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Natalya Murakhver
Biography
Born in Odessa, during the soviet occupation, Natalya and her parents immigrated to the United States when she was only six, arriving on December 27,1977 for fear of persecution due to Jewish heritage. Her early life isn't documented but by the time she graduated High School she was enrolled in a Bachelor of Arts English and Writing at New York University, it is unknown when she completed this degree but she was an Editor for the school magazine "Tisch News" , for three years between 2002-2005. She then went on to complete a Master of Arts in Food Studies & Food Management in 2007 briefly becoming ceritified as a Sommelier by the American Sommelier Association and a Wine Consultant. From 2006 she has worked as a freelance writer and founded a business called Apple to Zucchini in 2012 a business for Sports & Performance Nutrition. Her involvement in children's health became more prominent in 2017 when she produced the NYU Exposome and Family Health panel and partnered with the New York City Healthy School Food Alliance to improve school food for New York City public school children. In 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, she helped organise #KeepNYCSchoolsOpen and brought a lawsuit against the city to reopen publich school. She founded in 2021 the #MaskLikeAKid campaign to raise awareness to the prolonged restrictions placed on children in the name of safety. In January 2022 she worked with an international team of scientists and pediatric,infectious disease, emergency and ICU doctors to launch Urgency of Normal Toolkit an advocacy and health organisation for children, in the same year launching Restore Childhood an organisation also working to support children and families from the ramifications of COVID-19. She went on to Direct 15 Days: The Real Story of America's Pandemic School Closures in 2025.
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Dasha Plett
Biography
Dasha Plett (aka Princess Dasha) is an award-winning composer, sound designer, intermedia artist from Winnipeg/Treaty One Territory, known for their work, sculpting sonic worlds that span through film, theatre, performance, media and dance productions. Dasha is also one-half of a theatre collective known as We Quit Theatre with Gislina Patterson. Plett worked with the Stratford Festival, Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre, Prairie Theatre Exchange, Cercle Molière, Theatre Projects Manitoba, among others. Dasha's work has been shown in various venues including Cluster Festival, WNDX, Send + Receive, Young Lungs Dance Exchange, the Video Pool Artists in New Media Residency, 8Days8, and toured with SummerWorks, OFFTA, Théâtre Catapulte, PushOFF, LOMAA, and Buddies in Bad Times. She was awarded for the Simonovich Emerging Artist Grant in 2024 and nominated for the Dora Mavor Moore Awards for her sound work.
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Henri Laborit
Biography
Henri Laborit (21 November 1914 – 18 May 1995) was a French surgeon, neurobiologist, writer and philosopher. In 1952, Laborit was instrumental in the development of the drug chlorpromazine, published his findings, and convinced three psychiatrists to test it on a patient, resulting in great success. Laborit was recognized for his work, but as a surgeon searching for an anesthetic, he came to be at odds with psychiatrists who made their own discoveries and competing claims.
Laborit wrote several books where he vulgarizes his ethological laboratory research and marries it, through systems thinking, with knowledge from several other disciplines, being a strong advocate of interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity. His writings can also be found to have deep roots in anarchist thought. He was personally untroubled by the requirements of science and the constraints of university life. He maintained an independence from academia and never sought to produce the orderly results that science requires of its adherents.
Henri Laborit was born in Hanoi, French Indochina, in 1914. His father was a physician and colonial officer who died in 1920 from tetanus. Laborit contracted tuberculosis at age 12. In Paris, he earned a baccalaureate. He spent two years in Indochina on a hospital ship. He passed the examinations at the Naval Health Service in Bordeaux, and became a navy physician. He was sent to Sidi Abdallah, Bizerte. Feeling that his options for recognition would be better, he switched to become a surgeon. During World War II he was stationed on the torpedo boat Sirocco, where he witnessed the evacuation of the Dunkerque, and then was sunk by the Germans. He was saved by an English sloop that picked him up. He received the French Military Cross with distinction. He was later stationed in Dakar. By about 1949 he was appointed to Val-de-Grâce hospital in Paris.
