Afro-diasporic opera forum
Artists, Presenters, panelists
Professor, Department of Afroamerican and African Studies, Department of Women's and Gender Studies The Residential College, University of Michigan, Author: Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement (University of Illinois Press)
Naomi André is Professor in the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, and the Residential College at the University of Michigan. She received her B.A. from Barnard College and M.A. and Ph.D. (Music: Musicology) from Harvard University.
Her research focuses on opera and issues surrounding gender, voice, and race in the US, Europe, and South Africa. Her publications include topics on Italian opera, Schoenberg, women composers, and teaching opera in prisons. Her book, Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement (University of Illinois Press, 2018) won the Lowens Book Award from the Society for American Music and Judy Tsou Critical Race Studies Award from the American Musicological Society. Her earlier books include Voicing Gender: Castrati, Travesti, and the Second Woman in Early Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera (2006) and Blackness in Opera (2012, co-edited collection). She has edited and contributed to clusters of articles in African Studies and the Journal of the Society for American Music. Currently she is a co-editor for the essay collection African Performance Arts and Political Acts (University of Michigan Press, forthcoming in 2022). She is the inaugural Scholar in Residence at the Seattle Opera and a founding member of the Black Opera Research Network (BORN).
composer, scholar, Afterword (2015)
George Lewis is Professor of American Music at Columbia University. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, a MacArthur Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow, Lewis also holds honorary doctorates from the University of Edinburgh, New College of Florida, and Harvard University. Lewis is the author of A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press) and co-editor of the two-volume Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies (2016). A 2019 recipient of the Doris Duke Artist Award, his compositions, published by Edition Peters, are performed worldwide. https://music.columbia.edu/bios/george-e-lewis
composer, scholar, instrumentalist, Perle Noire: Meditations for Joséphine (2016)
Newark-born composer and multi-instrumentalist Dr. Tyshawn Sorey (b. 1980) is celebrated for his incomparable virtuosity, effortless mastery and memorization of highly complex scores, and an extraordinary ability to blend composition and improvisation in his work. He has performed nationally and internationally with his own ensembles, as well as artists such as John Zorn, Vijay Iyer, Roscoe Mitchell, Muhal Richard Abrams, Wadada Leo Smith, Marilyn Crispell, George Lewis, Claire Chase, Steve Lehman, Jason Moran, Evan Parker, Anthony Braxton, and Myra Melford, among many others.
classical singer, Perle Noire: Meditations for Joséphine (2016)
One of Musical America’s 2021 “Artists of the Year,” American classical singer Julia Bullock is “a musician who delights in making her own rules” (New Yorker). Combining versatile artistry with a probing intellect and commanding stage presence, she has, in her early 30s, already headlined productions and concerts at preeminent arts institutions around the world.
Also an innovative curator in high demand, she holds notable positions including opera programming host of the new broadcast channel All Arts, founding core member of the American Modern Opera Company (AMOC), 2018-19 Artist-in-Residence at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2019-20 Artist-in-Residence of the San Francisco Symphony and 2020-22 Artist-in-Residence of London’s Guildhall School. Bullock previously made debuts at San Francisco Opera in the world premiere of Girls of the Golden West, Santa Fe Opera in Doctor Atomic, Festival d’Aix-en-Provence and Dutch National Opera in The Rake’s Progress, and the English National Opera, Spain’s Teatro Real and Russia’s Bolshoi Theatre in the title role of The Indian Queen. In concert, she has collaborated with orchestras including the London Symphony Orchestra, Berlin Philharmonic’s Karajan Academy, NHK Symphony, New York Philharmonic, Boston Symphony, San Francisco Symphony and Los Angeles Philharmonic, while her recital highlights include appearances at New York’s Carnegie Hall, Boston’s Celebrity Series, Washington’s Kennedy Center, the Mostly Mozart and Ojai Music festivals, and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her growing discography features Grammy-nominated accounts of West Side Story and Doctor Atomic, which she recorded with the composer conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Committed to integrating community activism with her musical life, Bullock is also a prominent voice for social consciousness and change.
author, performer, director, The Nubian Word for Flowers: A Phantom Opera (2017), Author: Pride of Family (Publisher: Harlem Moon Classics – Penguin Random House)
IONE is an author/playwright / director and an improvising text-sound artist. She has taught and performed throughout the world with her creative partner and spouse of 30 years, Pauline Oliveros. Their unfinished work the Nubian Words for Flowers; A Phantom Opera, was completed a year after Pauline's passing, and opened at Roulette Intermedium in November 2017 ("a stunning work" Marc Swed, LA Times.) NWF The Pocket Edition was presented at NY Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center in February '20.
