Sinai Forum 2025

Platon is one of the world’s most renowned portrait photographers, having photographed more world leaders than anyone else in history, including six American presidents. He has photographed over 30 covers for TIME Magazine, including their 2008 Vladimir Putin Person of the Year cover, which was awarded first prize at the World Press Photo Contest and most recently, their 2024 Donald Trump Person of the Year.

In 2008, Platon signed on as staff photographer to the New Yorker, winning a Peabody Award and two National Magazine Awards for his photo essays. He has published four books with subjects ranging from the power of world leaders to the dignity of those who serve in the US Military.

In 2013, Platon founded The People’s Portfolio, a non-profit foundation dedicated to celebrating emerging leaders of human rights and civil rights around the world. The People’s Portfolio creates a visual language that breaks barriers, uplifts dignity, fights discrimination and enlists the public to support human rights around the world. Platon is currently on the board for Arts and Culture at the World Economic Forum.

Platon’s life’s work is the subject of a Netflix documentary, Abstract: The Art of Design. His first film, My Body Is Not A Weapon, features survivors of wartime sexual violence and 2018 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Dr. Denis Mukwege. Platon’s archive of prominent African American civil rights leaders and cultural leaders was acquired by the Smithsonian in 2020. Platon headlined at TED Vancouver in 2022, promoting curiosity over judgment.

Platon’s second film, Portrait of a Stranger, was made in partnership with the United Nations, honoring the voices of refugees from around the world. Platon’s new book, The Defenders, was made in collaboration with The People’s Portfolio and celebrates human rights activists
from around the world, published May 2024.

Nathan Gunn’s interest in music began in South Bend, Indiana where he grew up. He sang in his school musicals and his church choir, but it wasn’t until his junior year of high school after being introduced to Mozart’s opera, Die Zauberflöte, that he thought of devoting his life to it.

Consumed by a desire to learn more, Nathan went the University of Illinois to study music and was mentored by pianist John Wustman and master teacher William Miller.

As a performer, Nathan is respected as an artist, a musician and as a singing actor. He has performed on the greatest stages in the world, as well as television, radio, video recording and live simulcasts and he is proud to have premiered over a dozen new operas during his twenty-five years on the stage.

Nathan’s famous portrayal of Papageno (The Magic Flute) was brought to the world stage in the first-ever live HD broadcast performed at the Metropolitan Opera. In addition to Papageno, Nathan has reinterpreted classic roles such as Billy Budd, Figaro and Don Giovanni, garnering many awards, including a Grammy award for his portrayal of Billy Budd and the coveted Beverly Sills award. He has also been widely acclaimed for his work in musical theater.

His performances of Billy Bigelow, Lancelot (both for Live at Lincoln Center) and Max von Mayerling at the John F. Kennedy Center’s Broadway Center Stage and most recently Emile DeBecque have been widely acclaimed as well and have led to collaborations with such Broadway stars as Mandy Patinkin, Stephanie J. Block, Kelli O’Hara and Audra McDonald.

Nathan also finds directing for the stage quite enjoyable. He recently directed the world premiere of Ilya Demutsky’s absurdist comic opera “Black Square” at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts which is the home of Lyric Theatre @ Illinois.

Nathan and his wife, Julie, have been married for 32 years and have been partners in music for even more. They are often seen in recital and cabaret settings where they enjoy creating programs unique to the special event.

In the Fall of 2023, “Nathan Gunn: The Art of Opera” was on display at The Peoria Riverfront Museum. This was a curation of famous prints and posters designed to promote the premieres of new operatic and musical theater productions. The display was brought to life through musical performances designed to highlight the pieces. Through their production company, Shot in the Dark, they are creating and producing a new musical by composer Peter Hilliard and librettist Matthew Boresi.

Currently, it’s being workshopped with the help of Lyric Theatre @ Illinois and will be premiered in its 2024-25 season.

In addition to life as a performer and educator, Nathan is an avid promoter and advocate of the arts. He and Julie care very much about the younger generation and support programs that help them develop their artistic potential.

Nathan and Julie raised their five children in Champaign, Illinois, where they have lived since 1989.

Music has always been a part of Julie Gunn’s life, and her devotion to it has brought her accolades from around the world as a performer, producer, teacher and advocate. Her work often supports and promotes emerging creative or performing artists.

Trained as a pianist, she has been heard with many of the greatest art song, opera and musical theatre singers of her generation, especially her husband and artistic partner, Nathan Gunn, on many of the world’s most prestigious recital series, including the Aspen Festival, Boston’s Celebrity Series, Brussel’s La Monnaie, the Carnegie Hall Pure Voice Series, the Cliburn Foundation, Lincoln Center Great Performers, Manhattan’s Café Carlyle, the Ravinia Festival, St. Paul’s Schubert Club, the Sydney Opera House, Toronto’s Roy Thomson Hall, London’s Wigmore Hall and the United States Supreme Court.

