Amelia Mason is a senior arts and culture reporter for WBUR, Boston’s NPR news station. An award-winning journalist and critic, she covers everything from fine art to film to the inner workings of the local music scene. In Boston, she has extensively covered issues of equity in music, the blows the pandemic delivered to local theater and the loss of affordable workspace for artists and performers.

Since 2018, Amelia has helmed the search for WBUR’s Favorite Massachusetts Entry to NPR’s Tiny Desk Contest, which spotlights regional contestants in the beloved national competition. In 2024, she served as a judge for NPR’s Tiny Desk Contest.

Amelia’s work has been broadcast on NPR’s Here & Now, All Things Considered and Weekend Edition and published on NPR Music, where she is proud to have contributed to the canon-redefining “150 Greatest Albums Made By Women.” She regularly appears as a guest critic on NPR Music’s “New Music Fridays” podcast. In her spare time, she plays the fiddle and ponders which pasta shape is best.

Pianist Jacqueline Schwab creates musical stories from the diverse squares in the American quilt, heartened by community music making. Her signature sound features in over a dozen of Ken Burns’ documentaries, including his Grammy-winning Civil War, Baseball, Lewis and Clark, Mark Twain, The War, Benjamin Franklin and The American Revolution, as well as The Irish in America—The Long Journey Home, Ric Burns’ New York—A Documentary Film and other PBS documentaries. She has performed at the White House for President Clinton and on PBS with the American Pops Orchestra and has accompanied Scottish singer Jean Redpath on public radio’s A Prairie Home Companion and on CBS’s Late Show with David Letterman. She has performed solo concerts in almost every state of the Union, connecting with audiences through her playing and storytelling. She is well known in the traditional dance world for her playing with the Bare Necessities ensemble. Her most recent solo album, I Lift My Lamp—Illuminations from Immigrant America, celebrates vintage music from American immigrants. Jacqueline graduated from New England Conservatory, majoring in piano improvisation. She lives in Lexington, MA.

Jeffrey Binder is a theatre artist and arts leader whose work spans directing, playwriting, producing, education, and nonprofit administration. He brings a lifelong commitment to storytelling that fosters empathy, joy, and a sense of belonging across generations and communities.

Binder spent nearly three decades performing on Broadway, in regional theatres across the country, and in London’s West End. He later served as Associate Artistic Director of Gulfshore Playhouse in Naples, Florida, where he helped shape artistic programming, expand education initiatives, and support a successful capital campaign culminating in the opening of a new state-of-the-art theatre complex.

As a playwright, Binder’s modern adaptation of Scapino is published by Samuel French and has enjoyed record-breaking productions. He is deeply passionate about building artistic homes that honor tradition while welcoming new voices and is energized by styles and performances that are uniquely theatrical.

Jeff is thrilled to join the Revels family along with his daughter Annika, husband Mike, and dogs Quincy and Penny – with occasional, reluctant participation from his creaky old cat, Torch.

Elijah Botkin (Music Director) is a Boston-based conductor, arranger, choral educator, and performer who has served as Revels’ music director since 2021. He also directs the Northeastern University Madrigal Singers, which he founded in 2013, and serves as assistant conductor of the Zamir Chorale of Boston. He previously served as Spring Artistic Director of the Reading Community Singers, concluding his tenure in spring 2026.

At Revels, Elijah helps shape each production’s musical program, creating arrangements for its singers and instrumentalists to help bring our stage story to life. He enjoys exploring the traditions at the heart of each year’s show and helping performers discover the sounds, stories, and character of sometimes unfamiliar music. His arrangements for Midwinter Revels over the years have been praised as “uncannily idiomatic.”

Elijah graduated from Northeastern University in 2015 with bachelor’s degrees in Music History & Analysis and Mathematics. In addition to founding the Madrigal Singers, he served as president and assistant conductor of the NU Choral Society and sang with and arranged for the award-winning a cappella group Distilled Harmony. His work on Distilled Harmony’s quarterfinal-winning set earned an Outstanding Arrangement award at the International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella. The group’s recording of his arrangement of Little Mix’s “Nothing Feels Like You” also won a Contemporary A Cappella Recording Award for Best Mixed Collegiate Song. In 2014, he received the Gideon Klein Award to compose The Closed Town, which premiered with the Northeastern University Chamber Choir in April 2015.

As a performer, Elijah has appeared with Carduus and Nightingale Vocal Ensemble, and in the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s performance of Morton Feldman’s Rothko Chapel. Whether leading a rehearsal, performing onstage, or inviting an audience to sing along, he loves bringing people together through music and sharing the joy of singing with anyone willing to lend their  voice.