Presenters

Alan August has performed as tenor soloist in opera, oratorio, musical theatre, and concert with Repertory Opera Company, Santa Barbara Opera, San Jose Opera Touring Company, and Long Beach Opera, as well as with L.A. Camerata Symphony, Premiere Chorale, and in other venues in the United States and in Europe.

David Berry is a Professor of Music at Converse University. He is a composer whose other specialties include computers in music and musical aesthetics.

Dr. Harry Binswanger was a friend of Ayn Rand in the final years of her life and has written his subsequent philosophical work in the tradition of her Objectivist philosophy.

Ron Boudreaux is the videographer for our conference. He will be archiving the sessions and performances for conference presenters and performers, and we may make them available at a later date for sale or streaming.

Quent and Linda Cordair have been selling Romantic art for over 25 years, and as a premier provider of contemporary Romantic Realism in painting, sculpture and drawing, Quent Cordair Fine Arts has grown to serve an international clientele of private and corporate collectors.

Dr. Dianne Durante has been writing on art and art history for 30-odd years.

John Gillis is a practicing architect with buildings around the country.  His writing on art and architecture has been published in magazines and journals in the U.S. and the U.K.  He is the author of two published books from a planned quadrilogy on art, architecture, esthetics and Romanticism.

Madeleine McEntire is the Conference Manager for Resurrecting Romanticism. Currently Adjunct Instructor of Music Theory at Converse University, she began classical piano lessons in the tenth grade under the tutelage of Dr. Laurel Larsen at Newberry College in Newberry, South Carolina.

Shoshana Milgram first realized the richness of O. Henry when she learned, during graduate school, that his writing had been studied by Boris Eikhenbaum, a famous Russian Formalist, in “O. Henry and the Theory of the Short Story.”

Lee Pierson, who holds a Ph.D. in psychology from Cornell University, learned about perception, including picture perception, as the last graduate student of the eminent psychologist James J. Gibson.

Sandra Shaw is a sculptor, art historian, author and lecturer who has studied art and its history for over thirty years. She lectures widely to college students and adult audiences on the art of Western civilization and has authored the book Windows on Humanity: A History of How Art Reflects Our Ideas About Our Lives & World.

Thomas Shoebotham has taught and performed on the cello in the Bay Area for over 25 years. In past seasons he has made solo appearances with the Oakland Civic Orchestra, Kensington Symphony, and Palo Alto Philharmonic, and given solo and chamber music recitals in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, New Mexico, Illinois, and New York. He has been frequently heard as a cellist, conductor, and lecturer at previous OCONs.

Stephen Siek is the author of a highly acclaimed biography of Britain's greatest piano teacher, England's Piano Sage: The Life and Teachings of Tobias Matthay, and his most recent book (containing an essay by David Berry) is the highly praised A Dictionary for the Modern Pianist, published by Rowman & Littlefield in November 2016. In the past 20 years, he has given numerous courses at OCONs, including surveys of Chopin, Schumann, Rachmaninoff, and Tchaikovsky.