Laborit was the first to recognize the potential psychiatric uses of chlorpromazine. The science of anesthesiology was new since the 1930s. Surgeons were sometimes responsible for anesthetics and as a French navy surgeon, Laborit had seen patients die as a result of or after their operations. He became a researcher in anesthesiology. Laborit's ideas on anesthesia included potentiated anaesthesia, lowering basal metabolism and lowering body temperature (so-called artificial hibernation). He advocated the use of procaine, synthetic antihistamines, Diparcol (diethazine), tetraethylammonium bromide and vitamin B1. He did not like to use morphine. In his years in Bizerte he became interested in the use of the antihistamine promethazine to make patients more relaxed before surgery and in contributing to anesthesia, observations that were the forerunner of his later interest in chlorpromazine. ...
Source: Article "Henri Laborit" from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.
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Ryan Kelley
Biography
Ryan Jonathan Kelley (born August 31, 1986) is an American actor known for his Independent Spirit Award winning performance in Mean Creek and his work on the hit television series Smallville. He also starred as Ben Tennyson in Ben 10: Alien Swarm. He had a major supporting role in Stolen Summer, which was the film made during the Project Greenlight documentary series. He has appeared in over 50 commercials since he was 2 years old. Ryan has 14 brothers and sisters; nine are adopted. He is the fifth oldest. He was born and raised in a western suburb of Chicago, Glen Ellyn, Illinois.
Kelley had a role in the film Letters from Iwo Jima, and he played the title role in the movie Prayers for Bobby that premiered on Lifetime with Sigourney Weaver.
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Jean-Marie Bigard
Biography
Jean-Marie Bigard (born 17 May 1954) is a French comedian and actor. Known for his often controversial humour, he has performed at some of the largest entertainment facilities in France, including the Paris-Bercy Arena and Stade de France. Bigard is a close friend of former French President Nicolas Sarkozy, whom he accompanied on an official visit to Pope Benedict XVI in Rome.
Jean-Marie Bigard married Claudia Bigard in February 1991. The couple have one child, Sasha, born on 19 June 2009. They divorced in August 2009. He then married the comedian Lola Marois in May 2011. They are the parents of twins, Jules, Florian Jourda and Bella. Marois defends his right to speak freely.
Source: Article "Jean-Marie Bigard" from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.
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Ayn Rand
Biography
Alice O'Connor (born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum; February 2 [O.S. January 20], 1905 – March 6, 1982), better known by her pen name Ayn Rand, was a Russian-born American writer and philosopher. She is known for her fiction and for developing a philosophical system she named Objectivism. Born and educated in Russia, she moved to the United States in 1926. After two early novels that were initially unsuccessful and two Broadway plays, she achieved fame with her 1943 novel, The Fountainhead. In 1957, Rand published her best-known work, the novel Atlas Shrugged. Afterward, until her death in 1982, she turned to non-fiction to promote her philosophy, publishing her own periodicals and releasing several collections of essays.
Rand advocated reason as the only means of acquiring knowledge; she rejected faith and religion. She supported rational and ethical egoism and rejected altruism. In politics, she condemned the initiation of force as immoral and opposed collectivism, statism, and anarchism. Instead, she supported laissez-faire capitalism, which she defined as the system based on recognizing individual rights, including private property rights. Although Rand opposed libertarianism, which she viewed as anarchism, she is often associated with the modern libertarian movement in the United States. In art, Rand promoted romantic realism. She was sharply critical of most philosophers and philosophical traditions known to her, except for Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and classical liberals.
Rand's fiction received mixed reviews from literary critics. Although academic interest in her ideas has grown since her death, academic philosophers have generally ignored or rejected her philosophy because of her polemical approach and lack of methodological rigor. Her writings have politically influenced some libertarians and conservatives. The Objectivist movement attempts to spread her ideas, both to the public and in academic settings.
