Board of Directors

A guitarist with a repertoire ranging from Bach to the Beatles, Andrew Schulman has been a professional musician based in New York City since 1975. He is a soloist and founder of the Abaca String Band, a string quintet.

He was the resident musician in the Surgical ICU at Beth Israel Medical Center from 2010-16, then played in the Surgical, Medical, and Neurosurgical ICUs at NYU Langone Medical Center in 2017. In January 2016 he began a monthly residency at Berkshire Medical Center in Pittsfield, MA with the title, Medical Musician.  In May 2019 Andrew Schulman began serving as a consultant to the Vanderbilt University Medical Center-Therapeutic Music in the ICU project for hospitalized patients, a two-year program. In February 2020 he was appointed as Visiting Artist with the Georgetown Lombardi Arts and Humanities Program of Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington, D.C.

In August 2017 Andrew Schulman received the first certification for Medical Musician, from Berkshire Medical Center/University of Massachusetts Medical School. In September 2017 he was accepted as a professional member of the Society for Critical Care Medicine and has spoken and performed at several national and regional SCCM conferences. In 2020 he was appointed to a three-year term on the SCCM ICU Liberation Committee. He is also a member of the International Association for Music & Medicine.

Andrew and his wife Wendy Sayvetz are the subjects of the documentary film Andrew & Wendy (2014) which has been presented at international film festivals and aired multiple times on PBS-TV. He is the author of Waking The Spirit: A Musician’s Journey Healing Body, Mind, and Soul (Macmillan:Picador, 2016), a world-wide release. He and Wendy live in New York City with Phoebe, their Yellow Labrador Retriever.

Suzanne comes to MMI through the influence of her late husband, Robert Crim, a classical guitarist and lutenist who was a dear friend of Andrew Schulman. 

Reading Andrew’s journal, and then his book, about his work as a musician in the Beth Israel Medical Center Surgical ICU convinced her that music in critical care medicine was of great value to the well being of patients, family members, and the medical staff. 

A lawyer by training, she retired from the Federal government after 30  years with the Environmental Protection Agency, helping to protect our nation’s waters, including wetlands, coastal waters, and oceans.  While working she volunteered as a literacy tutor and a mentor for junior staff.  

After retirement, Suzanne joined the Board of, and volunteers with, the  Sarcoma Alliance, sarcomaalliance.org. She is also a member of a local  charitable organization that supports local schools, students, food  banks, and other causes. Through this organization Suzanne assists a kindergarten class with reading under a program she co-directs. In her spare time she enjoys going to concerts, spending time with family and friends, and hanging out on the Delaware coast with her German Shepherd  Dog, Leica.

Jenzi Silverman has created and taught courses on music, the brain, and wellness since 2009, for a broad variety of educational and professional groups in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. Beginning in 2020 she is teaching Music, Health, and Healing for the University of Minnesota Bakken Center for Spirituality & Healing.

Since 2005 she has provided music in healthcare settings in Minneapolis and suburbs. In 2020 she will be at M Health Fairview, providing live music for SICU patients. Her primary instruments are the tenor ukulele and tenor recorder. Her repertoire ranges from Renaissance dances to rock and roll. 

Jenzi holds a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology from the University of Minnesota, and an Associate Diploma in Recorder from Trinity College - London's international exam program. She is currently in the Bakken Center for Spirituality & Healing’s Graduate Certificate program in Integrative Therapies and Healing Practices. 

In 2018 and 2019 she completed classroom training in Medical Musicianship through the Medical Musician Initiative. Jenzi is the first recorderist and ukulele player to do this, and is working with Dr. Christopher Tignanelli at M Health Fairview University of Minnesota Medical Center  to start a Medical Musician program there.

Jenzi and her husband, Greg, enjoy life in St. Louis Park, MN, with their dogs: Pickles, a Red Heeler; Guido, a Shih Tzu; and Samantha, a Shih Tzu-Yorkie mix.

Eric Despard received his medical musician certification after attending a 50-hour MMI Medical Musician Workshop July 2017. He also worked privately with MMI co-founder, Andrew Schulman, to develop his medical musician skills. He then began working as a Medical Musician intern at Berkshire Medical Center in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.

Despard is now the Director of Cultural Arts at the University of Houston-Clear Lake where he manages the Bayou Theater, the UHCL Art Gallery, and stewards the UHCL art collection at UHCL Pearland and UHCL Texas Medical Center campuses. 

He was an Associate Professor of Humanities, the Music and Art Director and served as the Executive Director of the Laumeister Art Center at Southern Vermont College in Bennington, Vermont where he developed a Bachelor of Arts Major in Arts Administration and a music minor. 

A concert classical and jazz guitarist as well as composer, Eric performs regularly throughout the U.S. as a soloist and with his new music group, the Progression Ensemble. He holds a graduate degree from the Yale School of Music and an undergraduate degree from the Hartt School at the University of Hartford.