Free First Thursday

Harpist Franziska Huhn is a vibrant musical force: a soloist, chamber musician, pedagogue, and orchestral performer. Huhn has given solo recitals throughout the United States and worldwide in Lithuania, Norway, Poland, Turkey, Georgia, Russia, Syria, Pakistan, and Germany.

A 2003 Fromm Fellow, Huhn is known as a proponent of contemporary music for harp and performs works written especially for her by composers Daniel Pinkham, Lior Navok, and John Heiss. She plays as part of contemporary chamber ensembles Callithumpian Consort and Sound Icon, and has served as a performer and coach at the Summer Institute for Contemporary Performance Practice at NEC since 2007.
As a pedagogue, Huhn holds faculty positions at New England Conservatory, Boston University, and Wellesley College. For 15 years, she also taught at Longy School of Music of Bard College. Since 2003, she has served as the Assistant Director of the Harp Seminar at Boston University's Tanglewood Institute and the Director of the Harp Seminar since 2020.
 

Jamie Diamond (b. 1983, USA) is a performance artist, photographer, and filmmaker whose work explores the human figure through themes of motherhood, memory, and intimacy. She often uses herself as a subject or collaborates with strangers, mimes, professional actors, and outsider artists to inhabit a range of characters and roles. Through this process, she examines authenticity and blurs the line between reality and fabrication, challenging traditional narratives and societal norms.

Follow her on social media: @jamiediamond

Heather Paxson is interested in how people craft a sense of themselves as moral beings in their everyday lives, especially through activities having to do with family and food. She is the author of two ethnographic monographs: Making Modern Mothers: Ethics and Family Planning in Urban Greece (University of California Press, 2004), a study of changing ideologies and practices of motherhood and fertility control in Athens, and The Life of Cheese: Crafting Food and Value in America (University of California Press, 2012), analyzing how craftwork has become a new source of cultural and economic value within American landscapes of production and consumption. Her current work concerns the practical and semiotic work of moving perishable foods across international borders. After serving as Area Editor for the James Beard Award-winning Oxford Companion to Cheese, she co-edited Cultural Anthropology from 2018–2022.  At MIT, Heather teaches courses on food, family, craft, ethnographic research, and the meaning of life. She received her PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University and BA from Haverford College.