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Enrico Lopez-Yañez is the Principal Pops Conductor of the Detroit, Nashville, and Pacific Symphonies as well as the Principal Conductor of the Dallas Symphony Presents. Lopez-Yañez has quickly established himself as one of the nation’s leading conductors of popular music and become known for his unique style of audience engagement. Also an active composer/arranger, he has been commissioned by the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra, Houston Symphony, San Diego Symphony, and Omaha Symphony, and has had his works performed by orchestras including the Atlanta Symphony, Baltimore Symphony, National Symphony, Phoenix Symphony, Seattle Symphony, and Utah Symphony, among others.

This season, Lopez-Yañez will collaborate with artists including Dolly Parton, Bernadette Peters, Lyle Lovett, War & Treaty, Ben Folds, Indigo Girls, Joss Stone, Girl Named Tom, Lettuce, and Tower of Power. He will appear with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Toronto Symphony, and St. Louis Symphony, as well as making return appearances with the Baltimore Symphony, Houston Symphony, Indianapolis Symphony, National Symphony Orchestra, Seattle Symphony, Utah Symphony, and more. Previously, Lopez-Yañez has appeared with orchestras throughout North America including the Cincinnati Symphony, Minnesota Orchestra, Philadelphia Orchestra, Pittsburgh Symphony, and the San Francisco Symphony, among others.

As Artistic Director and Co-Founder of Symphonica Productions, LLC, Lopez-Yañez curates and leads programs designed to cultivate new audiences. Symphonica manages a wide breadth of Pops and Family/Education productions that “breathe new, exuberant life into classical programming for kids and families” (Nashville Parent Magazine).

Mo Willems is an author, illustrator, animator, and playwright. He was the inaugural Kennedy Center Education Artist-in-Residence (2019–2022), and he continues to collaborate in creating fun new stuff involving classical music, opera, comedy concerts, dance, painting, and digital works with the National Symphony Orchestra, Washington National Opera, Ben Folds, Yo-Yo Ma, Renée Fleming, and others.

Willems is best known for his #1 New York Times bestselling picture books, which have been awarded three Caldecott Honors (Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!; Knuffle Bunny: A Cautionary Tale; Knuffle Bunny Too: A Case of Mistaken Identity), and his celebrated Elephant & Piggie early reader series, which has been awarded two Theodor Geisel Medals and five Geisel Honors.

Willems' art has been exhibited around the world, including major solo retrospectives at the High Museum (Atlanta) and the New-York Historical Society (NYC). Over the last decade, Willems has become the most produced playwright of Theater for Young Audiences in the U.S., having written or co-written four musicals based on his books.

He began his career as a writer and animator on PBS' Sesame Street, where he garnered six Emmy Awards^® (writing). Other television work includes two series on Cartoon Network: Sheep in the Big City (creator and head writer) and Codename: Kids Next Door (head writer). Mo's recent TV projects include the live action comedy special Don't Let the Pigeon Do Storytime! and an animated rock opera special based on Naked Mole Rat Gets Dressed, which originally premiered on HBO Max. In April 2023, Mo celebrated the 20th anniversary of Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! with the publication of Be the Bus: The Lost & Profound Wisdom of The Pigeon (Union Square Kids, April 4, 2023), a humor book for adults, and Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! 20th Anniversary Edition (Hyperion Books for Children), including an exclusive board game. His papers reside at Yale University's Beinecke Library.

Bradley Freeman, Jr., has been a puppeteer since he was five years old. From then on, it was his dream to become a Muppet performer. He would practice every day after school lip-synching to the sketches from the first season of The Muppet Show. All through elementary, middle, and high school, Freeman took puppets around to mess around with his friends and to give them lessons in the television style of puppetry. After high school, he began creating, building, and performing original characters. In 2018, Sesame Street held a workshop to train young puppeteers from around the world.