In the last few years she has particularly enjoyed recitals with Mandy Patinkin and Adam Ben-David and with her daughter, cellist Jordan Lee Gunn.

Dr. Gunn enjoys working at the intersection of different disciplines and collaborates with artists in the fields of theatre, dance and design whenever possible. She is committed to the development, production and resonance of new works and in recent seasons has been part of several world premieres and workshops, as a producer, a pianist, or as a conductor. They include staged works like Black Square (Demutsky), Candinho (Ripper), PRISM (Reid), The Surrogate (Macklay), Sensorium Ex (Prestini), Take Flight! (Maultby and Shire) and Bhutto (Fairouz), often in collaboration with Beth Morrison Projects and concert works by Iain Bell, Augusta Read Thomas, Jennifer Higdon and Harold Meltzer. She mounts workshops and public performances of student compositions in musical theatre and opera each year.

A member of ASCAP, she is the author of many arrangements of songs for chamber groups and orchestras. Her arrangements have been heard at Carnegie Hall, Chicago’s Symphony Center, the DeBartolo Center, Ithaca College, Interlochen, the Kennedy Center, the Krannert Center, London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall and in Sun Valley, Idaho.

In 2013 the Gunns conceived a new way of thinking about and teaching sung theatre which has at its core, instead of a particular type of repertoire, the values of creativity, flexibility and wellness. Lyric Theatre @ Illinois was built on that foundation and is in its second decade as part of the University of Illinois School of Music and the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts. As the Co-Director of Lyric Theatre @Illinois, Dr. Gunn produces numerous operas or musical theatre works each year at the Krannert Center and other regional venues, lately including larger celebrations—Lyric Under the Stars at Allerton Park and Retreat Center—and Carnaval! at Krannert Center for the Performing Arts-combining spectacular performances with festive hospitality.

Nathan and Julie Gunn have a production company, Shot in the Dark Productions Inc, which made its debut at the Krannert Center in Nathan and Julie Gunn and friends:An Evening on Broadway and continued with Drytown: A living room vaudeville. In commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Shot in the Dark is proud to announce a multi-media concert honoring America’s poets and orators like Walt Whitman and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. who have so eloquently spoken for the American people through the years.

A member of the faculty at the University of Illinois School of Music, she engages students in all sorts of musical collaborations, teaching songwriting, chamber music, accompanying, vocal literature, career preparation for opera and musical theater singers, opera for pianists, stage management and design for sung theatre, the producing of opera and musical theatre and performing arts leadership.

She has served as a coach or conductor at many distinguished opera houses, including the Metropolitan Opera Young Artist Program and Wolf Trap Opera. She has conducted several chamber operas and musical theatre works for Lyric Theatre, among them The Rape of Lucretia, Cabaret! The Light in the Piazza, She Loves Me! Fun Home and The Wild Party. This next season, she will conduct Anastasia for Lyric Theatre.

She has given masterclasses at universities and young artists’ programs all over the United States and Canada, including the Aspen Festival, the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, Florida State University, the Glimmerglass Festival, Highlands Opera Studio, the Houston Grand Opera Studio, the Metropolitan Opera Guild, Opera Theatre St. Louis, the Ryan Young Artists’ Program, the Santa Fe Opera and Ravinia’s Steans Institute. She served as a master teacher in the 2023 National Association of Teachers of Singing Intern Program.

She is an advocate for initiatives benefitting the arts and children’s lives, establishing programs or campaigns with Krannert Center’s Endow the Dream and “Showtalk” interview series and founding the Illinois Community Music Academy for talented young chamber musicians and composers.

She served as the Interim Director of the Glimmerglass Festival Young Artists’ Program in 2022. She was appointed Rector of the Arts and Performing Arts of the Lincoln Academy of Illinois by Governor JB Pritzker. The Gunns are the guest curators of the Museum + program at the innovative multi-disciplinary Peoria Riverfront Museum, bringing performance into the mix of science, films, visual art, folklore, hall-of-fame and more.

She served as the President of the Countryside School Board of Directors and is a Court Appointed Special Advocate for Children. She attended Dartmouth College, majoring in Economics and received her Master’s and Doctoral degrees from the University of Illinois, where she has been awarded the Alumni Association’s Distinguished Service Award. She lives in Champaign, Illinois with her husband Nathan, where they raised their five children.

The go-to expert on disruptive tech and science in a fast-changing world, David Pogue is a New York Times bestselling author, beloved CBS Sunday Morning correspondent, NOVA host on PBS and New York Times contributor. Whether he’s covering AI, autonomous vehicles, the future of technology in healthcare, a post-robot world or climate change, David is a master communicator who brings even the most non-technical audiences up to speed.

