Marika Hughes is a native New Yorker, a cellist, a singer, a songwriter and has been a storyteller on The Moth Radio Hour. Born to a bi-racial, musical family Marika’s grandfather was the great cellist Emanuel Feuermann and her parents owned a jazz club, Burgundy in their neighborhood. As children, she and her younger brother were both regulars on Sesame Street, and attended the beloved Manhattan Country School. Marika continued her education in the double degree program at Barnard College and the Juilliard School, graduating with BAs in political science and cello performance, respectively.

Marika has worked with Whitney Houston, Lou Reed, Anthony Braxton, David Byrne, Adele, Henry Threadgill, D’Angelo, Idina Menzel, Nels Cline, Somi and Taylor Mac, among many others. She was a founding member of the Bay Area-based bands 2 Foot Yard (Two Foot Yard, Tzadik 2003 & Borrowed Arms, Yard Work, 2008) and Red Pocket (Thick, Tzadik 2004). She is a master teacher and director for Young Arts and a teaching-artist at Carnegie Hall’s Lullaby Project. She currently holds the cello chair at the Broadway show, Hadestown. Marika has self-released three albums: The Simplest Thing (2011), Afterlife Music Radio (2011) and New York Nostalgia (2016). She happily leads her bands Bottom Heavy and The New String Quartet and is the co-founder and director of Looking Glass Arts, an artist-led, recording residency and program in upstate New York. With a commitment to a sliding scale fee structure, LGA is democratizing access to the space, time and natural beauty critical to artistic growth.

Maya Barzilai is associate professor of Hebrew literature and Jewish cultures at the University of Michigan. Her research interests include Weimar cinema, German Jewish culture and thought, Hebrew modernism, and translation studies. She is author of Golem: Modern Wars and Their Monsters (NYU Press, 2016) and Golem, How He Came into the World (Camden House, 2020).