Earlier large music theater works include Njinga the Queen King; The Return of a Warrior (BAM’s Next Wave Festival 1993), Io and Her and the Trouble with Him; A Dance Opera in Primeval Time- U of Wisconsin’s Union Theater and The Lunar Opera: Lincoln Center Out of Doors. IONE also created the film, Dreams of the Jungfrau with sound design by Oliveros. IONE's memoir, Pride of Family; Four Generations of American Women of Color, was a New York Times Notable Book on its publication "- a masterpiece of narrative, history, and reflection." Mary Bilge- U Boston. A journalist for many years IONE, published in major magazines and newspapers throughout the 80s including The Village Voice, The Gannet Chain and Vogue. She was Artistic Director of Deep Listening Institute, Ltd for 15 years and is currently a Deep Listening Consultant at the Center for Deep Listening ®, RPI. As Founding Director of M.o.M., Inc. (The Ministry of Maåt), IONE conducts workshops and seminars throughout the world, disseminating the work of Pauline Oliveros and encouraging a vibrant international community of writers, visual artists, and musicians. She is a member of the Kingston Arts Commission and the recipient of the 2019 Arts Mid-Hudson Individual Artist’s Award and a Certificate of Merit from the General Assembly of the State of New York.
composer, instrumentalist
Courtney Bryan is “a pianist and composer of panoramic interests” (New York Times). Her music is in conversation with various musical genres, including jazz and other types of experimental music, as well as traditional gospel, spirituals, and hymns. Bryan has academic degrees from Oberlin Conservatory (BM), Rutgers University (MM), and Columbia University (DMA) with advisor George Lewis, and completed postdoctoral studies in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University.
Bryan is currently the Albert and Linda Mintz Professor of Music at Newcomb College in the School of Liberal Arts, Tulane University and a Creative Partner with the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra. She was the 2018 music recipient of the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, a 2019 Bard College Freehand Fellow, a 2019-20 recipient of the Samuel Barber Rome Prize in Music Composition, a 2020 United States Artists Fellow, and is currently a recipient of a 2020-21 Civitella Ranieri Fellowship.
Photo by Alex Smith
vocalist, performance artist
Helga Davis is a vocalist and performance artist with feet planted on the most prestigious international stages and with firm roots in her local community. Her work draws out insights that illuminate how artistic leaps for an individual can offer connection among audiences. Davis was principal actor in the 25th anniversary international revival of Robert Wilson and Philip Glass’s seminal opera Einstein on the Beach. She also starred in Wilson’s The Temptation of St. Anthony, with libretto and score by Bernice Johnson Reagon. Among the collaborative works written for her are Oceanic Verses by Paola Prestini, and You Us We All by Shara Nova and Andrew Ondrejcak. She has conceived and performed First Responder and Wanna as responses to Until and The Let Go by multidisciplinary artist Nick Cave. She is artist in residence at National Sawdust and Joe’s Pub, host of the eponymous podcast HELGA on WQXR, winner of the 2019 Greenfield Prize in composition, a 2019 Alpert Award finalist, and the 2018-21 visiting curator for the performing arts at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
poet, librettist
Sharan Strange studied at Harvard College and earned her MFA at Sarah Lawrence College. She is a founding member of the Dark Room Collective and served as co-curator of its Dark Room Reading Series, which presented over 100 established and emerging writers, musicians, and visual artists of color to audiences in the Boston area from 1988 to 1994. Her writings have been featured in numerous publications, in The Dream Unfinished concert series #SingHerName, and in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum, the Skylight Gallery, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Pro Arts Gallery in Oakland, and Core Gallery in Seattle. Strange’s honors include the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, the Barnard Women Poets Prize, an Artist Award from the DC Commission on the Arts, Georgia Writer of the Year Award, Pushcart Prize nomination, and residencies at the Gell Writers Center, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo. Strange teaches creative writing at Spelman College and serves as a community board member of Poetry Atlanta.
