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HOWARD BECKERMAN
(M.A. in Applied Linguistics, Columbia University) and
LINDA BECKERMAN
(M.F.A. in Painting, Rochester Institute of Technology) founded Heartworks as a Partnership in 1981 and incorporated as Heartworks International in 1992.
HOWARD is a composer, lyricist, playwright, language educator, community organizer, and creator of original musical theater. He also serves as Chair of New York's not-for-profit Worldwide Voices.
He has been awarded two New York State Council on the Arts grants for his original musical, Married in the Suburbs (in 2001 and in 2011), with Long Island performances at Huntington Town Hall, Cinema Arts Centre, Harborfields Public Library, Vail-Leavitt Music Hall, and the Patchogue Theatre for the Performing Arts. He also served as Project Director of the NYSCA-sponsored New Play Contest and Development Workshop series (2001). In addition, he received a JPMorgan Chase grant (2006) for Farmingville: The Musical, an original project developed in the Farmingville community to encourage cooperation and artistic collaboration between the English-speaking and Spanish-speaking residents. With his wife, artist Linda Beckerman, he co-founded the 501(c)(3) organization Worldwide Voices, Inc., to facilitate arts and media collaboration by diverse cultural groups and by speakers of different languages.
He is also the composer and lyricist of Halloween at Belvedere, an interactive family musical commissioned by the Central Park Conservancy, with NY performances in 2002, 2003, 2004, and 2010. His bilingual children’s musical Bullies and Bananas/Peleones y Guineos has been presented in Suffolk County at the Huntington Public Library-Station Branch, Airport Playhouse, and at Suffolk County Unity Day. He is also the producer of the Centennial Video for the Patchogue-Medford Library, including his original theme song about Patchogue.
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He has produced many CDs of his original multilingual musical language programs for international publishers and media companies, such as Berlitz Publishing, Warner Brothers, and Yale University Press. In the process, he has called on performers and musicians from a variety of cultures to participate in his multilingual musical productions. Mr. Beckerman believes that contemporary musical theater can help to unite our communities, and his mission is to continue developing new musicals and arts programs that embrace diversity in language and culture.
LINDA is a painter, writer, playwright, and digital audio editor of worldwide productions of English and foreign language learning publications. Clients include Berlitz, Langenscheidt (Germany), Nathan (France), Voice of America, Pearson Education, Ladder Multimedia (Taiwan), and Yale University Press. She has been an editor of bilingual manuscripts in English, Spanish, and French. With Howard, she presented a musical play development workshop to music educators at Balanced Mind XI: Teaching World Culture Through The Arts at the Tilles Center for the Performing Arts, C.W. Post, Long Island University.
Linda is Executive Director of the not-for-profit Worldwide Voices multicultural arts organization. She serves on the Town of Brookhaven Anti-Bias Task Force, and is a long-time volunteer for the SUNY Stony Brook Host Family Program for International Students. She has been a member of the Suffolk County Community College Immigrant Solutions Committee and was a Founding Board Member of Teatro Experimental Yerbabruja, Central Islip, NY.
For The New Musicals Project, Linda has served as Production Manager for a new musical play series and for the Huntington Village Theater Company was Project Manager for New York State Council on the Arts grants for development of new plays. For the Alliance of Queens Artists, she was Curator for juried art shows at venues including St. John's University and Avery Fisher Hall.
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