Who We Are

Bruce Arnold

Bruce Arnold

The Bruce Arnold Foundation was created by Bruce Arnold to help emerging artists. Bruce grew up in Sioux Falls, South Dakota in the 60s, a pre-internet period when finding a great guitar teacher was not an option, and getting the right information to master music was an impossibility. Once Bruce moved to the east coast to study at Berklee, he was submerged in a high-level learning environment and had to spend years catching up to his fellow students. Eventually, through very hard work, Bruce surpassed his peers, but was not settled with merely that; he vowed to help other students all across the world that found themselves in similar situations. To begin his own process of “passing the baton” as Mick Goodrick, one of his Berkeley mentors called it, Bruce created the Muse Eek Publishing Company which is dedicated to long distance learning for all musicians. By creating music educational products based on what had helped him and were a proven success with his students, he was able to give back some of the knowledge that he received from his extensive training by Charlie Banacos, Jerry Bergonzi, and the Berklee College of Music. But because Bruce believes that education doesn’t stop with the release of a book or DVD, he offers personal free email support for customers who purchase his books. He also spends a good bit of his time teaching via Skype because again, a one-on-one relationship to a student is crucial to their success.

MP-AT.org

MP-AT.org

Through the Bruce Arnold Foundation’s subsidiary: The Music Performance and Technology MP-AT.org (a traveling workshop for all instruments and music  technologies.) Students find the information they need to be a successful musician in the 21st Century.

 

 

 

 

Our Board of Directors

Jerry Feldman

Jerry Feldman

Mr. Gerry Feldman is a global executive offering extraordinarily broad health industry experience as a manufacturer and marketer of medical devices, a hospital administrator, and a regulator of healthcare.

Until November 2013, Mr. Feldman served as VP Market Development at Covidien, Respiratory and Monitoring Solutions. In this role, he was in charge of enhancing the company’s organic growth across its product lines, including capnography.

Prior to Covidien, Mr. Feldman was a member of the Management Board and President at Oridion Systems Ltd from September 2003 until it was acquired by Covidien in 2012 for over $340 million. In that capacity, he was responsible for all commercial and operational activities worldwide.

Prior to joining Oridion, Mr. Feldman held senior management positions including, President of the Clinical Diagnostics Division at Thermo Electron Corporation, from 1991 till 2003, and President of International Technidyne Corporation of Edison New Jersey, from 1987 till 1991, before its sale to Thermo Electron Corporation in 1991. His prior positions were in health care, including a long tenure as Hospital Administrator at the John F. Kennedy Medical Center in New Jersey.

Mr. Feldman has a Master of Business Administration Degree and a Master of Public Health Degree, both from Columbia University, as well as a Bachelor of Arts Degree from Queens College of CUNY.

Vered Leib Willis

Vered Leib Willis

After spending twenty years in the art world as a painter, art critic, curator, and part-time university professor, Vered Lieb began a second career as a consultant and retained executive search professional in 1990, when she joined Gilbert Tweed.

Trained by former McKinsey & Co. Consultant, and Founding Partner in Webb Johnson Associates, George Webb, Ms. Lieb is a consultant foremost in how to optimize organizational and operational effectiveness.

Ms. Lieb has built long-term relationships with industry clients and venture capital companies helping to improve and staff organizations from the Board of Directors, CEO, CFO, CTO, Vice President, and Director levels. Additionally she has managed and developed training programs, retention and compensation strategies, and built teams in sales, supply chain, marketing, logistics, IT, finance, and manufacturing.

Ms. Lieb was a Senior Associate with A.T. Kearny participating in growing the Strategy Consultancy; she became a full Consultant at Webb Johnson Associates, and later Korn Ferry, and a Partner at Aegis Consulting. The hallmark of her work is thoroughness and strong people assessment skills. Her clients included such international giants as LVMH (France), Reliance (India), Lonza (Swiss), United Business Media (UK), and DSM (Dutch) as well as many US based firms.

Vered Lieb attended and graduated Queens College, and holds a BA in Philosophy. Ms. Lieb continues to work directly with CEO’s and Boards who seek her help with small and mid-sized companies to achieve growth or prepare them for sale. With her background in Organizational Development and Strategy, Ms. Lieb is an effective personal business trainer and mentor. She is married to painter Thornton Willis. The couple lives and works from their loft in Soho, NYC.

