2024 - 2025 Selection Committee JUDGES

STEVE ADDABBO

Steve Addabbo is best known as a producer, musician, Grammy winning mixing engineer, songwriter and owner of Shelter Island Sound Recording studio in NYC.

Steve’s production and engineering work on Suzanne Vega’s first two albums set a new standard for the singer songwriter genre. Suzanne’s second album, “Solitude Standing”, with the worldwide hits “Luka” and “Tom’s Diner” went multiplatinum, earning him his first Grammy nomination.. Steve also co-produced Shawn Colvin’s Grammy Award winning debut album, “Steady On” .

Recent projects include mixing Bob Dylan’s Grammy nominated “Fragments”(2023) and seven other box sets for the ongoing Bootleg Series, including the Grammy winning “The Cutting Edge” (2016),  producing an EP for “The Voice” semifinalists, Jim and Sasha Allen on Imperial Records. “A Tribute to a Songpoet” (2023), the songs of Eric Andersen performed by 42 artists, was produced and mastered by Steve. “The Dance of Love and Death, Eric’s first album of new material since 2003 was produced by Steve and is scheduled for release in April 2025.

Steve’s first album of his own material was released in 2016. He performs frequently as well as touring with Eric Andersen and Richard Barone at venues that include Carnegie (Zankel) Hall, Central Park’s Summerstage, Mariposa Folk Festival, Passim’s, World Café Live, Joe’s Pub, Towne Crier, Outpost in the Burbs, City Winery (NY, Philadelphia and Boston) and more..

Steve is a guest lecturer NYU’s Clive Davis Recorded Music Program, Stony Brook’s Media Studies Class and The New School’s Greenwich Village Music Course. 

Film songwriting credits include “Left of Center” written with Suzanne Vega for the “Pretty in Pink” soundtrack (1986). “Get Up” written with Caitlin Canty for the film “Little Woods” (2018) and “A New Day” featured in “The Last Word”, starring Shirley MacLaine (2018)

TERRE ROCHE

Terre Roche is a singer, songwriter, guitar player, teacher, author, innkeeper and founding member of the legendary vocal trio, The Roches, and the band Afro-Jersey. Terre has performed in many clubs and concert halls throughout the United States and Europe and appeared on numerous TV shows over the course of her 50-plus year career.  She is a co-creator with jazz pianist Garry Dial of "Us an' Them," a collection of national anthems from 16 nations. Her composition, "Star of Wonder," has become a favorite repertoire piece in choirs around the world and is now published by E.C. Schirmer. 

At the other end of the spectrum, Terre shrieked her way to modest cult status as the voice on Robert Fripp's album Exposure. She sang the role of Squeaky Fromme in John Moran's avant-garde opera The Manson Family. Terre is the author of Blabbermouth, a memoir about her surprising journey coming-of-age as a female musician in the 1970's. She has worked with Paul Simon, Philip Glass, Linda Ronstadt, Meredith Monk, Don Was, The Muscle Shoals Swampers, Robert Fripp, Tracey Ullman, Kathy Mattea and Garry Dial among others.  Terre’s first solo album The Sound of a Tree Falling was released in 1998. Imprint, a collection of original compositions performed with bassist Jay Anderson, was released in 2015.

In 2022, Terre released Kin Ya See That Sun an audio album of live recordings of Terre and her sister Maggie doing arrangements of songs they did when they were teenagers traveling around the country to play on the college coffee house circuit.  The album contains many of the songs from Terre and Maggie’s debut duo album Seductive Reasoning as they were originally arranged, for just two voices and two guitars. The album was released digitally and is also presented in a very original and unique format - a hardcover book that includes lyrics, photographs, drawings, and recollections from various people who remember Terre and Maggie from way back when.  The book contains QR codes to download the album and also stream individual songs.

In 2024, Terre released Inner Adult, a new album of thirteen original songs, her first since 2015. The 13 songs were recorded all in one take at Coral Star Studio on St. John in the Virgin Islands.  Inner Adult is  released digitally and also presented as a book like Kin Ya See That Sun.  

Robert Fripp’s album “Exposure” has never been performed live. That’s about to change in 2025. A brand new band, “Exposure” is Fernando Kabusacki, Steve Ball, Don Box, Pat and Deb Mastellotto, Garry Dial and Terre Roche.  With the blessing of Fripp who is “waving good cheer” to the project.

ViSUAL Judges

LAUREN O’NEILL-BUTLER

Lauren O’Neill-Butler is a New York-based writer, editor, and educator. Her books include The War of Art: A History of Artists’ Protest in America (forthcoming from Verso, 2025) and Let’s Have a Talk: Conversations with Women on Art and Culture (Karma, 2021). A cofounder of the nonprofit magazine November and a former Senior Editor of Artforum magazine, she has written for Aperture, Art Journal, Bookforum, and The New York Times, among many others. She has also contributed essays to numerous exhibition catalogues. In 2020 she received a Warhol Foundation Art Writers Grant and in 2023 she received the Beverley Art Writers Travel Grant. 

She holds graduate degrees in art history and philosophy, and has been a visiting critic at Cooper Union, Stony Brook University, USC, Rutgers, Yale, and the University of Chicago. She is currently a part-time faculty member at Hunter College and the New School and has previously taught courses at the School of Visual Arts and RISD. She is an alumna of New College of Florida, where she first learned how to think critically.

WENDY VOGEL

Wendy Vogel is a writer and art critic based in Brooklyn. She received her Master’s degree from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and was a Critical Fellow in the Core Program residency at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. A former editor at Flash Art International, Modern Painters and Art in America, she has written for Artforum, Art Review, Bookforum, Camera Austria, e-flux Criticism, frieze, MOUSSE, and The New York Times, among other publications. In 2018, she received an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant in Short-Form Writing.

She has organized or co-organized curatorial projects at venues including the Hessel Museum at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; Künstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral, Bad Ems, Germany; The Kitchen, New York; Abrons Arts Center, New York; bitforms, New York; VOLTA NY; and Parsons School of Design.

Vogel has been awarded residencies at Lighthouse Works, Marble House Project, the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and Media Hour. She has taught at the University of Houston, Rice University, Virginia Commonwealth University and the School of Visual Arts. She is currently a Part-Time Assistant Professor in the Photography Department at Parsons School of Design. 

PERFORMANCE Judges

CHARLOTTE BRATHWAITE

Information Coming Soon

Information Coming Soon

LITERATURE Judges

ADIN DOBKIN

Adin Dobkin's first book, Sprinting Through No Man's Land: Endurance, Tragedy, and Rebirth in the 1919 Tour de France, was named a coup de cœur by the American Library in Paris. His reporting, essays, and criticism have been published in the New York Times Magazine, The Drift, the Paris Review Daily, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. Adin teaches English at the City University of New York.

ERIN WILLIAMS

Information coming soon

In recognition of the time, effort, and professional expertise that our Selection Committee Judges devote to the grant selection process, Café Royal Cultural Foundation provides a stipend to honor their commitment.