Henriëtte Brouwers has been the Associate Director of the Los Angeles Poverty Department since 2000. As Associate Director, she directs, performs, and produces many LAPD projects. While, living in Paris in the early 1980’s Brouwers studied corporeal mime with Etiènne Décroux and was a member of Boal's in exile, Theatre of the Oppressed group. Born in the Netherlands, and while living in Amsterdam, she performed with important groups including Grif Theater, Luc Boyer and the National Dutch Opera. She founded movement theater ACTA, and her performances, including her solo Malinche, toured the US, Belgium and The Netherlands. Brouwers devised the Weeping Women performances at Pomona College and with LAPD. She is featured in Bill Viola’s renowned video series The Passions.

Tom Grode is a former Skid Row resident, with numerous credits for casting films and television series. He moved to Skid Row in 2015 and has performed with LAPD in What Fuels Development? (2016), Walk the Talk (since 2016), The Back 9 (2017), I Fly! (2019), The New Compassionate Downtown (2021), The Resilience Monologues (2022) and LAPD’s current production The Covid Hotel Welcomes You to the Future.  For The Back 9 Tom performed and contributed to the script as a writer, and he traveled with LAPD for community residencies in Philadelphia and Minneapolis. Tom has been active in the Skid Row Community with the Skid Row Design Collective, the Skid Row Neighborhood Council Formation Committee, the Skid Row Community Improvement Coalition, and Skid Row Now & 2040.

David Kaplan is a New York-born piano soloist and chamber musician, praised by the Boston Globe for “grace and fire” at the keyboard. He has appeared as soloist with the Britten Sinfonia, Das Sinfonie Orchester Berlin, and in the last season appeared with the orchestras of Hawaii and San Antonio, improvising his own cadenzas in concerti of Mozart. He released two acclaimed albums in 2024: the GRAMMY nominated “DECODA”, and his solo debut disc, “New Dances of the League of David,” which was lauded by Financial Times, Gramophone, Fanfare, and more. He has given recitals at the Ravinia Festival, Washington’s National Gallery, and New York’s Carnegie and Merkin Halls, and performs chamber music with such collaborators as the Attacca Quartet, cellist Colin Carr, and in a longstanding duo with pianist-composer Timo Andres. Kaplan is the Assistant Professor and Inaugural Shapiro Family Chair in Piano Performance at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music, where he has taught since 2016.

Steven Walter is an award-winning music curator and cultural manager. He grew up near Stuttgart as part of an American family in Germany, with a few interludes in the USA. He studied cello in Oslo and Detmold and cultural management in Hamburg. In 2009, he founded PODIUM Esslingen and developed it into an award-winning platform for new concert formats. He has been the director of the Beethovenfest Bonn since 2021. Walter is a 2025 Thomas Mann Fellow.

Monday Evening Concerts (MEC) is the world’s longest-running series dedicated to contemporary music. Founded in 1939 by Peter Yates and Frances Mullen in their Schindler-designed Silverlake home, MEC was conceived as a haven for émigré composers and studio musicians to explore the then-radical works of Ives, Scriabin, Satie, Bartók, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky. Over the decades, MEC has earned international acclaim for presenting adventurous, intellectually rigorous, and poetically charged music—both new and ancient. It has hosted the American conducting debut of Pierre Boulez, world premieres by Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Harold Budd, and early performances by icons such as Michael Tilson Thomas, Marni Nixon, Lukas Foss, and Marilyn Horne. MEC has also introduced Los Angeles audiences to groundbreaking artists including Marino Formenti, the Arditti and JACK Quartets, and Steve Reich and Musicians. A seven-time ASCAP/Chamber Music America Award winner, MEC is featured in the writings of Eve Babitz, Susan Sontag, and Walter Hopps, and is the subject of Dorothy Lamb Crawford’s book Evenings On and Off the Roof. Since 2015, MEC has been under the direction of Jonathan Hepfer.

The Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD) is a performance and arts organization founded in 1985 by performer, director and activist John Malpede.  Malpede is the recipient of the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award and New York’s Bessie Creation Award. Based in Los Angeles’ Skid Row neighborhood, LAPD creates performances and multidisciplinary artworks that connect the experience of people living in poverty to the social forces that shape their lives and communities.  LAPD creates community-based performances, installations, and events that challenge stereotypes and address issues of social justice, housing, and economic inequality. As one of the first arts initiatives in the U.S. to engage directly with homeless communities, LAPD merges art and activism to foster dignity, visibility, and systemic change. In 2015, LAPD created their cultural space The Skid Row History Museum & Archive, site of performances, exhibitions, public conversations, generated by LAPD and other Skid Row artist and activist groups. SRHM&A houses a much utilized, extensive, living archive of Skid Row history.