Anna Rugis

New Zealand-born singer Anna Rugis has been singing since childhood. She gained a broad range of professional experience through her career as a session musician in New Zealand and Great Britain and has toured the U.S. with artists such as Cat Stevens, the Kinks, and Van Morrison. She met her husband, John (the production manager and sound engineer for Bill Graham/FM Productions in San Francisco), while working for Van Morrison.

They left the music business and returned to New Zealand to live and raise a family. There they met their spiritual teacher, Naqshabandi Sufi Shaikh Abdullah N. Dougan. They worked with him and his group in Auckland for ten years before returning to the U.S. in 1991. They now live in Michigan, where they have a small spiritual study group. Rugis and her husband returned to music by recording Reconciliation: The Company of Saints and Sages, an album of her spiritual songs. Each piece, inspired by a spiritual saint or sage, is sophisticated and distinct in style, rare in the genre of new age vocals. Rugis comments, "The overall concept of the work is the journey toward personal reconciliation and spiritual integration through contact with the living example of those who have previously made that journey."