Out of over 400 international applicants, he was one of 30 selected to participate. This got him on the Sesame Street radar, and several years later, they held auditions for a new character named Wes. After a long audition process, he got the part. Since then, his world has completely changed for the better.

On the Emmy Award^®-winning program Sesame Street, Freeman plays Tamir, Wes, Fred the Flamingo, Humpty Dumpty, and many others. He is also one of the primary supporting performers for the Disney Muppets, performing various penguins, gophers, etc. Most recently, he started working with Mo Willems and Hidden Pigeon Company as the official performer of The Pigeon on his show The Pigeon Explains^®.

Rose Labarre is an Emmy Award^®-winning crafter. She is a freelance fabricator and puppet wrangler for The Jim Henson Company, Hidden Pigeon Company, and Spiffy Pictures, to name a few. She is a costumer/dresser for television and theater. Selected television: Legendary on HBO Max, The Quest on Disney+ (Emmy^® win), Annie Live! on NBC (Costumer/Dresser), Sesame Street on HBO Max, Donkey Hodie on PBS, The Tonight Show on NBC (Puppet Wrangler), Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock Season 2 on Apple TV (Fabricator). Off-Broadway: Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish at Stage 42, As You Like It at Classic Stage Company (Dresser), Emmet Otter’s Jug Band Christmas at New Victory Theater, Sesame Street: The Musical at Theater Row (Fabricator). Live Events: Coldplay’s Music of the Spheres World Tour (Puppet Wrangler).

Helen Hayes Award-winning actress and Lunt-Fontanne Fellow Rayanne Gonzales has appeared on Broadway (Phantom of the Opera), film, and TV (In the Heights, Sound of Music Live). Select credits include: Mystic Pizza (world premiere, Ogunquit Playhouse); Into the Woods; 2022 Revival, Bernstein’s MASS (Kennedy Center); Anastasia (world premiere, Hartford Stage); Ragtime; A Christmas Carol (Ford’s Theatre); In the Heights (Olney Theatre Center, Walnut Street, Sacramento Music Circus); Carousel; Destiny of Desire (world premiere, Arena Stage). Recent: Daphne’s Dive; Bridges of Madison County (Signature Theatre). IG: @rayannegonzales

²ÝÝ®ÊÓƵÃâ·Ñ°æapp: Camelot in Concert, My Fair Lady in Concert; Signature Theatre: Soft Power, Pacific Overtures, She Loves Me, Simply Sondheim, Assassins, Blackbeard, Passion, Titanic, The Fix, Crossing, Miss Saigon, Spin, Brother Russia, Chess, Sweeney Todd, The Hollow, The Boy Detective Fails, Giant, Kiss of the Spider Woman; Ford’s Theatre: Little Shop of Horrors, Into the Woods, A Christmas Carol, Ragtime; Olney Theatre Center: My Fair Lady, Carousel, Godspell, Spring Awakening; Shakespeare Theatre Company: Two Gentlemen of Verona (a rock opera); Arena Stage: Redhand Guitar Workshop, Skindiver Reading; Imagination Stage: Dr. Doolittle, Disney's Mulan; Adventure Theatre: Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer; Keegan Theatre: The 25th Annual Putnum County Spelling Bee, RENT. Education: The Catholic University of America; The London Dramatic Academy. IG: @christopher_mueller

Lauded for having "a voice that soars" (The Washington Post), Aaron Reeder is a Berlin-based American performer and creative consultant whose artistry spans the realms of gospel to opera. He has collaborated with icons such as Dave Brubeck, Renée Fleming, and Megan Hilty, and is a featured soloist in The Metropolitan Opera's Grammy^®-winning productions Porgy and Bess and Champion. As an artist committed to fostering human connection, Reeder leads public programs with global institutions like the Humboldt Forum, Smithsonian Institution, and U.S. Department of State. His multidisciplinary work in theater, music, and education sparks dialogue on social and global issues, inspiring others to find their voice and embrace creative expression.

