Michael Drapkin
Founder and Dean

Michael Drapkin is considered one of the leading proponents for music entrepreneurship education in the United States today. He is a performing clarinetist, an educator, a technology executive, a published composer/arranger, a board member of a trailblazing symphony orchestra, and an entrepreneur that has worked with over 30 startup firms to the Fortune 500. He has written for the New York Times, chaired a program at an Ivy League university, spoken and given lectures across the country, and has written, cowritten or contributed to 11 books. He was born in Hollywood, California.

Drapkin founded and presented the Brevard Conference on Music Entrepreneurship (BCOME) for two summers at the Brevard Music Festival in North Carolina, attracting as attendees professional musicians, industry professionals, college music faculty and deans from as far away as Singapore. For BCOME, he was awarded $100,000 in grants from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation – the nation’s largest entrepreneurship foundation – and was one of their first music grantees ever. For his efforts with BCOME, Drapkin was a finalist for Best Non-Profit CEO for The Ten Awards – the “Academy Awards of New York Business,” an annual selection of ten companies and individuals in the greater New York business community that display extraordinary leadership and innovation to improve their business. He has delivered keynote speeches, lectures and master classes across the U.S. including Eastman, Juilliard, Northwestern and The University of Texas at Austin, among others.

Michael Drapkin has enjoyed a career as a music performer, composer, arranger, educator, clinician and adjudicator. Following the Wall Street adage of eat what you kill, Drapkin developed his own band Yiddish Cowboys in Austin, Texas, which released a CD on iTunes. He featured them in the Classical Crossover showcase he ran for South by Southwest in 2011, where he brought bands from around the world that are classically trained and have crossed over to the mainstream and brought their virtuosity with them. As a clarinetist, he was a member of the Honolulu Symphony Orchestra, as Associate Principal and Bass Clarinet and the New York City Opera Touring Company and Lake George Opera Festival, as Principal Clarinet, and has performed under conductors ranging from Leonard Bernstein to Seiji Ozawa. He has spent summers playing at Aspen and at Tanglewood as a Berkshire Music Center fellow, and was solo clarinetist and Executive Director of Music Amici, Rockland County, NY’s oldest professional chamber music group and one of the finest in the New York City area, and performed with them in Carnegie Hall. Mr. Drapkin is widely known in the bass clarinet world as author of Symphonic Repertoire for the Bass Clarinet Volumes One, Two and Three, which have become standard literature among orchestral bass clarinetists worldwide, and each fall he is a music judge and chief judge at high school marching band contests for US Bands.

He is also a member of the Board of Directors of the Brooklyn Phil, the edgiest most forward thinking arts-driving orchestra in the entire planet!

Drapkin has been an active member of the College Music Society, which represents college music faculty worldwide. He is the chair of the Careers Outside the Academy Committee, his third chair appointment for CMS, and led a pre-conference seminar for them in Atlanta. He is also a member of the Board of Directors and has been a keynote speaker for their Southwest Chapter, and has made presentations at the CMS National Conference annually for the past ten years.

In the business world, Drapkin has significant experience and a long track record in management, especially successfully managing large complex projects. He is Principal Consultant of Drapkin Technology Corp., a consulting firm with clients ranging from Gateway Computer to Sony Music, as well as over 30 startups, and is currently engaged on Wall Street, where he manages very large projects. He previously served as Director of Technology for Avalanche and was CTO of DMS Corp., a quarter billion dollar multinational firm in the logistics business, where he managed technology across two continents. He also was a vice president at Lehman Brothers, overseeing the firm’s deployment of client/server technology, including their first installation of a company-wide data warehouse for brokerage client business intelligence, and a business strategy executive with telecom upstart IDT, for which he has two patents pending.

Drapkin chaired the E-Commerce Management program at Columbia University’s Executive Information Technology Management program, teaching senior managers and directors of major firms how to become CEO/CIO/CTOs, and was a visiting lecturer on E-Commerce at the University of Chicago. He has consulted to numerous small firms and Fortune 1000 firms on all aspects of business — from how to increase profits using the web to how to effectively deploy the latest technology.

His articles on technology have appeared in numerous trade periodicals, and he has been quoted in Fortune, Wired, eWeek, New York Times, Chicago Tribune and numerous other publications, on camera with CNBC and CNET, and on the radio with CBS Marketwatch. He has spoken at major technology and e-commerce conferences, including Comdex, Internet World, PC Expo and eVenture World. He has also moderated panels for Akamai, Linkshare, the Executive Council of New York and other firms and conferences. He is the lead author of a book on E-Commerce strategy, organization and project management, Three Clicks Away, published by John Wiley and Sons, with a foreword by Dr. Pehong Chen – CEO and founder of BroadVision. Three Clicks Away was ranked #20 in sales on Amazon in New York City.

For more information, visit www.drapkin.net.

Suzy Drapkin
Executive Director

Suzy Drapkin blends a unique collection of counseling, administrative, business, financial, and entrepreneurial skills. Her expertise has allowed her to apply her skills in the public sector as a clinical and career counselor, educational trainer, vocational evaluator and rehabilitation coordinator, as well as in the business world as an executive recruiter and consultant.

She has worked with dislocated workers, welfare-to-work programs, the economically disadvantaged, displaced homemakers, chemically dependent, victims of domestic violence, incarcerated, physically handicapped, learning disabled, emotionally disturbed and mentally handicapped individuals. She holds certification in Myers-Briggs, tobacco prevention/cessation and conflict resolution facilitation, Adkins Life Skills Trainer and adult education instruction. Ms Drapkin has an M.S. in Rehabilitation Counseling from Sargent College of Allied Health Professions at Boston University.

Ms. Drapkin has a won several awards for her leadership with Junior Achievement of the Hudson Valley, Inc. program. For more information, visit www.careerachievers.com.