TAA Musings

MTSU Tucker Theatre, Boutwell Dramatic Arts Building

Eli Yamin (“Dr. E”) is an internationally renowned pianist, composer and educator, and is co-founder and managing and artistic director of Jazz Power Initiative(JPI), a twenty-two-year-old nonprofit. The organization transforms lives through jazz arts education and performance. His work combines jazz, theatre, and performance to engage young people and expand access to arts education, particularly in African American and Latin American communities central to jazz’s origins. Yamin has performed at Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, and the White House, and has toured more than twenty countries as a cultural ambassador for the United States. He is the creator of three original jazz musicals for youth performers who perform alongside professional musicians—Nora’s Ark (about climate and social change), Holding the Torch for Liberty (about women’s suffrage), and Message from Saturn (about the healing power of the blues)—which have been staged in four languages across five countries and fourteen states, with performances in New York at Jazz at Lincoln Center, Jazzmobile/Summerfest, and Lehman College. Yamin has released multiple recordings spanning jazz and blues and has collaborated with numerous artists including Illinois Jacquet and Claire Daly, whose album Swing Low is on display at the William J. Clinton Presidential Library.

Yamin holds degrees from Rutgers University, Lehman College, and Stony Brook University, and is a Steinway Artist. He is a lifelong educator who was mentored by a host of master artists including Barry Harris and Mercedes Ellington. Yamin has brought jazz education to more than 9,000 youth and 1,000 artists and teachers worldwide through JPI and the Jazz Power Institute for Artists and Educators. At Jazz at Lincoln Center, he designed and led the Middle School Jazz Academy for a decade and trained more than one hundred musicians as cultural ambassadors through the United States Department ofState. He also created Syncopated Leadership, an arts-based leadership workshop experienced by more than 2,500 professionals, and his instructional work has reached millions online. Yamin is the author of So You Want to Sing the Blues: A Guide for Performers, published in partnership with the National Association of Teachers of Singing. In 2024, he received the award for excellence in jazz education from the American Academy of Teachers of Singing. He was named a 2026 Manhattan Jazz Hero by the Jazz Journalists Association.

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Tucker Theatre, Boutwell Dramatic Arts Building

Joyce Scott works across media, confronting racism, sexism, violence, inequality, oppression, and injustice, while also engaging beauty, spirituality, nature, and healing. Her work explores the complex tapestry of collective history and unearths universal truths. She is best known for her mastery of the off-loom peyote stitch, a free-form glass bead weaving technique that merges beads, blown glass, and repurposed objects with autobiographical, sociological, and political themes. Born in Baltimore to parents from North Carolina—sharecroppers and descendants of enslaved people—Scott began her career creating fiber works including clothing, jewelry, shoes, and quilts, while experimenting with loom-constructed textiles. In the late 1970s, she turned to beads, drawn to their ability to capture light and blend color beyond traditional painting. She learned the peyote stitch from a Native American bead artisan, a technique that would define much of her work. By 1997, Scott expanded into printmaking, producing hundreds of works with ateliers including Goya-Girl Press and Pyramid Atlantic, and later Sol Print Studios and Goya Contemporary. In 1999, she held a landmark solo exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art, becoming the first Black female artist to receive this honor.

In 2016, working with Gary Garrido Schneider and Amy Raehse, Scott began developing her largest exhibition at Grounds For Sculpture in New Jersey. It opened in 2017 and featured historic and recent works, including two large-scale, site-specific sculptures focused on Harriet Tubman. Scott’s exhibitions and contributions have continued into the 2020s, including significant retrospectives and solo presentations. In March 2024, she opened a fifty-year traveling retrospective, Joyce J. Scott: Walk a Mile in My Dreams, co-organized by the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Seattle Art Museum. Scott is a graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art and the Instituto Allende in Mexico and has received numerous honorary degrees from California College of the Arts, New York University, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Baltimore. Her work is held in major collections worldwide, including the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Seattle Art Museum, the Chrysler Museum of Art, the Toledo Museum of Art, and the National Gallery of Art.

