Hanro Smitsman, born in 1967 in Breda (Netherlands), is a writer and director of film and television.

In 2005, Engel en Broer won Cinema Prize for Short Film at the Avanca Film Festival.

In 2007, Raak (aka Contact) won the Golden Berlin Bear Award at the Berlin International Film Festival, the Spirit Award at the Brooklyn Film Festival, the first place jury prize for "Best Live Action under 15 minutes" at the Palm Springs International Short Film Festival, and the Prix UIP Ghent Award for European Short Films at the Flanders International Film Festival.

In 2008, Skin won the Movie Squad Award at the Nederlands Film Festival, an actor in the film also won the Best Actor Award. It also won the Reflet d’Or for Best Film at the Cinema tous ecrans Festival in Geneva in the same year.

Heinrich Schütz (8 October (JC), 1585 – 6 November 1672) was a German composer and organist, generally regarded as the most important German composer before Johann Sebastian Bach and often considered to be one of the most important composers of the 17th century along with Claudio Monteverdi. He wrote what is traditionally considered to be the first German opera, Dafne (Opitz-Schütz), performed at Torgau in 1627, of which the music has since been lost. He is commemorated as a musician in the Calendar of Saints of the Lutheran Church on 28 July with Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel. He was buried in the Dresden Frauenkirche but his tomb has been destroyed.

He was born in Köstritz, the eldest son of Christoph Schütz and Euphrosyne Bieger. In 1590 the family moved to Weißenfels, where his father Christoph managed the inn "Zum Ring". When Schütz lived with his parents, his musical talents were discovered by Moritz von Hessen-Kassel in 1599. After being a choir-boy he went on to study law at Marburg before going to Venice from 1609–1612 to study music with Giovanni Gabrieli. Gabrieli is the only person Schütz ever referred to as being his teacher. He also inherited a ring from Gabrieli shortly before the latter's death. He subsequently had a short stint as organist at Kassel before moving to Dresden in 1615 to work as court composer to the Elector of Saxony. In 1619 Schütz married Magdalena Wildeck who had been born in 1601. She bore two daughters before her death in 1625: Anna Justina born in 1621 and Euphrosyne born in 1623.

Anna Gertrud Rosemarie Hein (born January 17, 1953 in Leipzig) is a German politician, currently Education spokeswoman for the Left Party. From 1900 to 2006 she was a member of the Saxony-Anhalt Landtag, and since 2009 a member of the Bundestag.

After completing school in Hennigsdorf, in 1971 Hein began studying Education at the then College of Educate in Dresden, from which she graduated in 1975 as a teacher of German and Art. She spent the next five years working at the extended secondary school in Oschersleben

From 1982 to 1986, Hein completed a doctorate in Social Science, writing a thesis on the subject of Visual art in the DDR for world peace: positions and problems in the Seventies and Eighties

She is married and has two daughters.

Rosemarie Hein entered the Socialist Unity Party in 1976. From 1980 to 1982 she worked in the district leadership for Oschersleben. After re-unification she became District Chair of the PDS in Magdburg, and that summer was elected as deputy national chair. She carried out this function until 1995. From 1997-2005 she was state chair of the PDS in Saxony-Anhalt. Since June 2007 she has been part of the party leadership of Die Linke.

Heinz Hennig (25 May 1927 – 29 January 2002) was a German choral conductor and an academic, known for founding the Knabenchor Hannover in 1950 and leading it until 2001.

Born at Burg bei Magdeburg, Heinz Hennig was educated at the boarding school "Musisches Gymnasium" in Frankfurt, namely by Kurt Thomas. He studied in Hannover.

In 1950 he founded the Knabenchor Hannover. In 1961 he cofounded the youth orchestra "Junges Sinfonieorchester Hannover" (JSO). He prepared the boys choir for the recording of Bach cantatas in a collaboration with Gustav Leonhardt, published as "Das Kantatenwerk" by Teldec. Hennig belonged to the first conductors pursuing historically informed performance and revived neglected works of Heinrich Schütz and Andreas Hammerschmidt, among others. He conducted the choir in five Schütz recordings between 1982 and 1999, four of them won prizes such as the Deutscher Schallplattenpreis. He also premiered works of composers such as Alfred Koerppen, who wrote in 1951 a youth opera Virgilius, der Magier von Rom that the choir performed successfully at the "Sängerfest" in Frankfurt.

Rick Moody (born Hiram Frederick Moody III, October 18, 1961) is an American novelist and short story writer best known for the 1994 novel The Ice Storm, a chronicle of the dissolution of two suburban Connecticut families over Thanksgiving weekend in 1973, which brought widespread acclaim, became a bestseller, and was made into a feature film of the same title.

Moody was born in New York City and grew up in several of the Connecticut suburbs, including Darien and New Canaan, where he later set stories and novels. He graduated from St. Paul's School in New Hampshire and Brown University.

He received a Master of Fine Arts degree from Columbia University in 1986; nearly two decades later he would criticize the program in an essay in The Atlantic Monthly. Soon after finishing his thesis, he checked himself into a mental hospital for alcoholism. Once sober and while working for Farrar, Straus and Giroux, he wrote his first novel, Garden State, about young people growing up in the industrial wasteland of northern New Jersey, where he was living at the time. In his introduction to a reprint of the novel, he called it the most "naked" thing he has written.^{[citation needed]}Garden State won the Pushcart Editor's Choice Award.