Miriam Davidson has been Artistic Director of ANNA Crusis Women’s Choir since 2012. She is proud of this thoughtful and passionate choir more than she can say. A multi-instrumentalist/ vocalist, singer-songwriter, author, recording artist as well as choral director, she joined synagogue choir rehearsals with her mom and dad at age five. She attended Tyler School of Art at Temple University and Petrie School of Music. As a performer, she has toured extensively throughout the US, garnered many awards from both the Folk and LGBTQ communities, and has recorded and coproduced eight CDs, several of which have won national awards. She overcame her own performance angst by learning accordion and banjo and playing them both in public.
For the past eight summers, she has led a pick-up choir of seventy people at a Unitarian Universalist summer institute, who, after four short rehearsals, sing their hearts out to a standing ovation crowd. She has directed the Festival Choir at the National Women’s Music Festival, and is Music Director at the Unitarian Congregation of West Chester, and Makhelat Micha’el Community Choir at Mishkan Shalom.
She is married to Kim Singleton (their ceremony was on the rooftop of the Atlantic Sands Hotel in Rehoboth, DE during the Sea Witch Festival), and together, they homestead in the Germantown section of Philadelphia.
Jeff Nations is a pianist and teacher who is a graduate of The North Carolina School of the Arts where he studied
with Marian Hahn and Robert McDonald. He was a recipient of The Irwin Freundlich Award in Piano. He has studied with Robert Durso, senior faculty member of The Golandsky Institute since 1998, and in 2017 he became a certified instructor in The Taubman Approach. A classical artist accomplished in a variety of musical genres including popular idioms, musical theater, and gospel, he has endeavored throughout his career to break through barriers that have often stood between the classical musician and the public.
From 1995 to 1998, he was a regular pianist for The Philadelphia Gospel Seminars Choir and the Villanova Gospel Choir. He has performed in both the U.S. and abroad, and in 1998 served as a United States Artistic Ambassador performing in over twenty recitals throughout the Middle East and Bangladesh. He is the recipient of a grant from The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, along with dancer/choreographer Michelle Jones- Wurtz, for their collaboration on his original piece for piano solo, “Dance-Toccata”.
Laura Grassia
Administrative Assistant
Laura has been a member of ANNA since August 2012. She has served on the Board of Directors and has overseen concert production and related tasks since joining. Laura is employed at Temple University and manages a state-funded grant that assists Pennsylvanians with disabilities. She lives in South Jersey with her partner and daughter.