Jane Getter

Jane Getter

Jane Getter is a guitarist, composer, and bandleader. She has earned a solid reputation as a musician who can negotiate complex jazz changes, dynamic R&B grooves and distortion driven rock solos. Her educational articles have appeared in Guitar Player magazine where she has been covered regularly, in their “Sessions” section, and a feature interview in the 2013 issue. She has lent her organizational skills as a band leader to the creation of numerous concerts and music workshops across the country.

Ms. Getter’s CV reads like a “Who’s Who” in contemporary music, with a stint as the guitarist in the Saturday Night Live Band, touring with jazz/blues organist Jack McDuff, as well as fusion maestro Michal Urbaniak. She has received the ASCAP Gershwin Award for Music for Theater or Dance, and co wrote the smooth jazz hit “Hopscotch.” In 2003 her Album “three” was submitted for a Grammy nomination.

She currently performs and records with Bruce Arnold and Alex Skolnick in the Eclectic Electric Guitar trio, and several other aggregates, including her own band “Premonition” with Adam Holzman and Bryan Beller.

Jane Getter is also an excellent educator and administrator. Her teaching approach is methodical, with a careful balance of challenge and encouragement. She organized the first highly successful Guitar Intensive Workshop in New York City in 2014.

Jerry DeVore

Jerry DeVore

Jerry DeVore is a musician, composer, music technologist, and educator. He created and directed the music technology program at Iowa Western College as full-time faculty. Since then, he has been the recording engineer for projects from radio shows to big band recordings, as well as a composer of computer music. Since his arrival in New York City in 2008, he has been actively performing and composing, all while teaching, engineering, producing, and project directing. He has performed in small intimate clubs to major performance spaces in New York City and throughout the USA.

Born in Peoria, Illinois, Jerry learned to play a dozen instruments by the end of high school. Starting with trombone, he moved on to performing professionally on drum set and percussion. Soon his focus turned to the electric and upright basses, and his career migrated to playing the bass full time.

Mr. DeVore involved himself in the local jazz scene as he transitioned into college. While attending Bradley University majoring in Music Performance, he was a full-time member of two orchestras in Illinois, in addition to short contracts with symphonies as far off as North Carolina.

Just before graduating with honors, he won an audition with the United States Air Force Band. He toured the nation for over 4 years performing with the Jazz Big Band and Concert Band of the USAF Heartland of America Band. After his term with the band, he became a music transcriptionist and conductor with a gospel choir and orchestra, performing with Dove Award-winning artist Richard Smallwood. He was soon hired to be a full-time member of an R&B band, the Confidentials (named by Brides Magazine as one of the top wedding bands in the nation). While performing at the Art Farmer Jazz Festival, a local college noticed him and began talks for creating a new program. This led to his creation of the first Music Technology degree program at Iowa Western College. As Jerry’s newly designed program was growing and doubling the music department’s enrollment, his interest shifted towards the completion of a master’s degree. He then moved to New York City and began a full-time graduate program of study at New York University.

Through his career, Jerry has performed as a soloist with the Dallas Brass accompanied by full orchestra, and with several notable artists: Curtis Fuller, Wynton Marsalis, Kenny Werner, Gladys Knight, and Lenny Pickett, to name a few. He brings a truly comprehensive understanding of the bass, music theory, and music technology to the Bruce Arnold Foundation.

Adam Klosowiak Bruce Arnold Foundation Board of Directors

Adam Klosowiak

Adam Klosowiak grew up in Glenview, IL, in the suburbs of Chicago, where his musical interests were started with piano lessons at the age of 10. Although music has always remained a hobby for Adam, it is nevertheless a big part of his life, even more so after he also started learning guitar in 2012.

After graduating high school, Adam went to Princeton University where he studied electrical engineering. In his senior year, he co founded the company KLOS Guitars with his brother Ian, a company which produces carbon fiber travel guitars. Since its inception, Adam has served as the CEO. Following graduation from Princeton in 2015, he won a Fulbright Fellowship to teach English in Austria.

An avid athlete, Adam enjoys nearly all sports from swimming, running and cycling to diving and gymnastics. He looks forward to all challenges as opportunities to learn and grow both personally and professionally.
 
 
 
 

Staff

Michal Shapiro

Michal Shapiro

Michal Shapiro is a producer, writer, editor, video journalist, web and graphic designer, musician and painter. She has published articles of music criticism in various international publications including Songlines, Global Rhythm, FRoots and Rootsworld online. Her world music videoblog appears regularly on the Huffington Post.

Almost all of Ms. Shapiro’s world music CD/Book compilations for the Ellipsis Arts label have won Awards, including Time-Out Magazine’s singling out her “Dancing with the Dead” compilation as one of the best CD’s of the millennium in their 2000 overview.

