Nir Cohen-Shalit, conductor, musicologist and Musical Director of Into the Light, has been described as “one of the most interesting and energetic figures in Israel’s musical life”. Feeling equally at home as conductor and scholar, his interests range from Early Baroque to Contemporary Opera, Bach’s cantatas to Sondheim’s musicals, and critical thinking to music theory. Maestro Cohen-Shalit has conducted most of Israel’s orchestras, including the Israel Camerate Jerusalem, the Israel Sinfonietta Beer Sheva, the Israel Chamber Orchestra and the Revolution Orchestra. He has participated in the Sounds of the Desert Festival, the Piano Festival at the Jerusalem Theatre, and the International Chamber Music Festival. At the Israel Festival, he conducted the Israeli premiere of Sondheim’s Into the Woods. At the Israel Opera, he served as assistant conductor to Meastri Eitan Schmeisser, Daniel Oren, Francesco Cilluffo, Karen Kamensek and Patrick Summers. He helped prepare the Israeli premieres of the operas Schitz (Levin/Rechter), The Lady and the Peddler (Agnon/Permont), The Passenger (Weinberg/Medvedev), and Dead Man Walking (Heggie/Macnally).
Cohen-Shalit has won awards and accolades for his work as a conductor and musicologist. He is also a sought-after lecturer in diverse fields: the history of conducting, historically informed performance, the American Musical, and the musical activity in the Terezin Ghetto. His doctorate at New York University centers on a historical analysis of 19 th century orchestral music.

Michael, a composer and teacher, was born in Tel Aviv in 1960. He studied composition at the Academy of Music and Dance in Jerusalem (JAMD) and at Cambridge University, and completed a PhD on “The British Symphony in the Second Half of the 20th Century” at the Hebrew University. He is a professor at JAMD, and teaches at several other educational institutions in Jerusalem and the Negev region. He was Artistic Director of the Israeli Music Festival for six years (until 2012) and researched for a decade at Beit Terezin music composed during the Holocaust. Fruits of this research are a number of creative works, including completion of works by composers who perished in the Holocaust, and some original compositions, inspired by these works. 

Wolpe won the Israeli Artists' Organization (ACUM) Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2009 and Tel Aviv’s Rosenblum Award for the Performing Arts in 2010. In 2014, he won the Prime Minister's Award for Composers, for the second time. In December 2018, he was awarded the Yitzhak Navon Prize by the Minister of Culture, for his contribution to cultivating Jewish and Israeli culture. In 2015-2016, Wolpe served as Conductor and Artistic Director of the Israeli Andalusian Orchestra in Ashdod. He founded (in 1998) and continues to lead the "Sounds of the Desert" Festival, at Kibbutz Sde Boker, dedicated to Israeli music in its many styles, and also serves as Artistic Director of the "Pianos" festival in Jerusalem, which he jointly founded in 2013. Wolpe's works cover a variety of genres, including chamber music, orchestral music, choral music, popular songs, arrangements, piano music and community music, which rooted in his creative activity in the kibbutz community.

UK-based Dr David Fligg is Honorary Research Fellow at the Royal Northern College of Music, and previously Lecturer in Academic Studies: he has also been a Visiting Professor at the University of Chester. His specialised subject area is the life and music of the Czech-Jewish composer Gideon Klein, one of the Czech composers interned in the Terezín prison camp by the Nazis. David has published widely on Klein, most recently the full-length biography ‘Don’t forget about me: The short life of Gideon Klein, composer and pianist’ (Toccata Press, 2022). In 2019-20, David co-curated Klein’s centenary festival in the Czech Republic, ‘Gido’s coming home!’. 

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David was Project Co-ordinator for the ‘Performing the Jewish Archive: Rediscovering Jewish Music & Theatre’ initiative (University of Leeds), and its five international festivals, between 2014 and 2018. He co-founded the research project ‘Music, memory and migration on the post-Holocaust Jewish experience’ (2013-14).  David cofounded the Into the Light project in early 2021, together with Yaacov Fisher.