Eva Nikolaidou, a native of Greece, is a doctoral candidate in Piano Performance at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, where she studies with Dr. Paul Barnes. She holds a Master of Music degree in Piano Performance from the University of South Dakota and a Bachelor of Music degree in Piano Pedagogy from the Ionian University in Corfu, Greece. For her doctoral recitals, she has favored twentieth century repertoire, including performances of George Crumb’s Vox Balaenae and György Ligeti’s Musica ricercata. Her doctoral research examines Canadian fiddle tune affinities in Ann Southam’s solo piano set Glass Houses, a project she will present in a poster session at the national conference of the Music Teachers National Association in Chicago this March. Eva has been an artist with the Salt Creek Song Festival in Ashland, Nebraska, since 2024. She is delighted to return to Vermillion following her 2023 performance of Paul Lombardi’s Through Tunnels of Words with soprano Amber Evans. In addition to her academic and performance work, Eva maintains a studio of 49 piano students of all ages in Lincoln, Nebraska.

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Douglas Hofstadter is College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and Cognitive Science at Indiana University in Bloomington. He was born in New York in 1945 but grew up mostly in California. With his parents and sisters, he spent a very special year in Geneva (1958–59), which inspired his love for French and languages in general. He speaks French and Italian, and has studied several other languages to varying levels. He majored in math at Stanford but switched to physics in graduate school. At roughly this time he became a decent pianist and started composing small pieces of music. In 1974 he discovered the so-called “Hofstadter butterfly” in solid-state physics. After his Ph.D. (1975), he left physics and plunged into the study of the human mind’s nature, running the gamut from silly errors to deep insights. He and his graduate students dubbed themselves “FARG” (“Fluid Analogies Research Group”). His books include Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979); The Mind’s I (co-edited with his friend Daniel Dennett in 1981); Metamagical Themas (1985); Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies (1995); Le Ton beau de Marot (1997); I Am a Strange Loop (2007); Translator, Trader (2009); Surfaces and Essences (co-authored with his friend Emmanuel Sander in 2013); and Ambigrammia: Between Creation and Discovery (or “ABCD” for short, 2025), as well as a verse translation, from Russian, of Alexander Pushkin’s novel-in-verse Eugene Onegin (1999). Aside from studying analogies, and collecting slips of the tongue and typos and such, and musing on the nature of humor, Douglas Hofstadter has been engaged for many years with visual art, literary translation, and music. In particular, he has composed about 40 short piano pieces, a few with voice.