James R. Krabill is senior executive for Global Ministries at Mennonite Mission Network in Elkhart, Indiana. For fourteen years he served in West Africa, primarily the Ivory Coast, as a Bible and church history teacher among African Initiated Churches (AICs) in various village settings, Bible institutes and theological faculties. For eight of those years he lived and worked with members of the Harrist Church among Ivory Coast's Dida people-- collecting, recording, transcribing, and publishing over 500 original Harrist hymns for use in literacy and music training. Many of these hymns appeared in his published PhD thesis, The Hymnody of the Harrist Church (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1995). James is a frequent speaker in various church and academic settings across the United States and has lectured or taught courses in over a dozen countries. He holds memberships in the African Studies Association, the Association of Anabaptist Missiologists, the International Council of Ethnodoxologists (board of trustees), the Association of Mission Professors (president, 2009-10), and the American Society of Missiology (current chair of Scholarly Monograph Series).
Frank Fortunato has served in music ministry his entire life. After several years of teaching music courses in colleges in the Midwest, he began his ministry with Operation Mobilization, where he served as a music missionary for many years with OM's mission ships. Following his time on board, Frank completed his master's studies in ethnomusicology, to which he has more recently added a doctorate in biblical worship. Currently, Frank serves as OM's International Music Consultant and the vice president for the International Council of Ethnodoxologists (ICE). He is the co-founder of OM's Heart Sounds International (HSI), a ministry which sends out teams to promote indigenous worship and the arts through seminars, songwriting events, and audio and video recordings of non-Western worship, mostly in restricted parts of the world.
Brian Schrag is a Senior Arts Consultant with SIL International. He was SIL's ethnomusicology and arts coordinator from 2006-2019, and founded the Center for Excellence in World Arts at Dallas International University, where he serves as adjunct professor. Brian has worked as a linguist, Bible translator, ethnomusicologist and community arts consultant in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Cameroon, and holds a PhD in Ethnomusicology (University of California, Los Angeles), an MA in Intercultural Studies (Wheaton College), and a BS in Cognitive Science (Brown University). Brian was vice president of Training and Education on the board of the International Council of Ethnodoxologists (ICE) from 2006-2019, and has been an active member of the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM) and the International Council of Traditional Music (ICTM) for many years.
Robin Harris (MAs - Columbia International University and Bethel University; PhD, University of Georgia Athens) served for decades in cross-cultural contexts, including ten years in northern Russia. In addition to serving as Chair of Dallas International University's Center for Excellence in World Arts, she speaks at colleges and conferences about ethnodoxology and its application to cross-cultural work. She is president of the Global Ethnodoxology Network (GEN), a global network for arts and mission workers that she helped to launch in 2003. Her publications include co-editing Worship and Mission for the Global Church: An Ethnodoxology Handbook (William Carey Library, 2013) and Storytelling in Siberia: The Olonkho Epic in a Changing World (University of Illinois Press, 2017).