Tara Israel is The Lancaster Project CEO and a photojournalist. Born and raised in East Hampton among local fishermen and seasonal Manhattanites, her photography is equal parts folkloric storytelling and cosmopolitan intellectualism. Inspired by a mission to document what “home” looks like to people across America, she calls her intimate portraiture “quiet moments with loud people.”

Gifted with a naturally inventive spirit nurtured by her acoustician mother, Tara has been creating solutions for striking a balance between her career and a bohemian lifestyle all while navigating a long-term sleep disorder. Growing up she helped with her acoustician mother to develop patents and perform material installations. She continued to work for her mother even after her photography gained international recognition as a college student, assisting on acoustic projects while her byline regularly appeared in top media outlets. As an adult, Tara utilized the skills she learned as a multi-hyphenate employee in the family business to manage a long-term sleep disorder. She began by utilizing scraps of material from her mother's work to transform her live-work spaces—a shared Brooklyn apartment on a truck route and a camper van. Guided by the feeling that the path toward well-being can be both simple and accessible, Tara’s concepts are for people just trying to manage being a human among humans. With thousands of miles in transit logged, hundreds of homes visited, and countless hotels forgotten, Tara learned one underlying lesson—there is often no way to control the environment around you, but you should have the power to control how it impacts you. Her photography can be found at www.taraisrael.com.

Dr. Bonnie Schnitta is The Lancaster Project CSO and a research scientist turned acoustic engineer and inventor. She was raised by a father who was a mathematician, engineer and inventor. Her mother felt strongly about the importance of college education for women and the pursuit of a career that brings joy. Bonnie is equal parts conventional and creative problem solving, through her background as a mathematician/engineer and instilled by her resourceful and inventive parents. She developed these skills as a principal in research projects for such agencies as The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Department of Defense (DOD). Classified work ended when Bonnie decided to raise her two children and focus her love of signal processing into a company that has been serving the needs of an elite clientele for 30 years.

When Bonnie started her company, she solved typical noise, speech intelligibility, reverberation, and similar acoustic problems. When she was told a solution set she provided did not work, she went into the field to determine why. While clever solutions to acoustic problems could be called an art, the actual solution is determined by science. Often the failure of a solution was the result of flawed installations or subpar materials. To protect the integrity of her work as an engineer Bonnie began to invent new solutions and methods for testing the solution. So began Dr. Bonnie’s effort to patent, trademark and develop installation methodologies to increase the success rate of the application of her engineering.