Home University for a Night 2010

Other Speakers and Musical Performance

Peggy Dulany is Chair of Synergos, which she founded in 1986 to facilitate relationships across sectors of society to develop long-term relationships and forge new paths in overcoming poverty. Her career has included heading a Boston-area public high school, consulting on health care and family planning, and leading youth employment and education programs at the New York City Partnership.

Robert H. Dunn, is President and CEO of Synergos. He is an advisor to the Board of the Culture Project. He previously served as Chairman and CEO of Business for Social Responsibility, Vice President for Corporate Affairs of Levi Strauss & Co., and in the Carter White House, the US Embassy in Mexico City, the Cabinet of the Governor of Wisconsin, and on the faculty of the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Josh Mailman is an activist philanthropist and investor, both for himself and on behalf of friends he advises on using their resources to create a more just and sustainable society. He helped found the Social Venture Network, the Fund for Global Human Rights, Grameen Telecom, and Serious Change, a social investment fund, and serves on the boards of organizations including Witness, the Joshua Mailman Foundation, and the Sigrid Rausing Trust.

Judith Rodin, a global philanthropic and humanitarian leader, is President of The Rockefeller Foundation. Under her leadership, the foundation helps ensure that more people can tap into the benefits of globalization while developing stronger resilience to risks. Dr. Rodin was previously President of the University of Pennsylvania, the first woman to head an Ivy League institution, and Provost of Yale University.

Special Performance by Sing for Hope

“What Sing for Hope does is wonderfully simple. It maintains a roster of compassionate, world-class artists who donate time and talent to the humanitarian causes that inspire them.”
- Dr. Muhammad Yunus, 2006 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and Sing for Hope Board Member

To learn more, please visit www.singforhope.org.

Inna Barmash (vocals)
Inna Barmash immigrated to the United States from Lithuania, where she first started singing in Yiddish and Russian. She co-founded the New York-based gypsy dance party band Romashka, the Princeton-based band Klez Dispensers, and has performed with numerous other klezmer and other eastern-european groups in the New York tri-state area, as well as her husband Ljova’s band Ljova and the Kontraband. Hailed as the “Balkan Edith Piaf” (Rootsworld), she has been instrumental in rediscovering and presenting the repertoire of Russian and Romanian gypsies and Russian pre-war music.

Lev “Ljova” Zhurbin (famiola)
Hailed by Billboard Magazine as “one of New York’s fastest-rising composers and instrumentalists”, Ljova stands at the forefront of his generation as the premiere bridge between the world's musical cultures. Ljova was born in 1978 in Moscow, Russia, and moved to New York with his parents, composer Alexander Zhurbin and writer Irena Ginzburg, in 1990. He divides his time between performing as a violist in diverse groups ranging from his own Ljova and the Kontraband, to string quartets, jazz combos and Gypsy bands; studying and arranging music for Yo-Yo Ma, the Kronos Quartet, Jay-Z and others; and composing original music for film, TV, dance, and the concert stage.