Milen Slavov (Slavman) was born in the Thrace region of Bulgaria. He began playing piano accordion at the age of seven, performing on stage at age 8, composing and arranging at 16, and producing multimedia content at 24. Milen studied music and performing arts professionally, graduating from The Filip Kutev music school in Kotel and the Music Academy in Plovdiv.

Milen moved to the United States in 1997. In 2000, the U.S. government awarded him permanent residency as an "Artist of Extraordianry Ability".

Miamon Miller stumbled onto a Balkan music class at UCLA where he was a 1970 undergraduate. As a sort of class culmination exercise, the musicians played their limited repertoire at the Museum Folk Dance Café in Pasadena. In the nearly 50 years since those tentative first notes he has become a fixture in Eastern European folk music. In the 70s and early 80s he was a musician with and later directed the Aman Folk Ensemble. During that period and subsequently, he played with many other groups including Pitu Guli, Bucovina Klezmer, Fuge Imaginea and Trei Arcuşi, to name just a few. Miamon was involved in the early days of the EEFC's Balkan Music & Dance Workshops, teaching the first Romanian folk violin classes and the Trans-Carpathian ensemble at both Mendocino and East Coast workshops. He's led bands at Kolo Festival, Stockton and Balkanalia!, and has played at numerous folk dance camps and folk festivals from coast to coast.

Mark Levy created the first week-long Balkan Music & Dance Workshop in 1974, and co-founded the East European Folklife Center in the early 1980s. He recently retired from the faculty of the University of Oregon School of Music and Dance, where he taught courses in ethnomusicology, coordinated a world music concert series, and directed the UO East European Folk Music Ensemble.

Mark has made numerous trips to the Balkans (especially Bulgaria and Macedonia), and has performed clarinet; Thracian, Rhodope, Macedonian, and Serbian gajda; and other aerophones with Aman, Pitu Guli, Ženska Pesna, The Balkantones, Kef, and Slavej. Mark lives in Eugene, OR.