Honorees

Ilysia Pierce has led Shabbat and High Holy Day services for Temple of the Arts since 1999. Prior to her tenure at the temple, Ilysia enjoyed a successful career entertaining audiences on stage, television (she originated the role of Miss Oops-A-Daisy in PBS, The Huggabug Club), and concert halls. Some of her theatrical highlights include: Janina (Irena’s Mother) in a reading of a new musical, Irena Sendler, Disney’s King David, an oratorio concert sparking the reopening of the New Amsterdam Theatre in New York (the original home of the Ziegfeld Follies), Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, playing the Narrator in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Hodel in Fiddler on the Roof, Frumah-Sara in Fiddler on the Roof with Theodore Bikel and Lainie Kazan, Eva Peron in Evita, for which she received a Dramalogue Critics’ Choice Award for outstanding performance, Johanna in Sweeney Todd, to name only a few.

Cantor Ilan Davidson has served Temple Beth El since 1995. The youngest in a long familial line of cantors, he began his training at the age of five with his mentor, Hazzan Philip Model z”l. With a strong performing arts background from the University of California, he is also a talented secular musician and contemporary Jewish singer and songwriter. He released his first album, Stained Glass, in 1995.

A native of Washington, DC, Diane White-Clayton holds Ph.D. and M.A. degrees in music composition from the University of California at Santa Barbara and a B.A. degree in music from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri with emphases in composition, voice, and piano. As a rotary scholar, she studied classical piano at the Ecole Normale de Musique in Paris, performing solo gospel concerts throughout Europe as an Ambassador of Goodwill.