2024 NFB Dino Light Playbill - Other - Page 12
2024-2025 NFB ARTISTIC STAFF, Cont.
David Ott, NFB Music Director
David Ott ranks among America’s most-performed composers of the late twentieth
and early twenty-first centuries. His works have been performed or recorded by
some of America’s and Europe’s most renowned orchestras, including the Chicago,
National, Minnesota, Atlanta and London Symphonies. He has garnered critical
praise and received numerous awards for his compositions and continues to be
commissioned for works by major orchestras throughout the U.S. He has been
cited as “one of the greats of American symphony music composers of the last
quarter of the twentieth century.”
Presently Ott is Music Director and Conductor of the Panama City Pops Orchestra, a
sixty-five piece ensemble that performs six concerts each season. He also serves as
Director of Music Ministries and Organist at Christ the King Episcopal Church in
Santa Rosa Beach, where he leads a chamber music concert series.
Bernadette Clements Sims, Founder
Bernadette Sims studied with Mary Lou Noletto, Lee Partridge and Duane
Dishion. At the age of 18 she auditioned for George Balanchine and placed third
in a regional audition for study at the School of American Ballet in New York
City. She won a scholarship to study with Alexandra Danilova at the Ballet Arts
Studio at Carnegie Hall.
Bernadette also studied with Robert Joffrey and Richard Englund and performed
with the Mobile Ballet, the New Orleans Ballet and the Birmingham Ballet. In
1964 she was 1st runner up to Miss Alabama. After marrying, she moved to Fort
Walton Beach and founded the Northwest Florida Ballet in 1969.
