2025 Featured Presenters

Mickey Smith Jr. is a GRAMMY Music Educator Award-Recipient, motivational keynote speaker, author, and musician. A significance & resilience expert for educators & employees, Mickey is entertaining, educating, and elevating in his approach – and a no-stress speaker clients love to work with.

Mickey is a Premiere Professional Saxophonist performing for over 30 years, sharing the stage with top headlining artists & musicians of various genres, even performing on shows such as NBC’s The Today Show.

Mickey has been featured in various publications such as Thrive Magazine as one of their “Thriving Thirty-somethings” as a premiere Educator & Speaker. He has appeared on CBS This Morning, as well as a celebrated featured appearance with singing-songwriting sensation Alicia Keys on the GRAMMYS! However, for Mickey, life is more about purpose than any performance. Success comes second to significance.

Renowned as a conductor of “uncommon emotional intensity” (Marie-Celine) and a “force at the podium”(Eugene Scene), American conductor Mélisse Brunet is a native of Paris, France with Spanish and Italian roots. She is quickly gaining attention on both sides of the Atlantic as “a skilled and polished conductor with an excellent pedigree…Brunet led the orchestra with panache and clarity, giving inspiring and assured renditions of each work.” (Cleveland Classical). In July 2022, she became the fifth Music Director of the Lexington Philharmonic, and the first woman to hold the position. She is also in her fifth season as the Music Director of the Northeastern Pennsylvania Philharmonic.

Brunet is one of the five conductors featured in the documentary “Maestra”by the Director Maggie Contreras and produced by David Letterman and Melanie Miller (“Navalny”). “Maestra” garnered 2nd place in the 2023 Tribeca Film Festival Audience Award for Best Documentary. The film’s exploration of Brunet’s daring journey at the international La Maestra competition and has received rave reviews in the press, including two articles in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Hollywood Reporter.

2024/25 season highlights include her opening the Delaware Symphony Orchestras’s season as one of four Music Director finalists, as well as engagements with the Phoenix Symphony, Carmel Symphony, and Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music. In the previous season she also led the Nashville Symphony Orchestra, the Eugene Symphony, the West Virginia Symphony, and the Orchestre National Avignon-Provence (France).

As a dynamic advocate of contemporary music, Brunet has collaborated with composers such as Shawn Okpebholo (appointing him as the Lexington Philharmonic’s first-ever Black composer-in-residence), MaryD. Watkins, T.J. Cole, Steven Stucky, Michael Daugherty, Shulamit Ran, James Barry, Loren Loiacono, and Jennifer Higdon, among others.

As an opera and musical theater conductor, Brunet has conducted Dead Man Walking by Jake Heggie and Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi at the Power Center in Ann Arbor; four staged performances of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte; and Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti, Menotti’s The Old Maid and the Thief, Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, and Strauss II’s Die Fledermaus, and two staged performances of Verdi’s La Traviata.

Brunet is a respected educator in both France and the USA. Most recently, she served as the first womanDirector of Orchestral Studies at the University of Iowa-School of Music, where she conducted symphonic concerts, operas, and musical theater.

Brunet began her studies on the cello, and learned to play the trumpet, French horn, and piano. She holds six diplomas from the Paris Conservatory, a bachelor’s in music from the Université la Sorbonne, a Professional Studies diploma from the Cleveland Institute of Music, and a Doctorate in conducting from the University of Michigan. As a true citizen of the world and intrepid conversationalist, she speaks English, French, Italian, Chinese, as well as some rusty Spanish, Hebrew, and German.