MTSU Tucker Theatre, Boutwell Dramatic Arts Building

Marc Shaiman is an award-winning lyricist, composer, orchestrator, and performer, who has successfully created music and lyrics for television, films, recordings, and theater since entering show business at the age of sixteen. He has earned seven Oscar nominations for Mary Poppins Returns, Sleepless in Seattle, Patch Adams, The First Wives Club, The American President and South Park; a Tony Award for Hairspray; two Emmy Awards for The Oscars with Billy Crystal and Only Murders in the Building; and two Grammy’s for Hairspray and Some Like It Hot. Shaiman has co-produced and arranged award-winning recordings for music icons such as Bette Midler, Harry Connick Jr., and Mariah Carey, including the Grammy-winning recordings The Wind Beneath My Wings and From a Distance. Other performers with whom he has collaborated in concert, cabaret, film, and television include Will Ferrell, Kristin Chenoweth, Eric Clapton, Diane Keaton, Steve Martin, Barbra Streisand, Queen Latifah, Robin Williams, Eddie Murphy, and Robert De Niro. At the legendary after-party for SNL 40th, he jammed with Taylor Swift, Paul McCartney, and Prince and “completely lost his mind”. His television ventures include “The Sweeney Sisters” on SNL and countless award and talk show appearances with Billy Crystal, Neil Patrick Harris, Nathan Lane, and Martin Short, the Emmy-winning SNL 40th, The Kennedy Center Honors, for which he arranged and performed in tribute to his friend Billy Crystal. His most cherished achievement for television is his collaboration with Bette Midler for her Emmy-winning appearance as Johnny Carson’s final guest on The Tonight Show. In 2014, Shaiman and Scott Wittman, his collaborator in the musical theatre world, were celebrated by the New York Pops with a spectacular concert at Carnegie Hall. Shaiman was honored with the Ambassador Award by the Society of Composers and Lyricists in December 2018, the Icon Award at the Guild of Music Supervisors Awards in February 2019, and an Outstanding Career Achievement Award from the Hollywood Music In Media Awards. Shaiman is also a New York Times-bestselling author after the recent publication of Never Mind the Happy: Showbiz Stories from a Sore Winner. Born and raised in New Jersey, he currently lives in New York with his husband Lou Mirabal.

MTSU Tucker Theatre, Boutwell Dramatic Arts Building

Currently lighting up Broadway, Betsy Wolfe stars as Madeline Ashton in the hit Tony-nominated musical Death Becomes Her. Most recently, she earned wide critical acclaim starring as Joy, the title role in the new musical Joy. She previously wrapped her acclaimed tenure with & Juliet, as Anne Hathaway, where her performance was nominated for the 2023 Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical. Wolfe is well known for her starring turns as Jenna Hunterson in the Tony-nominated Waitress, Cordelia in the Broadway revival of Falsettos, and Cathy in the celebrated off-Broadway revival of The Last Five Years. Other Broadway credits include: Bullets Over Broadway (Ellen), The Mystery of Edwin Drood (Rosa Bud), and Everyday Rapture. Her screen credits include the holiday film Estella Scrooge: A Christmas Carol with a Twist, the indie comedy First One In, and a guest-starring role on the CBS series Instinct.

Wolfe made her Metropolitan Opera debut in Die Fledermaus and has appeared as a guest artist with more than sixty symphony, pops, and philharmonic orchestras across the United States and worldwide, including the New York Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, The New York Pops, and the BBC Symphony Orchestra. She has collaborated with The New York Pops and played to sold-out crowds at Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center with their Broadway Today and Women of Note concerts.

Originally from California, Wolfe received a degree in musical theater from the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. And at age twenty she made her Carnegie Hall debut with the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra under Maestro Erich Kunzel. Wolfe quickly moved on to star as Rona Lisa Peretti in the San Francsico and Boston companies’ productions of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. Soon after, she made her Broadway debut in the revival of 110 in the Shade. Wolfe performed her one-woman cabaret show All Bets Are Off to sold out crowds at 54 Below in New York City, as well as in Las Vegas, San Francisco, New Orleans, and more.

Wolfe is also the founder of BroadwayEvolved, a groundbreaking training program for the next generation of performers, now in its eighth year.