Jean Cook Interim Executive Director | bio
jean<at>futureofmusic.org
Michael Bracy Policy Director | bio
michael<at>futureofmusic.org
Kristin Thomson Education Director | bio
kristin<at>futureofmusic.org
Casey Rae-Hunter Communications Director | bio
casey<at>futureofmusic.org
Chhaya Kapadia Events & Operations Manager | bio
chhaya<at>futureofmusic.org
Nicole Duffey Operations Coordinator | bio
nicole<at>futureofmusic.org
Future of Music Coalition
1615 L Street NW, Suite 520
Washington, DC 20036
(202) 822-2051
Staff Bios
Michael Bracy is a partner in the government affairs firm Bracy Tucker Brown & Valanzano. He also co-founded the Future of Music Coalition and currently serves as Board President and Policy Director and co-owns Misra, an independent record label.
Michael is known for his policy work in front of Congress and the FCC, including media consolidation, radio regulation (including Low Power FM), and ensuring public interest principles are at the heart of the legal structures that will help dictate new technological frameworks. Michael is a recognized public advocate both for the music community and for the need for increased citizen participation in the policy process. He has testified before the Congress and the FCC, and speaks often on these issues at conferences and in the media, including CNN, MSNBC, National Public Radio, Washington Post, New York Times, Billboard and elsewhere.
Michael attended Georgetown University, where his courtship with his future wife, Kelly, began in earnest when they co-hosted a radio show on the campus station. After graduation, Kelly and Michael spent seven years in Seattle, where Michael worked in the educational communications field specializing in producing and directing live, interactive educational and government television programming. Kelly and Michael have three children, Eliza, Sophie and Owen, and live in Arlington, VA.
Jean Cook is a musician, producer and Interim Executive Director of Future of Music Coalition (FMC), a national nonprofit that works to improve the lives of musicians through research, education and advocacy on policy issues that directly impact the ability of musicians to make a living and reach audiences. She is a founder and director of Anti Social Music, a New York-based new music collective. She currently records and tours with Ida/Elizabeth Mitchell, Jon Langford, and Beauty Pill. She has recorded on over 50 albums; recent appearances include projects by New York avant jazz artists Tom Abbs/Frequency Reponse, Assif Tsahar/KJLA 4Tet, and Taylor Ho Bynum/Spidermonkey Strings. Jean's administrative background includes working as a publicist and curator for Washington Performing Arts Society, producing and hosting radio programs for 89.9 WKCR-FM, New York, and producing dozens of new music performance projects including a multimedia DIY opera called The Nitrate Hymnal. In 2004 Jean worked for Air Traffic Control, a political action group helping musicians to be more effective in the 2004 election cycle. For FMC, she currently project directs initiatives to fix jazz and classical music metadata, analyze what is actually played on jazz radio (and how to improve data collection), and understand how copyright impacts indigenous artists in places like Ethiopia, Tajikistan and Australia. She joined FMC in 2005.
Transplanted to Washington D.C. from her hometown of Atlanta, Nicole has a long background in not for profit management and theatre production which serves her well wearing many hats as our Operations Coordinator. After earning bachelors in theatre performance at Georgia State University, she spent several years as a freelance properties artisan, and performer while paying the bills as the Box Office Manager of Jewish Theatre of the South. In 2005 Nicole relocated to the Midwest to pursue a master's degree in Theatre History at the University of Central Missouri where she taught, directed and performed while writing about gender & performance and Elizabethan stage practices. Aside from serving as a “devoted fan” to several local bands while in college, Nicole’s experience with the music industry includes some “legendary” open mic nights and studio work singing for the Nophi Records project The Secret Life. Nicole joined FMC in 2008. A bonafied geek, Nicole can be found talking up HINT at major sci-fi conventions across the country and feeding her craft habit with an online shop specializing in steampunk gear at www.sparcole.etsy.com
Chhaya is Future of Music Coalition’s Events & Operations Manager. Prior to moving to Washington, DC, she spent several years coordinating tours at noted Boston roots music booking/management agency Concerted Efforts for artists such as Orchestra Baobab, Ali Farka Toure, Rokia Traore, Booker T. & The MG's, Yat-Kha and others. She has also traveled internationally tour managing Pape & Cheik and The Holmes Brothers. Chhaya's background in arts management serves her well at FMC where she organized Policy Summit 2009, 2008's “What's the Future for Musicians?” seminar series, as well as many other events and meetings for artists and managers. She received a BA from Emerson College with a major in Audio Engineering and was also previously an in-house engineer with WERS-FM Boston. Chhaya joined FMC in 2006 in the bad old days when FMC was still running out of Jenny Toomey's spare bedroom. She keeps a personal blog under the handle Liquid Sunshine.
Casey Rae-Hunter is a musician, recording engineer, journalist and editor. His music writing has appeared in Washington City Paper, Dusted, Signal to Noise, Grooves, and Seven Days Newspaper. He attended university for jazz guitar at 16, but spent most of the 1990s toiling in the indie music trenches, fronting and/or playing guitar for a list of bands too long to mention. He made the transition to studio rat around 2000. Since then, he has mixed and mastered numerous releases in genres ranging from power-pop to technical metal. As a music journalist and critic, he has profiled some of the leading figures in both underground and mainstream music, including Antony & the Johnsons, Mike Watt, The Books, Lindsey Buckingham, Animal Collective, Jolie Holland and Built to Spill. He currently writes and records under the moniker The Contrarian.
Kristin Thomson is a community organizer, social policy researcher, entrepreneur and musician. After graduating with a BA in Sociology from Colorado College in 1989, Kristin moved to Washington, DC where she worked for two years as a national action organizer for the National Organization for Women. She left NOW in 1992 to make a full-time commitment to Simple Machines, an independent record label she co-ran with Jenny Toomey. Over the label's 8-year history, Simple Machines released over seventy records and CDs, published the Mechanic's Guide to Putting Out Records, Cassettes, and CDs, and organized three high-profile music festivals in Washington, DC. While running the label, Kristin and Jenny also wrote, recorded and released four highly-acclaimed Tsunami records on Simple Machines, and toured the US, Canada, England and Europe extensively.
After Simple Machines stopped putting out new records in 1998, Kristin permanently relocated to Philadelphia, PA. In 2001, Kristin graduated with a Masters in Urban Affairs and Public Policy from the University of Delaware. During her graduate program she was a recipient of a School of Urban Affairs and Public Policy Fellowship, and the Urban Affairs Association Award that recognized her thesis, The Internet as an Agent of Change, as a valuable contribution to the body of usable social knowledge. As FMC's Education Director, Kristin is responsible for project management and research, and has overseen event programming, including recent Future of Music Policy Summits. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband Bryan Dilworth, a concert promoter, and their son, where she also plays guitar in the lady-powered rock band, Ken.
