© Lydia Boenisch
Falko Mohrs was born in Wolfsburg in 1984. He completed a dual course of study in freight forwarding and business administration at Volkswagen AG and Ostfalia University of Applied Sciences. He was a member of the Bundestag from 2017 to 2022. He has been Lower Saxony’s Minister for Science and Culture since November 8, 2022.
Marco Limberg
Philipp Peyman Engel, born in 1983 in Herdecke, grew up in the Ruhr area as the son of a Persian Jewish woman and a German father. He studied philosophy, education, literature and media practice in Bochum and Essen. The journalist is editor-in-chief of the weekly newspaper Jüdische Allgemeine. Medium Magazin awarded him the prestigious “Editor-in-Chief of the Year” media prize in 2023. Engel’s articles on Jewish life, anti-Semitism and Israel regularly appear in Der Spiegel, FAZ and Deutschlandfunk.
Friedhard Neumann
Eliah Sakakushev-von Bismarck has been Artistic and Managing Director of Villa Seligmann since 2018. He was the director and initiator of various chamber music festivals in Germany, Spain and Bulgaria. He turned to music at an early age and attended a special school for professional musicians. At the age of 16 he became a student of cello at the University of Music in Vienna. He completed his concert examinations at the Musikhochschule Mannheim. He has performed on international stages as a chamber musician, orchestral cellist and soloist. Appointments as solo cellist in orchestras have taken him to Spain, Germany, Brazil and New Zealand.
Moritz Frankenberg/dpa Prof. Dr. Katja Lembke studied Classical Archaeology, Egyptology and Latin in Heidelberg, Rome, Munich and Tübingen and received her doctorate in 1992. She has been a corresponding member of the German Archaeological Institute since 2003. Between 2005 and 2011, she was Director of the Roemer and Pelizaeus Museum in Hildesheim. In 2015, she was awarded an honorary professorship at the Georg August University of Göttingen. Katja Lembke is active in numerous honorary positions, including as a member of the Scientific Commission of Lower Saxony, on the Advisory Board of the Berlin Museum in the Humboldt Forum Berlin and in the 12th EKD Synod and the 25th State Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Hanover, as well as a mentor at Leibniz University Hanover and the University of Osnabrück.
Lower Saxony State Parliament 2024
Accordionist and composer Nico Gutu studied classical accordion, jazz and improvisation in Weimar, Hanover, France and Italy. His numerous awards include the German Accordion Music Prize and the DAAD Prize. As a soloist and co-creator of innovative concert formats, he combines tradition and modernity. The Dutch cellist Martha Bijlsma is a much sought-after chamber musician. As co-founder of the Flex Ensemble (piano quartet), she has won numerous prizes and founded the innovative concert series “imPULS” in 2016, with which she performs interdisciplinary music productions.