His highly entertaining keynotes prove that science and technology blend brilliantly with storytelling, humor and, frequently, music and song. David provides invaluable insights on how technology impacts our work, businesses, health, society and connections with each other—now and into the future.

David has been at the forefront of new and emerging tech trends for decades. For 13 years, he wrote the weekly tech column for the New York Times. For a decade, he wrote a monthly column for Scientific American. His work on CBS Sunday Morning has won him seven Emmy awards. David is one of the world’s bestselling “how-to” authors, with more than 120 titles and 3 million copies in print. These include seven books in the For Dummies series, his New York Times bestselling Pogue’s Basics series of essential tips and shortcuts and the Missing Manual series of computer books. His 2021 book, How to Prepare for Climate Change (Simon & Schuster), provides practical advice on preparing for an era of extreme weather events and other climate-caused chaos.

With broad appeal to general, business, healthcare and tech audiences alike, David brings expansive knowledge, engaging wit and an occasional song to center stage. Audiences leave as informed as they are entertained, with an enlightened perspective of the state of science and technology today—and how it’s shaping everyone’s tomorrow.

Jennifer Griffin currently serves as a national security correspondent for FOX News Channel (FNC). She joined FNC in October 1999 as a Jerusalem-based correspondent. Prior to that, she reported for three years from Moscow for FNC.

Since 2007, Griffin has reported daily from the Pentagon, where she questions senior military leaders, travels to war zones with the Joint Chiefs and Secretaries of Defense and reports on all aspects of the military and the current wars against ISIS and Al Qaeda.

She extensively covered the Russian invasion of Ukraine, reporting live from Lviv and Kyiv, Ukraine, where she presented an exclusive sit-down interview with Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba. In April of 2022, she secured an exclusive interview with United States Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, which took place at Ramstein Air Base in Germany following his meeting with dozens of defense ministers on the war in Ukraine. Prior to traveling to Europe, Griffin spearheaded FNC’s Ukrainian war coverage stateside with around the clock updates from the Pentagon. In 2021, she led reporting surrounding the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan and the terror attack at Abbey Gate, including securing an interview with chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley.

Additionally, Griffin covered the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012, and the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011. She has secured major interviews with former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta in Baghdad on the day the Iraq War ended in December 2011, an exclusive interview with General David Petraeus in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 2010 when he took over as the top US
commander there. Griffin also traveled with former Defense Secretary Robert Gates on multiple trips overseas from 2007 to 2011. She began her work at the Pentagon at the start of the “surge.”

During Griffin’s tenure at FNC, she has provided coverage from Israel. She provided on-scene coverage of the Palestinian Intifada from 2000 – 2007 and was among the first reporters to arrive in the wake of the South-East Asia tsunami tragedy, reporting from Phuket and Khao Lak, Thailand. While based in Jerusalem, she reported on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, countless suicide bombings, military incursions and failed peace deals. In 2000, she provided on-site coverage of Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon, its withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005 and Yasser Arafat’s funeral. Also, Griffin is credited with conducting a rare and extensive interview with former Prime Minister of Israel Ariel Sharon on his farm in 2009 before he lapsed into a coma.

Prior to joining FNC, Griffin covered the Middle East region for several American media organizations, including National Public Radio and U.S. News & World Report. Previously, she reported for The Sowetan newspaper in Johannesburg, South Africa, where she covered Nelson Mandela’s prison release and numerous other historic moments in South Africa’s transition away from the apartheid regime.

A graduate of Harvard University in 1992, Griffin received a B.A. in comparative politics. She is also the co-author of the book, This Burning Land: Lessons from the Frontlines of the Transformed Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, which she wrote with her husband, Greg Myre, regarding their experience in Israel.

Greg Myre is a national security correspondent with NPR in Washington. He has been covering conflicts around the globe since the 1980s.

In the past few years, he has made several extended trips to Ukraine to cover the war there with Russia. He’s also been reporting extensively on the Israel-Palestinian conflict in Gaza. Myre has worked with NPR for the past 17 years. Prior to that, he was a foreign correspondent with The New York Times and The Associated Press for two decades.

He was first posted abroad to South Africa in 1987, where he witnessed Nelson Mandela’s release from prison and reported on the final years of apartheid. He was assigned to Pakistan in 1993 and often traveled to war-torn Afghanistan. He was one of the first reporters to interview members of an obscure new group calling itself the Taliban.

He was in Moscow from 1996-1999, covering the early days of Vladimir Putin as Russia’s leader. He was based in Jerusalem from 2000-2007, reporting on the fighting between Israelis and Palestinians.

He and his journalist wife Jennifer Griffin co-wrote a 2011 book on their time in Jerusalem, entitled, This Burning Land: Lessons from the Front Lines of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.

He’s a graduate of Yale University, where he played football and basketball.