Bonnie Whiting (she/her) performs, improvises, and creates new music for percussion. Exploring intersections of storytelling and experimental music, her work is often cross-disciplinary, integrating text, music, movement, and technology. Her debut album, featuring a solo-simultaneous realization of John Cage's 45' for a speaker and 27'10.554 for a percussionist was released by Mode Records in 2017, and her second album, Perishable Structures, launched on the New Focus Recordings label in 2020. Current projects include an evening-length song cycle for speaking percussionist composed by Eliza Brown and ten musicians incarcerated at the Indiana Women’s Prison (featured on NPR’s nationally syndicated Slingshot), the expansive new work Stages by composer Wang Lu, including set design by artist Polly Apfelbaum and text by writer Lucy Corin, and performances on the original Harry Partch instrumentarium. Through the U.S. Embassy’s cultural exchange program, she has engaged in two concerti appearances with the National Orchestra of Turkmenistan. She recently performed in the multimedia opera The Ritual of Breath Is the Rite to Resist, featuring productions at Lincoln Center’s Summer for the City, The Hopkins Center at Dartmouth College, and at Stanford Live. She is co-Artistic Director and core percussionist of the Seattle Modern Orchestra, and she has performed with the country's leading new music groups: Ensemble Dal Niente, International Contemporary Ensemble, Talea Ensemble, and red fish blue fish percussion group. She lives and works in Seattle, WA, where she is Chair of Percussion Studies and the Ruth Sutton Waters Associate Professor of Music at the University of Washington.

Feilica Curry is a D.C.-based actor, singer, and Emmy^®-nominated host of WETA Arts on WETA/PBS. Curry was in the Tony^®-nominated Broadway revival and national tour of Into the Woods. Off-Broadway, she led the company of Fabulation, reopening the iconic Billie Holiday Theater and received an AUDELCO nomination for the solo show Queen’s Girl in the World at Abingdon Theatre Company. She is a Resident Company Member at Factory 449 in D.C., Everyman Theatre in Baltimore, and an Artistic Associate at Ford’s Theatre. She has a Helen Hayes Award, a Berkshire Theatre Critics Award, a RTCC Award, and an Anderson Hopkins Award for Excellence in the Theatre Arts. She has performed with the National Symphony Orchestra and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Curry is also a stage director who has worked on several projects at the Kennedy Center with Mo Willems and Renée Fleming as well as Cynthia Ervio’s New Year’s Eve special for PBS. Felicia has been named one of “12 DC Stage Dynamos” by The Washington Post, one of “DC’s Biggest Theatre Stars” by Washingtonian Magazine, and the Baltimore Sun called her one woman cabaret "a brilliant, high energy performance." @thefeliciacurry

The 2024–2025 season is the National Symphony Orchestra’s 94th season and Music Director Gianandrea Noseda’s eighth season. Since its founding in 1931, the NSO has been committed to performances that enrich the lives of its audience and community members. In 1986, the National Symphony became an artistic affiliate of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, where it has performed since the Center opened in 1971. The NSO participates in events of national and international importance, including the annual nationally televised concerts on the lawn of the U.S. Capitol, live-streamed performances on medici.tv, and local radio broadcasts on WETA 90.9 FM.

Since launching its eponymous recording label in 2020, the NSO has embarked on ambitious recording projects including the Orchestra’s first complete Beethoven Symphony cycle and the release of the first-ever cycle of George Walker’s Sinfonias, both led by Noseda. Recent projects include a new series of Four Symphonic Works by Kennedy Center Composer-in-Residence Carlos Simon conducted by Noseda, and William Shatner’s So Fragile, So Blue, recorded live with the NSO in the Concert Hall.

The NSO’s community engagement and education projects are nationally recognized, including NSO In Your Neighborhood; Notes of Honor; and Sound Health. Career development opportunities for young musicians include the NSO Youth Fellowship Program and its acclaimed, tuition-free Summer Music Institute.