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A two-time Michigan Emmy Award winner, a 2017 Sphinx Medal of Excellence recipient, and a 2015 GRAMMY® Award nominee, Eugene Rogers is recognized as a leading conductor and pedagogue throughout the United States and abroad. In addition to being the founding director of EXIGENCE, Dr. Rogers is the director of choirs and an associate professor of conducting at the University of Michigan. Recently, he was named as the fifth Artistic Director of the two-time GRAMMY® Award-Winning Ensemble, The Washington Chorus (Washington, D.C.).

At the University, Rogers leads the graduate choral conducting program, conducts the chamber choir, and administers the program of over eight choral ensembles. His choirs have toured throughout China, South Africa, the United States, and have appeared at national and regional conferences. In December 2017, Musical America named Rogers one of the top 30 “Movers and Shapers” professionals in North America. His past appointments include being the director of the University of Michigan Men’s Glee Club, Macalester College (St. Paul, Minnesota), the Boys Choir of Harlem, Waubonsie Valley High School (Aurora, Illinois), and Anima Young Singers of Greater Chicago (formerly the Glen Ellyn Children’s Choir). In 2016, Rogers’ passion for issues of social justice and music was featured in the award-winning documentary Love, Life & Loss which highlights Joel Thompson’s powerful Seven Last Words of the Unarmed, and in 2013, he co-managed the production of the joint CD Ye Shall Have a Song with the Michigan, Yale, and Harvard Glee Clubs, a collaboration celebrating America’s three oldest collegiate choirs.

In 2015, Mark Foster Publishing began the Eugene Rogers Choral Series, a series featuring emerging composers who specialize in contemporary classical and folk music traditions, and the EXIGENCE Choral Series in 2018 which features folk and contemporary works by Black and Latinx composers. In 2011, Rogers traveled to and studied the choral traditions of East Africa (Tanzania).

Rogers holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in choral music education from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign and the Master of Music and Doctor of Musical Arts degrees in choral conducting from U-M. He currently serves on the board of Chorus America and is the former national chair of the Diversity Initiatives Committee for the American Choral Directors Association.

Shirin Barghi is an Iranian journalist, photographer and graduate of New York University. She has more than three years of journalism experience in Tehran, where she studied and worked before moving to New York in 2010. Her work has been featured in the Guardian, Souciant Magazine and Beyond Zucotti Park: Freedom of Assembly and the Occupation of Public Space. Her #lastwords project was the inspiration for Joel Thompson’s composition Seven Last Words of the Unarmed.

As a director of photography and editor, Bob Berg has earned numerous awards, including a National Emmy, 65 Regional Emmys, and twice named NPPA Regional Photographer of the Year. In 2015, Berg joined the ranks at the University of Michigan becoming the senior producer, director of photography and editor for Michigan Media.

Founded in 1859, the University of Michigan Men’s Glee Club is one of the oldest collegiate choruses in the United States and long acclaimed as one of the finest male choruses in the world. The Glee Club is known for its wide repertoire of music that incorporates selections from different musical styles and periods including Renaissance motets, Romantic anthems, opera choruses, folksongs, spirituals, contemporary works, and, of course, Michigan songs. Since the beginning of Dr. Rogers’ tenure in 2011, the club premiered over twenty new arrangements and compositions.

In 1959, Michigan Men’s Glee Club was the first American male chorus to win the International Musical Eisteddfod in Llangollen, Wales, (and has since won three more first prizes at the same competition), and in 1967, circled the globe in celebration of the University’s sesquicentennial year. Recent international tours have included Southeast Asia (1989), Eastern and Central Europe (1992), South America (1996), Australia (2000), the British Isles (2004), Spain (2008), Cuba (2011), China (2012), and South Africa (2016). The Club has made appearances at Avery Fisher and Alice Tully Halls at Lincoln Center in New York, the Kennedy Center in Washington DC, and the pre-game festivities for the 1984 World Series. Other notable appearances include the 1986 and the 2004 IMC National Seminar at Harvard University, the American Choral Directors Association Central Division Conventions in 1992, 2000, 2010, and the ACDA National Convention in San Diego in 1997. The Club was also honored to be featured on Mannheim Steamroller’s double platinum CD Christmas Extraordinaire in 2001. Recently, they gave two performances at the esteemed National American Choral Directors Conference in Salt Lake City, Utah (2015) and appeared at the Intercollegiate Men’s Choruses National Seminar at the University of Illinois (2016).

In 2016, the Michigan Men’s Glee Club recorded and premiered their documentary film, Love, Life & Loss. This film documents the Club’s performance of Seven Last Words of the Unarmed, a multi-movement work by Joel Thompson commemorating the lives of African American men lost at the hands of authority figures, and John Legend’s Glory from the motion picture, Selma. The film was also featured in a broadcast on Detroit Public Television.

The scope of the Men’s Glee Club reaches far beyond rehearsals and performances; the Club is a vibrant social organization with a national outreach program to diverse communities called “Brothers in Song.” Partnering with such organizations as Detroit School of Arts, Chicago Children’s Choir, Duke Ellington School of the Arts and others. In addition, the group frequently collaborates with Glee Clubs around the nation such as Michigan State, Cornell, Ohio State, Notre Dame, Rutgers, Miami of Ohio, Harvard, and Yale Glee Clubs. The graduate and undergraduate members of the Glee Club represent many diverse fields of study in the majority of the University’s 19 schools and colleges, and its student officers are responsible for the management of all non-musical Glee Club operations. The Friars, an eight-member a cappella subset of the Glee Club, serve as an extension of Club and maintain an ambitious performing schedule.