University of Toronto commissioned Aaron to compose a celebratory orchestral score to the virtual convocation ceremonies held in absentia as a result of the global pandemic. Aaron is also an active recording and mixing engineer for new Classical music. In 2017, working with Christos Hatzis and the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, Aaron was the mastering engineer for the album “Going Home Star – Truth and Reconciliation”, which won the Juno award for “Classical Album of the Year”.

Since graduating from The University of Manitoba Faculty of Fine Arts in 1980, Shannon Lovelace has shown in galleries across North American and her portraits and life studies can be found in corporate and private collections around the globe. Children, families, the world of ballet and the beauty of the natural environment have all found themselves in her canvases, lovingly rendered in luscious tableaux in acrylic and conte. Close collaborations with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet since 1993 as a milliner, decorator, dyer and designer, gave Lovelace backstage access to performances, which led to beautiful paintings of dancers that evoke the stylistic techniques of Degas and Sargent.

Her costume designs, like her artwork use threads of repeated colour and form to create a cohesive movement across the stage. Each costume is designed to help support the whole. In Kimiko’s Pearl, the past and present are defined not only by historic cuts but by tone. The past, like an old photograph is washed in sepia, gradually the costumes become more vibrant as the years progress to current day.

Shannon has designed Madame Butterfly, Sleeping Beauty and Moulin Rouge - The Ballet with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet as well as Ballet Memphis’ Sleeping Beauty. She has worked on several moves as costumer and illustrator.

Born in Vancouver, some of his earliest memories are of the interior of BC where his parents were forced to relocate during World War II. Ultimately graduating from the Vancouver School of Art in 1961, he went to London, England in 1962 to concentrate on painting, and again in 1967 with a Canada Council grant. In 1996, he left a design career to focus on art. He has since participated in many solo and group exhibitions. His work is represented in permanent collections of the Royal Ontario Museum, Canadian War Museum, Ottawa Art Gallery, Canada Council Art Bank, City of Ottawa, Carleton University Art Gallery, and in private collections in Canada and abroad.

Lillian Yano Blakey is a Sansei visual artist, author and retired educator. She was a consultant for Antiracism and Equity in the Curriculum in North York until her retirement in 2001. Her writing includes the publication of the first culturally diverse language series, Our Wonderful World Series, in 1995. Most recently, she co-authored with Jeff Chiba Stearns in 2020, On Being Yukiko, a graphic novel about her family’s forced removal from their home in B.C. to an excruciating life in the sugar beet fields of Alberta. Her writing can be found in anthologies and in University research articles.

Currently, her art is personal, narrating generations of her Japanese Canadian family’s story. She tries to bring to light the lived complications and uncertainty of being Japanese Canadian. Her art was included in the 2019 iconic exhibition at the Royal Ontario Museum’s Being Japanese Canadian: reflections on a broken world. In 2022, her work was in The Canadian Museum of History’s “Lost Liberties: The War Measures Act”. In 2024, her art will be included in the Canadian War Museum’s Women Artists and War.

Since 2001, she has focused on her career as a professional artist in both the mainstream Canadian art world and in the Japanese Canadian community. She became the first Asian President of the Ontario Society of Artists, established in 1872. Her artwork can be found in the permanent collection of the Government of Ontario Art Collection and in the permanent collection of the Nikkei National Museum and Cultural Centre in Burnaby B.C.

Based in Toronto, Ontario, Emma Nishimura’s work spans traditional etching, archival pigment prints, drawings, sound works, and installation. Using a diversity of media, her work addresses ideas of memory and loss that are rooted within family stories and inherited narratives. Nishimura has an MFA from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a BA from the University of Guelph, Ontario. Her work has been exhibited at galleries and museums nationally and internationally, including International Print Center New York (IPCNY), NY; Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto; Carleton University Art Gallery, Ottawa; Open Studio, Toronto; California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco; and the Taimiao Art Gallery, Beijing, China. Nishimura was the 2018 recipient of the Queen Sonja Print Award, which included a solo presentation of her work in The Collection Gallery at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Her work is held in public and private collections, including the Royal Ontario Museum, Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada, the Japanese Canadian National Museum, El Minia University in Egypt, and Queen Sonja of Norway’s private collection, among others. Her work has been reviewed by Hyperallergic, Border Crossings, The Globe and Mail, and The Art Newspaper. Most recently, she was featured in a short documentary by CBC that was released in 2020. Nishimura is currently the Chair of Photography, Printmaking, and Publications at The Ontario College of Art and Design University (OCAD U).

Lighting designer since 1988 at the Shaw Festival, originally with Artistic Director, Christopher Newton. He is currently director of lighting design at Shaw. Kevin Lamotte grew up near Leamington, Ontario, and studied lighting in a technical theatre program at Niagara College and the Banff Centre for the Arts during the summer. He then studied lighting, set, costumes, and script analysis at the New York Studio and Forum of Stage Design with Lester Polakov.

For Shaw he has lit over seventy-five productions, notably John Bull's Other Island, Passion, Poison and Petrifaction, The Doctor's Dilemma, Peer Gynt, An Inspector Calls, You Can't Take it With You (1999), Heartbreak House, All My Sons, and SS Tenacity.

He has also worked at the National Arts Centre, Canadian Stage (Wit 2001 and Domesticated 2015), Citadel Theatre, Young People's Theatre, and Centaur Theatre. More recently, for Soulpepper Theatre Company, he has designed for memorable productions of Marat/Sade (2015), Father Comes Home from the Wars I, II, and III (2016), and Waiting for Godot (2017). He also designs for opera and ballet productions.

Lamotte is a recipient of the Pauline McGibbon Award, the Dora Mavor Moore Award, Jessie Richardson Award, Prix de la Masque, and Betty Mitchell Award. In 2006, he was nominated for the Siminovitch Prize in Theatre.

He is a member of the Associated Designers of Canada.

His work is marked by a heightened aesthetic sense, while still maintaining subtle treatment of detail and utter complicity with design partners.

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