Mezzo-soprano Lauren Groff completed her master's degree in Vocal Performance at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music in 2008, studying under Catherine Cook. Ms. Groff completed her undergraduate studies at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, where she performed the role of Dido, (Dido and Aeneas) and was part of the chorus for Pacific Repertory Opera. Her roles in the Bay Area have included Hänsel (Hänsel and Gretel), Hippolyta (A Midsummer Night's Dream), Claudio (Silla-US Premiere), Meg (Little Women), and Lidio (L'Egisto-Cavalli). A frequent soloist, her concert credits include Respighi's Laud to the Nativity, Vivaldi's Gloria, Handel's Messiah, and Mozart's Grand Mass in C-minor. Ms. Groff made her Bay Area opera debut with Festival Opera as Hippolyta in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Her future engagements include a concert version of Carmen with the San Jose Youth Symphony (title role), Bay Area appearances in Handel's Messiah, soloist appearances with the Valley Concert Chorale, and a soloist with the SF Concert Chorale in Saint-Saens Christmas Oratorio.


Mary Louise Hart, Associate Curator of Antiquities, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.


Eleni Hatzaki (Assistant Professor, Classics, University of Cincinnati) is an Aegean Pre-historian working on Crete with research interests in the archaeology of Prehistoric Knossos, ceramic production and consumption, burial customs and society, the archaeology of urban complexity, and household archaeology. She came to University of Cincinnati from the British School at Athens where she held the academic positions of Assistant Director and Knossos Curator. In Greece she has directed two excavation projects (Little Palace North Project and Villa Dionysos Viridarium Project) at the quintessential Bronze Age site of Knossos, Crete. Her long-standing academic association with Knossos (urban development, labyrinthine stratigraphy, pottery, and architecture) started while a graduate student of Mervyn Popham, who suggested the Little Palace (excavated in the 1900s by Arthur Evans) as a suitable Oxford D.Phil. thesis. Apart from Knossos she has participated in numerous fieldwork projects in Greece: Palaikastro, Myrtos Pyrgos, Malia on Crete, Lefkandi and Phylla on Euboea, Kythera and Dokos (islands off the Peloponnese). Publications include the Late Bronze Age (MM IIIB to LM IIIC) chapters of the Knossos Pottery Handbook ( Momigliano ed. 2007); Knossos: the Little Palace (Hatzaki 2005); Knossos: Palace, City, State (Cadogan, Hatzaki and Vasilakis, eds. 2004). Current projects include the Little Palace North Project (now at post-excavation study season phase); publication of the Late Bronze Age ceramic assemblages from the 'Minoan' settlement and House Tomb of Myrtos Pyrgos (excavated in the 1970s by Gerald Cadogan); and publication of the Temple Tomb at Knossos (excavated in the 1930s by Evans and John Pendlebury).


Andrew G. Jameson (PhD, His­tory, Harvard; doctorate, History, The Sorbonne, Paris; MS, Library Science, Simmons; Archival Management, Radcliffe) taught Byzantine, Near Eastern, and African history at Harvard and UC Berkeley. He is Director Emeritus of Books for Asia of The Asia Foundation and President Emeritus of The Academy of Art SF. He was advisor to the National Libraries of Nigeria and China, visiting professor at Bosphorus University and advisor to the library of the Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarchate in Istanbul-Constantinople. He lectures and writes on African and Asian cultures, on libraries, and on the Orthodox Church and mon­asteries; he is researching a book on the Nicene Creed and on the history and lore of the camel. He serves on Harvard's Graduate Council, as a trustee of the William Saroyan Foundation, and as historian of the Bohemian Club of SF. He was recently elected to the Explorers Club of New York, having climbed Mounts Kilimanjaro and Cameroon and trekked the Sahara with the Tuareg. AWorld War II infantry veteran, he earned a Bronze Star with Cluster and a Purple Heart with Cluster in the Battle of the Bulge.


Ian Morris (Jean and Rebecca Willard Professor of Classics and Professor of History, Stanford University) is an archaeologist and historian who has dug in Britain, Greece, and Italy. He has published eleven books. The latest of these, Why the West Rules—For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future, examines eastern and western history from the Ice Age into the twenty-first century (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, October 2010. At Stanford he has served as Chair of the Classics Department, Senior Associate Dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences, Director of the Archaeology Center, and Director of the Social Science History Institute, and in 2009 he won the Dean's Award for Excellence in Teaching. From 2000 through 2006 he directed Stanford's excavations at Monte Polizzo, an indigenous town in Sicily, uncovering new evidence about the transformation of Mediterranean societies in the seventh and sixth centuries BCE. His books have been translated into Spanish, Greek German, and Dutch, and he has appeared on numerous television specials.


Kim Shelton (Assistant Professor, Classics, and Director, Nemea Center for Classical Archaeology, UC Berkeley) is an active field archaeologist and Pre-historian with excavations at Petsas House in the settlement of Mycenae and in and around the Sanctuary of Zeus at Nemea. She is a specialist in ceramics, domestic architecture and Mycenaean religion. She came to UC Berkeley from the University of Texas at Austin following twelve years of field research in Greece, primarily at the Late Bronze Age palatial center of Mycenae where she remains the assistant to the director of the Archaeological Society of Athens' research, Dr. Spyros Iakovidis. She has also participated in fieldwork and specialist study in Greece at the Mycenaean stronghold of Gla, at Pylos, Tegea, the shipwreck site of Iria and now in the sanctuary area and the settlement on Tsoungiza at Nemea. Publications include The Late Helladic Pottery from Prosymna (1996), the chapter on Late Bronze Age Mainland Greece for the Oxford Handbook of the Bronze Age Aegean (E. Cline, ed. Forthcoming) and numerous articles on the Petsas House excavations and the major finds (pottery, frescoes, Linear B tablets). Currently she is researching ceramic deposits from the UCB Nemea Excavations (1972-2002) for publication and finishing two books: one on the figurines of Petsas House (Archaeological Society) and the other the final publication of the Tsountas House excavations (Oxbow Books) conducted by the British School of Archaeology in 1950, 1959-1960. In 2009 she was elected Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London.


Xenia Stefanidou (Greek Ambassador to Philippines), a native Athenian, is a BA graduate of the School of Archeology and History of the University of Athens. In 2005, she completed her Masters in Public Administration at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. A nine-year stint in archeology led to an interest in diplomacy. After completing her studies in the Diplomatic Academy in 1984, she served in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Athens whereupon she was assigned to Bonn, Germany to serve as Secretary of Embassy, then to Plovidiv, Bulgaria where she served as Consul General at the Consulate General of Greece. Returning to Athens, she served in several political departments at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In 2004, Mrs. Stefanidou was detached to the Consulate General of Greece in Boston, and in September of 2005, she assumed her duties as the Consul General of Greece in San Francisco. In 2009 she was named Ambassador of the Republic of Greece to the Philippines. In 1995, she was decorated with the "Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany" by the German Ambassador in Sofia, Bulgaria. She is fluent in six languages—Greek, English, German, French, Spanish and Italian.