Jonathan E. Alsberry began dance and music training with his mother at Agape Dance Center and later graduated from The Chicago Academy for the Arts. He earned his BFA from The Juilliard School, where he met choreographer Aszure Barton—launching a long-standing creative partnership. Known as “Jojo,” he is currently the Senior Rehearsal Director and Director of Summer Intensives at Hubbard Street Dance Chicago. He is also a Creative Associate with Aszure Barton & Artists, assisting in numerous creations for companies including Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Hamburg Ballet, Malpaso, and La Scala Ballet. He joined the Lar Lubovitch Dance Company in 2007 and continues to serve as a stager and teaching artist. Jojo has appeared as a soloist with The Metropolitan Opera Ballet and Lyric Opera of Chicago in several productions, and most recently, LA Opera. Other companies include Luna Negra Dance Theater, The Chase Brock Experience and Daniel Gwirtzman Dance Company. International performance credits include Mikhail Baryshnikov’s Hell’s Kitchen Dance, Evolution with Alessandra Ferri, and Despertares with Isaac Hernández. Teaching and choreographic credits include Arts Umbrella, The School at Jacob’s Pillow, The Juilliard School, Springboard Danse and University of California Irvine.
First worked with aB: 2004

Michael Falk is a songwriter, record producer, artistic director and concert producer. He joins the Banff Centre after 3+ years in senior leadership at the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, producing their concerts, managing the orchestra, and programming their Pops and Movies series.

Throughout his multifaceted career, Michael has focused on collaboration across disciplines, bringing together diverse artists to create inspired new work. Through building partnerships with architects, Indigenous presenters, dancers, wrestlers, comedians, restauranteurs, and more, he has created countless projects that blur artistic lines and engage audiences in unique, inspired
experiences.

As a musician he releases music under the name Touching, was the leader of indie rock band Les Jupes, and has performed and recorded with numerous other groups. His Record Of The Week Club project brought musicians who had never met to his studio to create new works that were released the next day. His songs have been placed in films and tv shows, and charted across North
America and Europe.

Before the WSO, Michael served as Artistic Director of Jazz Winnipeg, where he led the festival through its most ambitious and internationally-focused programming.

Michael has also ran a recording studio, a record label and produced the SpaceLand and Hatch interdisciplinary block parties. With one eye towards trying things that haven’t been done before, and another to seeking artistic excellence through collaborations that build each other up, Michael continues to chase new ideas, creative flow, and a pathway to giving
audiences transformative experiences.

Photo by Samantha Katz.

Haema Sivanesan is Director, Visual Arts at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, where she has previously held positions as Director Leighton Artist Studios and Curator, Walter Phillips Gallery. She has held leadership and curatorial positions in public art galleries and visual arts organizations across Canada and around the world. Her curatorial work focuses on non-western, trans-national and diasporic art histories and practices. She has been the recipient of prestigious awards from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, New York and the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation, Hong Kong.

Ken Hughes is an entrepreneur and community leader. He serves as Chair of the Board, Providence Therapeutics, Canada's cancer therapeutics company, focused on saving lives through cancer and infectious disease therapeutic development. He is Vice Chair of Beacon Data Centres, a leading developer of hyperscale data centres in Alberta, and serves as Lead Independent Trustee of Nearctic Industrial REIT.

Hughes is also a member of the board of the Banff Canmore Foundation and a Director of the Banff Centre Foundation.

Elected at age 34 to the House of Commons of Canada, he served as Chair of the Aboriginal Affairs Committee leading five all-party unanimous reports and was appointed Parliamentary Secretary to the Deputy Prime Minister.

Hughes was appointed the first Chair of the Board of Alberta Health Services in 2008, creating Canada’s largest health delivery service, leading through early years of development. In 2012, Hughes was elected to the Legislature of Alberta, appointed Minister of Energy, and led the creation of the Alberta Energy Regulator. Subsequently, as Minister of Municipal Affairs, he led the resolution of Disaster Recovery Assistance Program claims for nearly 10,000 Albertan families recovering from the southern Alberta floods of 2013. In September 2014, he returned to private life.

Hughes studied at the University of Guelph, the University of Alberta, B.Sc. (Agriculture) and has a Master of Public Administration from the John F. Kennedy School at Harvard University. As a governance professional, he has been a certified ICD.D member since 2005.