Neil deGrasse Tyson was born and raised in New York City, where he was educated in the public schools clear through his graduation from the Bronx High School of Science. Tyson went on to earn his B.A. in Physics from Harvard and his Ph.D. in Astrophysics from Columbia.

In 2001, Tyson was appointed by President Bush to serve on a twelve-member commission that studied the Future of the U.S. Aerospace Industry. The final report was published in 2002 and contained recommendations (for Congress and for the major agencies of the government) that would promote a thriving future of transportation, space exploration and national security.

In 2004, Tyson was once again appointed by President Bush to serve on a nine-member commission on the Implementation of the United States Space Exploration Policy, dubbed the “Moon, Mars, and Beyond” commission. This group navigated a path by which the new space vision can become a successful part of the American agenda. And in 2006, the head of NASA appointed Tyson to serve on its prestigious Advisory Council, which guides NASA through its perennial need to fit ambitious visions into restricted budgets.

In addition to dozens of professional publications, Tyson has written and continues to write for the public. From 1995 to 2005, Tyson was a monthly essayist for Natural History magazine under the title Universe. And among Tyson’s eighteen books is his memoir The Sky is Not the Limit: Adventures of an Urban Astrophysicist; and Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution, co-written with Donald Goldsmith. Origins is the companion book to the PBS NOVA four-part mini-series Origins, in which Tyson served as on-camera host. The program premiered in September 2004.

Two of Tyson’s other books are the playful and informative Death By Black Hole and Other Cosmic Quandaries, which was a New York Times bestseller, and The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America’s Favorite Planet, chronicling his experience at the center of the controversy over Pluto’s planetary status. The PBS NOVA documentary The Pluto Files, based on the book, premiered in March 2010.

In February 2012, Tyson released his tenth book, containing every thought he has ever had on the past, present and future of space exploration: Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier.

For five seasons, beginning in the fall of 2006, Tyson appeared as the on-camera host of PBS NOVA’s spinoff program NOVA ScienceNOW, which is an accessible look at the frontier of all the science that shapes the understanding of our place in the universe.

During the summer of 2009, Tyson identified a cadre of professional standup comedians to assist his effort in bringing science to commercial radio with the NSF-funded pilot program StarTalk. Now also a popular Podcast, for three years it enjoyed a limited-run Television Series on the National Geographic Channel. StarTalk combines celebrity guests with informative yet playful banter. The target audience is all those people who never thought they would, or could, like science. In its first year on television and in three successive seasons, it was nominated for a Best Informational Programming Emmy.

Tyson is the recipient of twenty-seven honorary doctorates and the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal, the highest award given by NASA to a non-government citizen. His contributions to the public appreciation of the cosmos have been recognized by the International Astronomical Union in their official naming of asteroid “13123 Tyson.” And by zoologists, with the naming of Indirani Tysoni, a native species of leaping frog in India. On the lighter side, Tyson was voted “Sexiest Astrophysicist Alive” by People Magazine in 2000.

In 2017, Tyson published Astrophysics for People In A Hurry, which was a domestic and international bestseller. This adorably readable book is an introduction to all that you’ve read and heard about that’s making news in the universe—consummated, in one place, succinctly presented, for people in a hurry.

That was followed in 2018 by Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military, coauthored with Avis Lang, in 2019 by Letters from an Astrophysicist, both New York Times Bestsellers, and in 2021 by Cosmic Queries: StarTalk’s Guide to Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We are Going, coauthored with James Trefil.

Tyson served as Executive Science Editor and on-camera Host & Narrator for Cosmos: A SpaceTime Odyssey, the 21st-century continuation of Carl Sagan’s landmark television series. The show began in March 2014 and ran thirteen episodes in primetime on the FOX network and appeared in 181 countries in 45 languages around the world on the National Geographic Channels. Cosmos won four Emmy Awards, a Peabody Award, two Critics’ Choice awards, as well as a dozen other industry recognitions.

Tyson reprised his role as on-camera host for the next season of Cosmos—Cosmos: Possible Worlds, which premiered on the National Geographic Channel in March 2020 and on the FOX network in September 2020.

Tyson’s latest books are Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization, which contains his life’s wisdom on the intersection of science literacy and culture,and To Infinity and Beyond: A Journey of Cosmic Discovery, co-authored with Lindsey Nyx Walker, both New York Times bestsellers.

In 2024, Tyson published Merlin’s Tour of the Universe, a 21st-century update of his very first book, a playful Q&A on the universe conducted by Merlin, a visitor from Andromeda whose task is to help Earthlings understand how the universe works. The book is illustrated by his artist brother, Stephen J. Tyson.

Tyson leads the world-renowned Hayden Planetarium of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, where he is the first occupant of its Frederick P. Rose Directorship. He is also a research associate of the Museum’s Department of Astrophysics.

Neil deGrasse Tyson lives in New York City with his wife, a former IT project manager with Bloomberg Financial Markets.