Dave Burrell (b. 1941) is a jazz pianist and composer currently based in Philadelphia. He emerged as an influential innovator in New York’s free jazz scene in the mid-1960s, playing alongside trailblazing musicians such as Marion Brown, Pharoah Sanders, Archie Shepp, and David Murray. In addition to more than forty albums under his own name, he has recorded over eighty albums as a sideman. He continues to be a fixture at international jazz festivals and top clubs around the world.

Herman Mishkin (1871–1948) was the official photographer of the Metropolitan Opera from 1910 to 1932. The Herman Mishkin Photograph Collection includes glass photographic negatives capturing portraits of several Metropolitan Opera singers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Singers represented include Maria Duchène, Manuel Salazar, Leonora Sparkes, Madame Zerola, Nicola Zerola, and Adeline Vosari.

Mildred Miller Posvar (b. 1924) is an internationally renowned operatic mezzo-soprano. In 1950 she married Wesley Posvar, who would go on to be the fifteenth chancellor of the University of Pittsburgh from 1967 to 1991. She founded the Opera Theater of Pittsburgh in 1978. 

Born in Poland, Bronisław Mirski (1887–1927) was trained as a violinist and conductor. Around 1915 he relocated to the United States, where he became known as Nek (or Nicholas or Nick) Mirskey and began working as a theater orchestra conductor. At first he worked in small towns including Punxsutawney and DuBois, Pennsylvania, where he met his future wife, pianist Genevieve Wilson. After their marriage in 1917, he sought work in larger cities and subsequently worked in Boston, Dallas, New York, and Kansas City.