Description above from the Wikipedia article Ayn Rand, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
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Sean Connery
Biography
Sir Thomas Sean Connery (August 25, 1930 – October 31, 2020) was a Scottish actor and producer. He won an Academy Award, two BAFTA Awards (one being a BAFTA Academy Fellowship Award), and three Golden Globes, including the Cecil B. DeMille Award and a Henrietta Award. Connery was the first actor to portray the character James Bond in film, starring in seven Bond films (every film from Dr. No to You Only Live Twice, plus Diamonds Are Forever and Never Say Never Again), between 1962 and 1983. In 1988, Connery won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in The Untouchables. His films also include Marnie (1964), Murder on the Orient Express (1974), The Man Who Would Be King (1975), A Bridge Too Far (1977), Highlander (1986), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), The Hunt for Red October (1990), Dragonheart (1996), The Rock (1996), and Finding Forrester (2000).
Connery was polled in a 2004 The Sunday Herald as "The Greatest Living Scot" and in a 2011 EuroMillions survey as "Scotland's Greatest Living National Treasure". He was voted by People magazine as both the “Sexiest Man Alive" in 1989 and the "Sexiest Man of the Century” in 1999. He received a lifetime achievement award in the United States with a Kennedy Center Honor in 1999. Connery was knighted in the 2000 New Year Honours for services to film drama.
On October 31, 2020, Connery died at the age of 90.
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George Schaefer
Biography
George Louis Schaefer (December 16, 1920 – September 10, 1997) was an American director of television and Broadway theatre, who was active from the 1950s to the 1990s.
Schaefer was born in Wallingford, Connecticut, and lived in Oak Park, Illinois for much of his boyhood and young adulthood. He was the son of Elsie (née Otterbein) and Louis Schaefer, who worked in sales. Schaefer studied stage directing at the Yale School of Drama. He began his directing career while serving in the U.S. Army Special Services during World War II. He directed over 50 plays for the troops. After being discharged, he directed for the Broadway theatre. His first production was of Shakespeare's Hamlet starring Maurice Evans. In 1953, Schaefer won a Tony Award for his production of The Teahouse of the August Moon which he co-produced with Evans.
During the Golden Age of Television, Schaefer directed numerous live TV adaptations of Broadway plays for NBC's Hallmark Hall of Fame. His first episode for Hallmark was an adaptation of his Broadway staging of Hamlet starring Evans. In the 1980s, several of his productions for Hallmark aired in syndication under the title George Schaefer Showcase Theatre. His television work garnered him five Emmy wins out of 21 total nominations. He also won four Directors Guild of America Awards out of 17 nominations. He holds the record for the most DGA Award nominations. He also directed five theatrical films, but to limited success.
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Yolinda Yan Chor-Sin
Biography
Dita Yan Chor-Sin (Chinese: 甄楚倩) is a Cantopop singer, actress, and former member of the idol group Onyanko Club from Hong Kong.
Yan first got her start in show business when she signed a contract with a Hong Kong television channel Asia Television Limited. That same year, she went to Japan and became a research student for the Japanese idol group Onyanko Club for a month in 1987. She returned home soon after to Hong Kong and released her first album, entitled "Hansam Jyuzi". Her second album, "Jan Cosin Mou Bun Di Mou", became Yolinda's first hit. She gave birth to a boy in 2001.
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Eve Moon
Biography
Eve Moon was born in Honolulu, Hawaii in 2003 and now lives between Los Angeles and Seattle. She was approached by a director in Los Angeles at age six and started her acting career shortly thereafter. Eve starred in many commercials and booked her first series regular role on the CBS network at the age of nine. She has continued her love for acting appearing as a guest star in various tv shows. Besides acting, she loves animals and travel and is an advocate of the "Free to Luv" Anti bullying movement.
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