Allan Kozinn (@kozinn) began writing about music for The New York Times in 1977, and served on its culture staff from 1991 to 2014. He was born in New York and studied music and journalism at Syracuse University.

A Los Angeles native based in the Berkeley area since 1996, Andrew Gilbert covers jazz, international music and dance for KQED's California Report, The Mercury News, San Francisco Chronicle, Berkeleyside and other publications.

Ben Kutner is a Los Angeles-based composer, music writer, and lecturer. His music has appeared at venues across the U.S. and he is the founder of the New Parnassus Ensemble.

Brett Campbell is senior editor at Oregon ArtsWatch, a frequent contributor to SFCV and many other publications, and coauthor, with Bill Alves, of Lou Harrison: American Musical Maverick (Indiana University Press 2017).

Brin Solomon writes words and music in various genres and is doing their best to queer all of them. Their work appears in the National Sawdust Log, VAN Magazine, and San Francisco Classical Voice.

Los Angeles-based writer Catherine Womack covers classical music and the arts for the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Magazine, Alta, SFCV, and more. Womack earned a B.M. (Queens University of Charlotte) and M.M. (Southern Methodist University) in piano performance and pedagogy and spent 10 years as a piano instructor and professor of music history before pivoting to journalism. Dog lady. Will travel for opera.

Charles Shere is a composer and writer, the retired art and music critic of The Oakland Tribune, and the author of books about the composers Robert Erickson and Virgil Thomson. Learn more at www.shere.org.

Claudia Bauer is a dance writer and critic in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her writing has appeared in Dance Magazine, Pointe magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Mercury News in San José, and numerous other publications. Instagram: @rainbowpixiedust

Cristina Schreil is a Bay Area-based award-winning arts and culture journalist. She has written for BBC Music, Acoustic Guitar, Strings, Nob Hill Gazette, and more.

David Bratman is a librarian who lives with his lawfully wedded soprano and a wall full of symphony recordings.

Don Kaplan is the author of several books including See With Your Ears: The Creative Music Book. He has contributed to Early Music America, Strings magazine, Music Educators Journal, Copper magazine (PS Audio's journal of music and audio), The Monthly, The New York Times and other publications. He has taught at several colleges such as the Bank Street College of Education, New York University and the New School for Social Research, and been a visiting artist at several Bay area and New York City schools.

Emily Wilson lives in San Francisco. She writes for radio, print, and the web, including Smithsonian.com, Daily Beast, 48 Hills, Hyperallergic, Latino USA, Women’s Media Center, California Magazine, and SF Weekly. She also teaches adults getting their high school diplomas at City College of San Francisco.

Gil French was concert editor of American Record Guide from 2005 to 2020. He has reviewed recordings and concerts since 1988. He also served as midday classical host in public radio from 1988 to 2003.

Janice Berman, SFCV’s senior dance critic, has been a dance writer and reviewer since 1978, beginning at Newsday and New York Newsday. She has written on dance for The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Ballet Review, and Dance Magazine, where she was editor-in-chief.

Jason Victor Serinus regularly reviews music and audio for Stereophile, SFCV, Classical Voice North America, AudioStream, American Record Guide, and other publications. The whistling voice of Woodstock in She’s a Good Skate, Charlie Brown, the longtime Oakland resident now resides in Port Townsend, Washington.

Jeff Kaliss has featured and reviewed classical, jazz, rock, and world musics and other entertainment for the San Francisco Chronicle and a host of other regional, national, international, and web-based publications. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University, and is the author of I Want to Take You Higher: The Life and Times of Sly & the Family Stone (Backbeat Books) and numerous textbook and encyclopedia entries, album liner notes, and festival program notes.

Jennifer Gersten is a violinist pursuing her DMA at Stony Brook University. She is a senior editor for Guernica: A Magazine of Global Arts and Politics, and has held internships at NPR Music and The Blade, a paper based in Toledo, Ohio. Her reporting, essays, and music reviews have been published or are forthcoming in The Kenyon Review Online, The Awl, NPR Music, Guernica, Harvard Magazine, WQXR, and Bachtrack.

Jerry Kuderna is a pianist who gives lecture/recitals every Friday at the Berkeley Arts festival.

Jessica Balik is a flutist and has a PhD in historical musicology from Stanford University.

Joe Cadagin holds a doctorate in musicology from Stanford University, where he completed a dissertation on composer György Ligeti. He is a regular contributor to Opera News magazine. You can read more of his work here.

Jonathan Rhodes Lee studied harpsichord in New York, San Francisco, and the Netherlands. He is the author of Film Music in the Sound Era  and he currently serves as Assistant Professsor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Ken Iisaka is a pianist, a software engineer, and bon vivant living in Foster City.

Laura Clark is a soprano and freelance journalist based in England.

Lily O'Brien is a freelance writer and editor with a passion for the performing arts. She has written feature articles and previews for a variety of publications including Downbeat, JazzTimes, Marin Arts & Culture, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Marin Independent Journal, and Strings magazine. She is a singer who has performed professionally in a variety of genres, and an avid world traveler and bicyclist.

Lisa Houston is a feature contributor to Classical Singer magazine and San Francisco Classical Voice, and the founder of SingerSpirit.com, a website for singers.

Lucy Caplan is the recipient of the 2016 Rubin Prize for Music Criticism. She is a doctoral candidate at Yale, where she is writing a dissertation on opera and African American culture in the early 20th century. 

Michael Zwiebach is the senior editor/ content manager for SFCV. He assigns all articles and content, manages the writing staff and does editing. A member of SFCV from the beginning, Michael holds a Ph.D. in music history from the University of California, Berkeley.

Nicholas Jones, Professor Emeritus at Oberlin College, is a teacher and lecturer in the Bay Area. He sings and plays recorder, violin, and viola da gamba in a number of early music groups, is a member of the Music Critics Association of North America, and serves on the board of Early Music America. 

Paul Kotapish is the managing editor for SFCV.  You can learn more here or at guitarfish.net.

Rebecca Wishnia recently earned her master’s degree in violin from UC Santa Cruz, where she studied with Roy Malan. A passionate chamber musician, she has performed in a variety of ensembles around the Bay Area, in addition to studying and teaching chamber repertoire at festivals each summer.

Rodney Punt writes music criticism for SFCV, Classical Voice North America, Huffington Post, and LA Opus, the latter of which he also publishes. He is a career arts management professional.

Scott Cmiel is Chair of the guitar and musicianship departments at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music Preparatory Division and Director of the guitar program at San Francisco School of the Arts.

Steve Osborn, a children's writer by day, moonlights as a violist and music critic.

Tal Skloot is the owner of Tritonemedia, a production company that specializes in the performing arts and story based media. He has worked on numerous feature films and Emmy award winning documentaries. His documentary 'Freeway Philharmonic' recently toured the globe as part of the U.S. State Department sponsored American Documentary Showcase.

Tom Jacobs is a former senior staff writer for Santa Barbara-based Pacific Standard magazine, and a former staff writer for the Los Angeles Daily News and Santa Barbara News-Press. He tracks and analyzes trends in the arts and social sciences, with an emphasis on psychology, the role of culture and the cultivation of creativity. A native of Chicago, he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in journalism from Northwestern University.

Victoria Looseleaf is an award-winning international arts journalist who covers dance, music, theater and the visual arts. Publications she has contributed to include the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and KCET Artbound. Her feminist novella in verse, Isn’t It Rich? is being adapted for the stage, and her children’s/coffee table book, Russ & Iggy’s Art Alphabet, will soon be published by Red Sky Presents. In addition, Looseleaf co-founded the online magazine ArtNowLA.