Eric Markowitz earned his B.A. in English and M.A. in Writing from DePaul University. He received an M.A. in Special Education from Northeastern Illinois University.

His wide range of teaching experience includes working with at-risk youth (students on probation, wards of state, and teenage mothers); youth with emotional and behavioral disorders; students with a wide variety of learning disabilities; and young victims of sexual abuse. He is currently a special education teacher with the Chicago Public Schools.

Markowitz, a guitarist and songwriter, met Kowalkowski while attending DePaul's music school. He has appeared on over a dozen CDs with a variety of musicians, his most recent being The Chamber Pot Orchestra .

Markowitz is also a brain tumor survivor (see the Chicago Sun-Times article). When he's not teaching or recording in Chicago, he enjoys traveling the world with Karla, who just so happens to be a travel writer and his beautiful partner for life.

 

Jeff Kowalkowski is a composer, performer, and educator. Recent activities include the creation of a new evening-length performance with Lucky Pierre. Jeff has been a member of this Chicago-based performance collective since 2000, and has performed with the group in New York City, Estonia, Switzerland, and Croatia.

A short film score by Jeff was performed live--with a screening of Lotte Reineger&Mac226;s Zehnminuten Mozart--at the Mozart (250th) Festival in Augsburg, Germany in Spring 2006 by the ensemble Interzone Perceptible.

In the fall of 2005, Jeff was guest instructor in composition at Oberlin College Conservatory (Oberlin, Ohio). He gave a seminar titled: Composers, Politics, and Technique. He also premiered a collaborative concept: „The Cause of [ ] is the Cause of [ ]‰ (for 13 composers, boom boxes, and computers) at the Allen Memorial Art Museum.

Since 1996 Jeff has taught at DePaul University in Chicago, currently offering three syllabi of his own design: Guide to Music Theory, Composition and Sound Art, and Community Audio Art. In this third course, students work on Milkwood projects: oral histories, soundscapes, radio documentaries, and music therapy projects.

Jeff also teaches Orchestration and Music Concepts at Northeastern Illinois University&Mac226;s Department of Music and Dance, and free-lances as a jazz pianist. He was awarded a Doctorate in Music from Northwestern University, Evanston, in 1996. His wife Mary Decker is a Librarian at Chicago Public Library. Together they have two sons: Caleb and Henry, and 3 cats, one bird, 47 goldfish and 7 snail.