Meet the Unlocking Harmony Team

Mimi Bornstein, Founder and Director

Mimi Bornstein is a choral director, pianist, worship leader, singer, and composer. Her work is centered in embracing the healing and transformational elements of music and the powerful journeys we take when we sing in community.
Mimi works across a broad range of settings and her choral arrangements have been performed nationally and internationally. Under Mimi’s direction, choruses have performed with noted musicians including Grammy Award-winning Paul Winter Consort, Paul Sullivan, Theresa Thomason, and Jonathan Edwards.
Mimi served as Founder and Artistic Director of Midcoast Community Chorus (MCC), a non-profit community arts organization hosting a 140-voice non-auditioned multigenerational chorus. MCC provides a place for people to find voice and give voice to the issues of our time. MCC’s annual spring benefit concerts have raised over $100,000 since its founding in 2008 for local Maine non-profits.

Mimi served as Co-Founder and Co-Director of Voices United Community Chorus (VUCC) along with Charles Brown, a gospel choir singer and choir director. VUCC is a non-auditioned, interracial, multi-faith community chorus with a mission to building bridges through music to ensure equality, opportunity and inclusion.
An active member of Chorus America, the American Choral Directors Association, and the Association for Unitarian Universalist Music Ministries (AAUMM), Mimi sat on the AAUMM Board of Directors and served as their Director of Conferences.

Elaine Ransom, Administrator

Elaine Ransom is a classically trained vocalist and gained her Bachelor of Arts in Music from Spelman College. She has over eight years of experience as a contracted singer. She has sung in venues such as the Kennedy Center and with companies including, but not limited to, the Atlanta Ballet, Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, HBCU National Chorus, Washington Douglass Chorale, and for Pope Francis with the Spelman College Glee Club. Elaine gives private and group music lessons in voice, piano, guitar, ukulele, and composition. She enjoys leading worship, composing, and performing in various genres; some of her favorites include Gospel, Jazz, and Classical.
With faith as her driving force, one of her main goals is to help as many people as she can for as long as possible. She is excited to assist Unlocking Harmony in bringing healing experiences and awareness to current and formerly incarcerated individuals through song.

Malcolm Brooks, Documentary Songwriters’ founder.

Malcolm Brooks, PhD, is a composer and documentary songwriter. His work is heard on PBS, NOVA and the History Channel. He has written music for films that have won honors, including two Emmy nominations and a Peabody award. He serves on the faculty at Bay Chamber Concerts and Music School and holds degrees from Columbia, Berkeley, and Prescott. He has led documentary songwriting workshops in many settings, from prisons to recovery clinics to scholar’s conferences. Malcolm is currently working with incarcerated people and parolees, writing documentary songs with them and arranging the songs for choirs.

Khalid Taylor

Khalid Taylor is a documentary songwriter and community storytelling facilitator. He received a B.A. in Music and Cognition from Oberlin College & Conservatory, and is pursuing a M.S. in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University. Serving as both a board member and teaching artist educator for Documentary Songwriters, he teaches other humanitarian musicians how to facilitate the collaborative, narrative-driven documentary songwriting method. Khalid maintains his private practice, SOL Songs, to help individuals and groups discover, share, and transform personal stories into songs using the Documentary Songwriting method. As a Story Ambassador with Capital Storytelling and the Artistic Director of Queer Quoir, Khalid seeks to amplify the voices of LGBTQ+ people of color in the Lehigh Valley and beyond.

Will Foote, Documentary Songwriter

Will is a talented singer-songwriter and music educator from Maine who has performed at private events and folk festivals in the US and abroad. Will has shared Documentary Songwriting in academic settings, and completed a songwriting project in rural upstate New York giving voice to the stories of modern farm workers.
In his role at Unlocking Harmony, Will has participated in Documentary Songwriting workshops with women experiencing re-entry and coping with the challenges of motherhood, trauma and life inside and outside of prison.
Will is passionate about the power of music to heal, unite and uplift. He is a key member of our team and often appears as a vocalist in our live and recorded choir performances.
Will is a graduate of Brewster Academy and St. Lawrence University.

Hazel Delehey, Documentary Songwriter

Hazel Delehey joined DocSong in its beginning stages when she started taking guitar lessons from Malcolm Brooks, Documentary Songwriters’ founder. She now works as a teaching artist, often using the method as a foundation for her original music. In high school, Hazel pioneered the first documentary song for a documentary film, a project for The High Mountain Institute in Colorado. Hazel graduated from Bates College with a B.A. in English and Educational Studies. She used her final thesis project to work with 8th graders in The Restorative Practice Advisory and Action Group in Lewiston, Maine to write songs with the DocSong method. Hazel worked closely with women in the #SongsofMeToo Project and continues to offer her voice and expertise to Finding Our Voices, a Maine-based organization breaking the silence of domestic abuse. Hazel spent her summer facilitating a songwriting program in Islesboro, Maine where she wrote island-focused songs with 6-12 year-olds. She frequently performs live for local events and on daysailer schooners out of Camden harbor.