Shapiro’s paintings have been used in TV commercials, movies, and television shows, most conspicuously in the AMC series “Mad Men” where her painting adorned the office of main character Don Draper in the first 3 seasons.

From 2001-2011 she was the Director of Music Programming for Link TV (now merged with KCET in Los Angeles) a pioneering satellite channel broadcasting nation wide. She continues to be an active member in the world music community, regularly covering music events worldwide. These excursions frequently appear as videos on her vlog in the Huffington Post.

She has edited the entire Muse-Eek Publishing catalogue, handled all publicity outreach and writing, and designed most of their CD and DVD packages. She continues to create videos, flyers and all promotional material for the Bruce Arnold Foundation, Muse-Eek Publishing, and MP-AT.org, the newest offshoot of the Foundation.

Peter Cortinas

Peter Cortinas

Peter Cortinas is a web developer and guitarist born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. He attended Hunter College in Manhattan, studying computer science for three years before leaving early to embark on a 15-year career in information technology, working for various companies in the entertainment industry such as Atlantic Records, Disney and Viacom. After an eight year run as an IT manager for the BET television network, he is now at the start of a new path in web development and computer programming. His musical pursuits include currently studying jazz theory with Bruce Arnold and, in the past, he has performed and recorded with New York City post punk rock act Bitter Grace. He currently resides in Los Angeles with his wife Jacqueline, their two boys and five cats.

Interns

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Allan Chen is currently a freshman at the University of Michigan College of the Literature, Science, and Arts pursuing a major in Computer and Information Science.

Allan was born in Fair Lawn, New Jersey. Early on, he was introduced to the piano. Starting from age 7, he has played at various concert halls in New York City. His most memorable experiences include playing Mendelssohn’s Fantasy in F# Minor Op. 28 at Carnegie Hall in 2012 and playing Kabalevsky’s Concerto No. 3 in D major, Op. 50 with Michael Thomopoulos at Merkin Concert Hall. He is a product of The Palisades School of Music and a student of well-respected teacher, Stella Xu. He has medaled in the 2011 Russian Music Festival (2nd Place), won the 2012 Golden Key International Music Festival (1st Place), and placed in both the 2012 and 2013 Crescendo International Music Competition (2nd Place).

Off the stage, Allan also enjoys playing piano at his local senior center, entertaining and putting smiles on faces. In addition, he was chosen as a student scholar in the Rutgers Waksman Institute Research Program in Microbiology, where he conducted research on duckweed and published four protein sequences to the National Center of Biotechnology Information.

His hobbies including bowling, listening to classical music, and programming.


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Beatriz Torres is currently a transfer student at SCAD – Savannah College of Art and Design pursuing a major in Graphic Design.

Beatriz, or “Bia” was born in Brazil, and moved to the United States in 2014 via a program called “Brazil Science Without Borders”. This program afforded her the opportunity to experience “the American way of life”. She enjoys all kinds of art; from music to street art. Beatriz loves chocolate, exploring new places and meeting new people.

When Bia is not drowning in homework, you can probably find her playing mini golf, going to the movies, playing video games, or just binge-watching shows on Netflix.

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Ruzeb Chowdhury is currently a Freshman at Cornell University and is pursuing a major in Computer Science.

Ruzeb was born in Queens, NY, where he has spent his days surrounded by multicultural tastes, especially in the arts of dance and song.

Some of his passions include playing soccer, building websites, and intensely browsing Imgur. When he isn’t catching up on schoolwork, Ruzeb spends countless hours on Netflix watching “House of Cards”, “The Walking Dead”, “Orange is the New Black”, among many others. He also enjoys Chess and CS:GO.

Although Ruzeb is not classically trained on any particular instrument, he is greatly intrigued by music and has joined the intern team to learn more about music composition and theory in addition to performing his primary tasks as an intern.

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Sara Adeli is currently a junior at Thomas Edison High School and hopes to one day pursue a career in law or journalism.
Sara was born in Maryland, but she has lived in Northern Virginia for most of her life. She first discovered her love for music in the fourth grade when she was introduced to the flute. After seven years of playing in her school’s symphonic band, Sara decided that she wanted to learn the guitar. She had always wanted to be able to sing and play an instrument simultaneously, so she decided to take a guitar course that was offered at her school. It was one of the best decisions she has ever made.
Aside from music, Sara also loves to read, write, tutor her peers, and most importantly, kill zombies in Black Ops with her little brother.

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