The Directors

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Dr. Mollie Stone—CWMC's primary director—serves as Choral Conductor and Lecturer at the University of Chicago. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Amherst College, a Master of Music degree in conducting from Westminster Choir College, a Doctorate in choral conducting from Northwestern University, and has studied at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Mollie wrote her dissertation on how Black South Africans have adapted the choral music of the anti-apartheid struggle to address the HIV/AIDS epidemic. In 2001, she received a grant from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation to produce a teaching DVD (Vela Vela) that helps musicians across the world learn and teach Black South African choral music more authentically in the oral tradition. Mollie, alongside Patty Cuyler, has since created additional teaching materials (the Raising the Bar series through The Choral Imperative) that help singers learn about the music of the Republic of Georgia, Bulgaria, and South Africa. Mollie works at home and abroad to facilitate collaborations, projects, and programs that allow singers to study the music of other traditions by working directly with tradition bearers, and to provide tradition bearers with platforms and resources that support them in sharing their music on their own terms. Mollie has also taught in the US and abroad with Village Harmony since 2009.

Patty Cuyler—director of Village Harmony—was born in California and educated at Princeton University. A long-time resident of Vermont and a resident of the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago from 2011-2023, Patty is an energetic, dynamic workshop leader and choral director and is internationally-renowned for her expertise in teaching Corsican, Georgian and South African music. Director of Village Harmony, she currently calls Marshfield, Vermont her home, though she returns regularly to Chicago to visit and teach. Over the years she spear-headed the expansion of the organization’s reach into the four corners of the globe. She started the Boston-area chorus Boston Harmony in 2005, and in 2013 with Mollie Stone co-founded the Chicago World Music Chorus. Patty has compiled and edited a massive library of transcriptions of traditional Georgian, Balkan and South African music and co-edited two volumes of The Folk Rhythm, four volumes of the Raising the Bar series of book+dvd publications and two book+cd collections of Georgian folk and sacred music. More recently it was Patty's vision and labor that shaped Village Harmony's response to the recent pandemic years and launched the organization's far-reaching—and continuing—online programs.

Born and raised on the South Side of Chicago, Lonnie Norwood, Jr. is an in-demand clinician of African American folk/sacred music, helping educators and ensembles understand the historical significance, incomparable West African influences, vocal techniques, and the Black liberation aspects behind the vast collection. Lonnie is a member of the NAACP and the NANM (National Association of Negro Musicians). Lonnie joined the artistic staff at Chicago Children's Choir as a conductor in 2012 and opened its vivacious Englewood Neighborhood Choir in 2013; more recently he was appointed CCC's Director of Africana Studies and conductor of the Lincoln Park/DePaul Neighborhood Choir. In 2015 Lonnie established Audacious Praise, a multicultural arts outreach organization based in Chicago's South Side creating accessible, intergenerational programming that impacts social & spiritual unification in marginalized communities. He serves as Music Director at Bryn Mawr Community Church in the South Shore community (Chicago), and is in partnership with Old Town School of Folk Music bringing the Freedom Songbook Society to his community in South Shore. Norwood also conducts workshops with high schools, colleges and universities, notably Harvard University, Indiana University, and Temple University, and community choirs around the United States.  He has recently lectured for various branches of the ACDA (American Choral Directors Association) and FMEA (Future Music Educators Association). More information can be found at lonnienorwood.com.