2000/2001 FELLOWS

The following bios were current as of the Master Musician award date, but have not been updated.

Eleanor Academia is a master of Kulintang, the ancient gong and drum music of the Southern Philippines. She was the first "outsider" and American to be allowed in the legendary village of Kulintang masters in the ancient city of Dulawan in Minadanao, Philippines. A direct mulit (lineage holder) of recognized Philippine Kulintang master artists, Academia is the founder and director of the World Kulintang Institute and Research Studies Center in Reseda, California.

Born and raised in Texas, Clora Bryant came to Los Angeles in 1945, where she became part of the swinging music scene on Central Avenue. An accomplished jazz trumpet player and vocalist, Bryant was the only female horn player ever to perform with saxophone legend Charlie Parker. In the early 1950s, Bryant was a member of the Hollywood Sepia Tones, the first all-woman jazz group to appear on television. During her distinguished career, Bryant has performed with such well-known artists as Dizzy Gillespie, Linda Hopkins, Johnny Otis and Bill Berry.

Abdoulaye Diabate was born in Guinea, West Africa, to a long lineage of Mandé jali-musicians, practitioners of a musical tradition that dates back to the 13th century. The rise of modern Mandé music began in the 1920s with the introduction of the acoustic guitar to an instrumental repertoire that had previously included balafon (xylophone), nkoni (lute) and kora (harp). The repertoire was further extended in 1958 when the electric guitar was introduced to the country as part of a sweeping governmental modernization policy. Diabate is a master of both acoustic and electric guitar in the Mandé tradition. He is a founder of the African Virtuoses band, and former performer with Fatala.

Radha Prasad was born and raised in India and taught himself to play the bamboo flute at an early age. He studied for 18 years as an apprentice to Pandit Hariprasad Chaurais, India's foremost flutist. He has toured extensively throughout India, Europe and the United States. He moved to the U.S. in 1992, and has been resident in Los Angeles as a teacher and performer since 1995. Because of the difficulty of obtaining high quality bamboo flutes, Prasad has become a master craftsman of the instrument, making and tuning flutes for musicians in Southern California.

Manoochehr Sadeghi began to study classical Persian santur (a 72-string hammer dulcimer) in Tehran when he was seven years old under the master Ustad Abol Hassan Saba. When he was 17, he joined Saba's orchestra, and enjoyed many years as a master performer and teacher in Iran before coming to the U.S. in the late 1960s. He has been recorded for A&M Records, the Bomar Company, and for broadcast on Iranian television and radio. He received a master's degree in music from California State University, Los Angeles, and has pursued a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology at UCLA. In 2003 he was named a National Heritage Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts.

Sophiline Cheam Shapiro received a Diploma of Arts in classical dance from the University of Fine Arts in Phnom Penh, Cambodia in 1988, and served on the faculty there for three years before immigrating to the United States in 1991. She is among a small number of artists who survived the purges of the Khmer Rouge, and consequently, is one of only a handful of living artists who continue to practice the traditional repertoire of Khmer classical dance and music. The only traditionally trained Khmer classical dance singer in Southern California, Shapiro is equally accomplished in dance, and has received critical acclaim for her choreography.