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.
 

Described by NPR Music as “a trumpeter of deep expressive resources and a composer of kaleidoscopic vision,” Ambrose Akinmusire has made a home at the crossroads of different musical forms and languages, from post-bop and avant-garde jazz to contemporary chamber music and hip-hop to singer-songwriter aesthetics. He began recording for Blue Note in 2011, earning widespread acclaim for his albums when the heart emerges glistening (produced by Jason Moran), the imagined savior is far easier to paint, A Rift in Decorum: Live at the Village Vanguard, Origami Harvest (top albums of 2018, New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Los Angeles Times), and on the tender spot of every calloused moment (2021 Grammy nominee, best jazz instrumental album).

Akinmusire has also created music for film and television projects including the new Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal series Blindspotting; appeared as a featured soloist with the legendary artists Archie Shepp and Roscoe Mitchell; and made signal contributions to groundbreaking albums including Mary Halvorson’s Code Girl, Brad Mehldau’s Finding Gabriel, and Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly. He also played on Joni Mitchell’s 2014 release Love Has Many Faces, and in 2018 accompanied Chaka Khan, James Taylor, and other luminaries honouring Mitchell in a gala concert documented on Joni 75: A Birthday Celebration. Akinmusire received his second Grammy nomination, this time for best improvised solo on Carrington’s 2022 release, New Standards Vol 1. In 2024, Akinmusire signed to Nonesuch records and released the critically acclaimed Owl Song—the first of three records Akinmusire will release over the next few years.

HAMID DRAKE was born in Monroe, Louisiana but for the most part was raised in Chicago. In 1974 he began what was to be a long-term musical relationship with Fred Anderson who introduced him to performing with many of the other artists in the AACM. In late 1977 Drake joined Adam Rudolph and Foday Musa Suso to form the Mandingo Griot society, one of the first groups in the United States to explore the relationship between traditional West African and American musical idioms. He met Don Cherry when the group recorded their first LP on Flying fish Records. Drake’s relationship with Cherry continued until Cherry’s passing in 1995 doing many tours throughout Europe, Japan and the United States with him. Don Cherry provided a major breakthrough for Drake not only musically but spiritually as well. Since 1987 Drake has recorded toured extensively in Europe and the US with German saxophonist Peter Brotzmann and also with bass player William Parker in several of his ensembles and with many other artists.

The list of the people that Drake has worked and recorded with includes David Murray, Pharaoh Sanders, Iva Bitova, Misha Mengelberg, AB Bars, Luc EX, Adam Rudolph, Bill Laswell, Archie Shepp, Napoleon Maddox(Iswhat), DVK with Ken Vandermark and Kent Kessler, Nicole Mitchell, Punkt, Rob Wagner, Rob Brown, Cooper-Moore, Lewis Barnes, Kirk Knuffke, Fred Anderson, and Kidd Jordan.

In 2005 Drake formed the group Bindu and a few years later Bindu Reggaeology both formed with the purpose of highlighting through music and spoken word the spiritual, cultural and social importance that the Divine Mother Tradition (Divine feminine) has played throughout world.