Victoria Kolasinski
Victoria “Viggy” Kolasinski is a fingerstyle ukulele player/teacher born and raised on Long Island, New York. Under the username @jiggywithviggy, Viggy makes fun and kinetic ukulele tutorials on her social media pages and has grown a cumulative audience of over 300k followers! She’s been playing the uke for 10 years and teaching private lessons, workshops, live shows, and online for four of those years, bringing with her a youthful energy and her silly stage presence.…
Steve Kovalcheck
Faculty
Guitar
Guitarist/composer/educator Steve Kovalcheck has a diverse musical background. Hailing from Nashville, Tennessee, Kovalcheck grew up in a rich musical environment. While his roots are in hard rock, he became interested in jazz in his late teens, and has gone on to work with well known artists including Jeff Hamilton, Joey DeFrancesco, Terrell Stafford, Grammy Award winner Howard Levy, Jeff Coffin, Pat Bianchi, Lewis Nash, Danny Gottlieb, Adam Nussbaum, Chris Potter, Nicholas Payton, and Ingrid Jensen, to name a few.…
Tom Krueger
New York
Social dance (with Caitlin Romtvedt)
Tom Krueger (aka TK) is a filmmaker and fiddler living in New York’s Hudson Valley. Currently the executive director of Tempo Kingston Performing Arts Center. His love for all styles of music and dance runs deep, evident by the fact that he’s often one of the last stragglers out on the dance floor.
Samantha Ladwig
Afternoon Workshop Faculty
Samantha Ladwig is an essayist and writing instructor. Her work has been published by The Cut, Literary Hub, Vulture, Bustle, Vice, HuffPost, Real Simple, Vox, The Ex-Puritan, CrimeReads, Brevity, and The Kitchn, among many others. She is a former book reviewer for BUST magazine, as well as a former bookshop owner.…
Abe Lagrimas, Jr.
Past Faculty
Abe Lagrimas, Jr. is a musician, composer, educator, and author who plays the drums, vibraphone, ukulele, and studied at Berklee College of Music. He competed in the highly prestigious Thelonious Monk International Jazz Drums Competition and has worked with many different artists such as Eric Marienthal, Eric Reed, Kamasi Washington, Katisse Buckingham, Lalo Schifrin, Barbara Morrison, Michelle Coltrane, Jake Shimabukuro, Kenny Endo, and continues to be an in-demand session musician.…
Stephanie Land
Afternoon Workshop Faculty
Stephanie Land is the New York Times bestselling author of “MAID: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive,” called “a testimony…worth listening to,” by the New York Times and inspiration for the Netflix series “Maid,” and its sequel “CLASS: A Memoir of Motherhood, Hunger, and Higher Education.” Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic, and many other outlets.…
Susan Landgraf
Afternoon Workshop Faculty
Susan Landgraf is a poet and journalist. She has published more than 400 poems, essays, and articles in numerous journals and magazines. Most recently her poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, Nimrod, Calyx, The Bellingham Review, Literary Mama, Kestrel, Margie, and The Sow’s Ear. She is the author of What We Bury Changes the Ground (Tebot Bach, 2017) as well as The Inspired Poet (Two Sylvias Press, 2019), a book of writing exercises.…
Sasha LaPointe
Morning Workshop Faculty
Sasha LaPointe is from the Upper Skagit and Nooksack Indian Tribe. Native to the Pacific Northwest, she draws inspiration from her coastal heritage as well as her life in the city.
Judy LaPrade
Piano
Judy LaPrade is a life-long musician and teacher. She grew up in West Virginia where she played and sang in church. By junior high school she led and accompanied the patient choir at the local state mental hospital, then as an adult took the Blues into schools and music therapy groups for people with developmental challenges.…
John Largess
Viola, Miró Quartet
Violist John Largess began his studies in Boston at age 12 in the public schools, studying with Michael Zaretsky of the Boston Symphony, and later as a student of Michael Tree at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. In 1995, he graduated from Yale University to join the Colorado String Quartet as interim violist with whom he toured the United States and Canada teaching and concertizing.…