Karina Pardus, President

Karina Pardus is an award-winning composer, orchestrator, singer/songwriter, President of the Female Composer Safety League, Music Director for the Adults with Disabilities Program at Tanner Dance through the University of Utah, and former Executive Director of Mamas in Music. She is the founder of Coy Compositions and writes music for podcasts (Talking Autism), video games (Hide vs. Seek), and has worked commercially with companies such as Ipsy. She has been a panelist at the Salt Lake Gaming Convention, Game Sound Con, PAX East, and a contributor to the Silicon Slopes Tech Summit. As a mom of 3, she knows that managing a family and a business requires a lot of creativity to not only balance her dreams, but to thrive among them.

Alexa L. Borden, Treasurer

Alexa L. Borden is an award-winning composer, multi-instrumentalist, and singer/ songwriter from Philadelphia, PA. She attended both Berklee College of Music and Moravian University for her bachelors degree in Music Composition, and holds an MFA in Music Composition for the Screen from Columbia College Chicago (where she met fellow composer and frequent collaborator Connor Cook). In addition to composition, Alexa extensively studied music history and music education, frequently performing as featured harpsichordist with the Moravian Baroque Ensemble and acting as music director for a number of staged performances and original musicals (Frankly, A Resting Place). In addition to piano and harpsichord, Alexa also plays theremin, guitar, bass, clarinet, ukulele, mandolin, and is a trained vocalist.​

In addition to her work and mission with the FCSL, Alexa currently serves as Executive Director for the AWFC (Alliance for Women Film Composers) in an effort to aid in elevating underrepresented voices in the music and film industry.

Grace-Mary Burega, Secretary

Grace-Mary Burega is a media composer who aims to use her strong thematic ideas as a call to action for various causes. Her credits include short and feature-length films, documentaries, PSAs, advertisements, and video games. 

She is a graduate of both the Berklee Online Masters of Music in Film Scoring program and the Berklee College of Music undergraduate program in Film and TV Scoring. She is the Secretary for the Female Composer Safety League and Women in Film and Video of New England. She is currently a Recording Session Coordinator for the Screen Scoring department at Berklee College of Music.

Keir Schmidt, Vice-President

Keir Schmidt grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah, to musician parents. Before moving to Los Angeles in 2013, he studied classical guitar and composition at the University of Utah. While in college, Keir started to collaborate with Joseph Gordon-Levitt through his company Hitrecord. ​​That collaboration eventually led to a full-time position with Hitrecord as Music Coordinator, and then Associate Music Producer. His work there has resulted in four Emmy Nominations, and winning two of them. 

​Over the past ten years, Keir has also worked with the composers Nathan Johnson, Judson Crane, and Joe Trapanese, who have instrumental in learning the process of film and TV composition. Beginning in 2023, he works full time as Ryan Lott’s (Son Lux) lead assistant. In addition to working on the Oscar-Nominated score for Everything Everywhere All At Once, Keir and Ryan composed the score for season 1 of the hit Freeform series ‘Single Drunk Female’.

​Nomi Abadi, Board of Directors

A virtuoso pianist, singer, composer, activist, inventor of the NORY® double keytar, and Founder of the Female Composer Safety League, Nomi Abadi started composing when she was four years old, and made her piano debut as a guest soloist with the Orange County Chamber Orchestra at age 5. She toured as a classical pianist and soloist with numerous orchestras around the world as a child prodigy. As a musical artist, she has released an album and three EPs, and collaborated on numerous projects, including as a pianist on the Grammy nominated album "Sekou Andrews and the String Theory", and as a co-writer and guest vocalist on Satanic Planet’s debut album for the song, “Devil In Me” alongside Dave Lombardo (Slayer/Misfits) and Justin Pearson (The Locust/Deadcross).

Alison Plante, Board of Directors

Alison Plante is Professor of Screen Scoring at Berklee College of Music and Program Director for the Berklee Online Masters of Music in Film Scoring. She has been a dedicated advocate for women composers throughout her teaching and professional work, including by serving as the faculty advisor for the Women's Film Initiative at Berklee since its founding. She was also the first female Chair of a collegiate Film Scoring department. Her more than two decades of scoring work includes credits in educational television; History Channel and PBS specials; award-winning documentary features and shorts; national TV spots, trailers, and corporate identity music; live action and animated shorts; theater (with a specialty in puppetry); and multimedia museum installations for the Smithsonian Institution and the Harvard Museum of Natural History. In her free time she has served on the board of other arts organizations, and is active as a climate activist. ​

Joe Dunn, Board of Directors

Senator Joe Dunn (ret.) was a member of the California State Senate from 1998 to 2006. In the Legislature, he chaired key committees such as the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Senate Housing Committee. He received international acclaim as chair of the Senate Investigation Committee into the 2001 California energy crisis, and subsequently as “The Man Who Cracked Enron” (California Lawyer Magazine). Prior to entering the Senate, he was a plaintiff’s lawyer in Orange County, working on mass tort cases surrounding child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, Big Tobacco, nuclear radiation contamination, and products liability litigation of defective medical devices and pharmaceuticals. He joined the Newport Beach office of Robins Kaplan after law school, and then Robinson, Calcagnie, Robinson, also in Newport Beach, where he continued to focus on sexual abuse, products liability, and complex litigation until his election to the Senate. 

Following his two terms in the State Senate, Dunn served as CEO of both the California Medical Association and the State Bar of California. He is currently lecturer at the University of California, Irvine, School of Law, an institution he cofounded while in the Senate. At UCI Law, he helped launch the UCI Cybersecurity Policy and Research Institute, the Civil Justice Research Institute, the Cannabis Research Center and most recently, the overall artificial intelligence and the law effort at the law school.  He currently serves as a trustee for the UCI Foundation and serves on the board of several organizations fighting sexual abuse in society.  Senator Dunn received his Juris Doctor, cum laude, from the Minnesota School of Law (1983) and his B.A. magna cum laude from the College of St. Thomas (1980).