Nicole Paiement founded Ensemble Parallèle in 1993. She has had 15 years of experience as an artistic director. She is a professional conductor; is a full professor in the music department at the University of California, Santa Cruz; is also on the faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music; and holds a doctorate in music.

Jacques Desjardins has had 14 years of experience managing various ensembles. He is a composer; is on the faculty of San Francisco Conservatory of Music teaching Music Theory; and holds a doctorate in music.

Brian Staufenbiel is the head of the Opera Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His directing credits include Bizet's Carmen; Donizetti's The Elixir of Love; Menotti's The Medium; Puccini's Gianni Schicchi; Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and The Magic Flute; Weill's Street Scene; and Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream for which he was awarded the first prize in the National Opera Association Opera competition in New York in 2007.

Staufenbiel has also directed at the Seoul Contemporary Opera Company the Korean premiere of David Jones' opera Bardos and the reprise of Chan-Hae Lee's latest opera Back to the Origins. He has also been guest director in the Sherbrooke Summer Music Festival, where he directed works by Ravel and Honegger. He returned to the festival in Summer 2007 to direct and perform in the semi-staged version of Handel's Jephtha.

In 2007, Staufenbiel also directed the world premiere performance of the final version of Lou Harrison's opera Young Caesar with San Francisco's Ensemble Parallèle.

As a tenor, he has sung the leading roles in Rossini's L'Italiana in Algeri; Britten's The Rape of Lucretia; Poulenc's Les mamelles de Tirèsias; Ravel's L'enfant et les sortilèges; Kurt Weill's Mahagonny; and Mechem's Tartuffe. Staufenbiel has appeared at the Boston Early Music Festival, the Rochester Bach Festival in New York State, and sings frequently throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.

In addition to live performances, Staufenbiel has recorded for Musical Heritage Society; Koch International Classics; and Helicon Records, music by Alessandro Stradella, Heinrich Schütz, Lou Harrison, and Paul Bowles. His most recent recording includes the world premiere recordings of tenor arias from Lou Harrison's opera Young Caesar and The Mass for the Feast of Saint Cecilia (Kleos records).

The Staufenbiel/Scharrón Duo has performed from coast to coast, Argento's Letters from Composers set as a one-man opera. The duo recently completed a CD recording of works by Britten, Argento, and Adler (commissioned work).

Matthew Antaky has created and collaborated on both scenic and lighting designs for all of the performing arts including theater, opera, dance and music since 1985. His work has been seen throughout the United States as well as Europe, Canada, and Mexico.

In 1993 Antaky became a founding member of Shadowlight Productions, a company pioneering new techniques and designs dedicated to the exploration and performance of shadows. Antaky is a six-time nominee and three-time recipient of the Isadora Duncan award for Outstanding Visual Design.

In recent years, Antaky has created designs for The Barber of Seville and The Crucible (Opera San Jose); Candide; Tosca; Don Giovanni and Un Ballo in Maschera (Festival Operas); Copland's Tender Land; Phillip Glass' Photographer; Lou Harrison's Rapunzel; Bernstein's MASS (Cabrillo Music Festival); and Bart's Bluebeard's Castle and is currently creating designs for the staging of Eight Songs for a Mad King (Utah Symphony).

VIcky Mae Nebeker has costumed designed for various operas including Faust, La Finta Giadenira, Merry Wives, Gianni Schicchi, and The Marriage of Figaro. Currently she is the Properties Manager for Berkeley's Aurora Theatre Company for Awake and Sing after her debut with "ack goes Boating. Last year she served as the Assistant Cutter for SF Opera’s Merola program.

Her list of credits also includes Costume and Props for the Great Dickens Christmas Fair, Renaissance Pleasure Faire’s, Idaho, New Jersey & Colorado Shakespeare Festivals, San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre, Goodspeed Theater (of Connecticut), Celebrity and NCL cruise lines, and five Broadway tours: Brigadoon, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Grease, 42nd Street, and Carousel. She holds a Master of Fine Arts from San Francisco State University in Theater Arts (Design/ Technical Production).

Frédéric O. Boulay has worked in opera, symphony, theatre, dance and circus as director of production, project manager, technical Director, and rigger in more than two hundred fifty productions in France and the United States since 1989. A native of France, he holds a Master of Arts in Technical Theatre from Western Washington University, and a Master of Business Administration from the University of Utah David Eccles School of Business.

In recent years, he has worked with Ensemble Parallèle on Young Caesar, and with companies such as Festival Opera, Opera San Jose, Tacoma Opera, Opera Birmingham, Santa Barbara Opera, Lamplighters Music Theatre, Oakland East Bay Symphony, World Music Festival, Liss Fain Dance, Diablo Ballet, Mark Foehringer Dance Project, Western Ballet, Capacitor and Cirque du Soleil.

Austin Forbord is a video artist, filmmaker, and choreographer. He was nominated for an Isadora Duncan Award for performance in 2001, and for visual design in 2003. He won the award in 2006 for his design contribution to Deborah Slater’s Hotel of Memories. Forbord has performed with a diverse group of San Francisco based companies including his own company Rapt, as well as AWD, Scott Wells & Dancers, On-Site Dance Co, Kunst-Stoff and Sara Shelton Mann/Contraband.

He has created video designs for performances by Joe Goode Performance Group, Robert Moses' Kin, Sara Shelton Mann/Contraband, Moving Arts Dance, Stephen Pelton, Erling Wold, Liss Fain Dance, Kunst-Stoff and Motion-Lab. Rapt is also a film company, and Forbord recently finished directing and editing dance films for Anna Halprin and Deborah Hull. Rapt is responsible for the critically acclaimed full length documentary, "Artists in Exile: A Story of Modern Dance in San Francisco". He is in production on a documentary about the history of theater in the Bay Area commissioned by the Kenneth Rainin Foundation.

Jeanna Parham began her career in San Jose where she designed for many South Bay theaters. Since moving to San Francisco, she has been creating designs for the American Conservatory Theater; TheatreWorks; Broadway by the Bay; Alameda Civic Light Opera; University of California Santa Cruz; Opera Theater; and Sacramento Civic Light Opera. Hurd also works regularly as guest designer for many other theaters in the San Francisco Bay Area.