He was recognized as Honourary Chief Badger Runner of the Blackfoot Confederacy Piikani First Nation in 1991. He has received the following civil awards: The 125th Anniversary of Confederation of Canada Medal (1992), The Alberta Centennial Medal (2005), The Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee Medal (2012) and The King Charles III Coronation Medal (2025) He and his wife Denise live in Canmore, Alberta and on Salt Spring Island, BC. (Updated August 2025)

GRAMMY-nominated saxophonist and composer Melissa Aldana has garnered international recognition for her visionary work as a band leader, as well as her deeply meditative interpretation of language and vocabulary. She was recently signed with Blue Note Records and releases her debut album with the historic label titled 12 Stars in March 2022. “Melissa Aldana is one of the foremost musician/composers of her generation,” says Blue Note President Don Was.

Aldana was one of the founding members of ARTEMIS, the all-star collective that released their debut album ARTEMIS on Blue Note this past Fall. The album featured Aldana’s simmering composition “Frida,” which was dedicated to Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, who inspired the musician through “her own process of finding self-identity through art.” 

Kahlo was also the subject of Aldana’s celebrated 2019 album Visions (Motéma), whichearned the saxophonist her first-ever GRAMMY nomination for Best Improvised Jazz Solo, an acknowledgement of her impressive tenor solo on her composition “Elsewhere.” In naming Visions among the best albums of 2019 for NPR Music, critic Nate Chinen wrote that Aldana “has the elusive ability to balance technical achievement against a rich emotional palette.”
 

Aldana was born in Santiago, Chile and grew up in a musical family. Both her father and grandfather were saxophonists and she took up the instrument at age six under her father Marcos’ tutelage. Aldana began on alto, influenced by artists such as Charlie Parker and Cannonball Adderley, but switched to tenor upon first hearing the music of Sonny Rollins. She performed in Santiago jazz clubs in her early teens and was invited by pianist Danilo Pérez to play at the Panama Jazz Festival in 2005.

Aldana moved to the U.S. to attend the Berklee College of Music, and the year after graduating she released her first album Free Fall on Greg Osby’s Inner Circle label in 2010, followed by Second Cycle in 2012. In 2013, at 24, she became the first female instrumentalist and the first South American musician to win the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Saxophone Competition, in which her father had been a semi-finalist in 1991. After her win, she released her third album Melissa Aldana & Crash Trio (Concord). Aldana is also an in-demand clinician and educator, and the New England Conservatory’sJazz Studies Department recently appointed her to their jazz faculty beginning in the Fall of 2021.

BRANDEN JACOBS-JENKINS (Playwright) is a Brooklyn-based writer and a professor in the practice at Yale University. His plays include Purpose, Appropriate, The Comeuppance, Girls, Everybody, War, Gloria, An Octoroon and Neighbors. His work has received the Pulitzer Prize, as well as Tony, New York Drama Critics’ Circle, Lortel, Drama League, Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle, Jeff and Obie awards. His other honors include the Tennessee Williams Award, the Windham-Campbell prize, and the MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships. A graduate of Juilliard’s playwriting program, he is the vice president of the Dramatists Guild council and serves on the boards of DGF, Soho Rep and the Park Avenue Armory.

Aszure Barton is a choreographer, director, and innovator who began dancing at age three. With training spanning from tap and African dance to Scottish Highland and character, she's been producing dances since her days as a student at Canada's National Ballet School. In the early 2000s, she founded Aszure Barton & Artists | AB&A — the core of her choreographic voice and an ongoing creative hub described by the US National Endowment for the Arts as “watching the physical unfurling of the human psyche.” While AB&A remains her artistic home, Barton’s reach extends globally. She has collaborated with celebrated artists and companies such as Mikhail Baryshnikov, María Pagés, Cyndi Lauper, Volker Bertelmann (Hauschka), Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, American Ballet Theatre, English National Ballet, Grand Théâtre de Genève, Hamburg Ballet, Limón Dance Company, Martha Graham Dance Company, National Ballet of Canada, Nederlands Dans Theater, Sydney Dance Company, Teatro alla Scala, and others. Among her celebrated works, Mere Mortals premiered at San Francisco Ballet in collaboration with DJ Floating Points and Hamill Industries, marking the first full-length ballet by a female choreographer in the company’s 90-year history. Barton is currently Resident Artist at Hubbard Street Dance Chicago and House Choreographer at Gauthier Dance at Theaterhaus Stuttgart — partnerships  that expand her choreographic web while remaining grounded in AB&A’s ethos. She has received numerous honors, including a Bessie Award for her work BUSK and the prestigious Arts & Letters Award. Barton was the first Martha Duffy Resident Artist at Baryshnikov Arts Center and is also an official ambassador of contemporary choreography in Canada.