Ethnomusicologist, recent research focus: Shirley Graham Du Bois’ Tom Tom
Fredara Mareva Hadley, Ph.D. is an ethnomusicology professor in the Music History Department at The Juilliard School where she teaches courses on ethnomusicology and African American Music. Dr. Hadley has presented her research at universities and conferences both domestic and abroad and has been published in academic journals and other publications. Her commentary is featured in several documentaries including the recently released PBS doc-series, The Black Church, hosted by Professor Henry Louis Gates. Dr. Hadley's ongoing research projects focus on the musical impact of Historically Black Colleges and Universities and on Shirley Graham DuBois, one of the earliest Black women musicologists and opera composers.
musicologist, dramaturg
Matthew D. Morrison, a native of Charlotte, North Carolina, is an Assistant Professor in the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and holds a Ph.D. in Musicology from Columbia University. He has worked in collaboration with the opening of The Shed, NYC, with the Glimmerglass Festival Opera, and has held fellowships at Harvard University and the Library of Congress. He is currently completing a book entitled Blacksound: Making Race & Popular Music in the U.S., which considers the making of race, intellectual property law, and American popular entertainment out of blackface minstrelsy.
Co-Curator & Associate Producing Director, Opera Omaha's Amplifying the Black Experience series
Originally from Chicago, IL, Melanie Bacaling (sher/her) is an active producer, stage manager, and director in the opera industry. She is currently Co-Curator and Associate Producing Director for Opera Omaha’s Amplifying the Black Experience series as well as Boston Lyric Opera’s Project and Digital Content Producer. She was named an Emerging Artist, Director for Boston Lyric Opera’s 18/19 and 19/20 seasons. BLO also appointed Ms. Bacaling as the Company Intimacy Advocate, where she is developing protocols for consent-based practices in the opera rehearsal room. Ms. Bacaling has held production engagements with Santa Fe Opera, Des Moines Metro Opera, Opera Omaha, Washington Concert Opera, Aspen Opera Center, Sun Valley Music Festival, The Boston Conservatory, and Longy School of Music. Her upcoming engagements include Assistant Directing Netia Jones’ A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Santa Fe Opera and joining the staging staff at LA Opera for the 2021/22 season.
scholar, dramaturg
Daniele G. Daude (Dr. Dr. phil.) is a French-German scholar whose research fields encompass stage analysis (opera and theatre), music and ideology since 1945, humor on the stage, and tendencies of non-canonical music histories in the 21th century. She received a doctorate in Theatre Studies in 2011 at Freie Universität Berlin in Performance Analysis and a doctorate in Musicology in 2013 in Opera Analysis at the Université de Paris 8. She has taught at several German and French academic institutions (Humboldt Universität and Universität der Künste in Berlin and Campus Caraïbéen des Arts and Internat de la Réussite in Fort-de-France, Martinique).
In 2013-2015 she led the Department of Theatre at Campus Caraïbéen des Arts. In 2016 she became Maître de Conférences en esthétique et philosophie in the French university system. Daniele Daude also graduated from the Conservatoire à rayonnement régional d’Aubervilliers in violin and chamber music (2000-2001). In 2013 she founded the choir Com Chor Berlin and in 2016 the chamber music ensemble The String Archestra to promote diversity in the German classical music landscape.
vocalist, composer, interdisciplinary artist
Lisa E. Harris, Li, is an independent and interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker, creative soprano, performer, composer, improvisor, writer, singer/songwriter and educator from Houston Texas. Recognized by Huffington Post as “one of fourteen artist transforming Opera”, Li's work resists genre classification as she focuses on the energetic relationships between body, land, spirit and place. Using voice, theremin, photography, movement, improvisation, meditation, and new media to explore spatial awareness, substantivalism, relationalism, intuition, panoptic surveillance, sonification and personification, Li maintains a focused concentration on healing in performance and living. She is the founder and creative director of Studio Enertia, an arts collective and production company in Houston Texas. Li is the 2021 recipient of the Dorothea Tanning Award for Music/ Sound, awarded by the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.
activist, performer, arts leader
Fulbright scholar Dr. Derrell Acon is an award-winning bass-baritone who understands the power of the performing arts to foster human compassion and catalyze conversations on challenging subjects. He has over 15 years of experience in the equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) space and continues to establish himself as a leader in classical music, education, and ethnic studies as relates to the role of the artist-activist. Dr. Acon is known for his unique and provocative presentations, which often combine performance and scholarship.
“An Absurdist Conversation on Rainbows and COLOR” boldly explored the queer experience within Black culture, while his performance-presentations “Ay Blackity Black; Classical S$%t that Ain’t Wack” and “Old Opera, New Opera, Red Opera, Blues Opera” explored the barriers inherent to classical music education and performance, and how we must actively work to dismantle them. Last summer, he taught an 8-course seminar entitled “Viva VERDI: Why Giuseppe and Gang Would be BLM Activists." Dr. Acon is an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grantee for his work in challenging the traditional narrative in opera and is a frequent presenter throughout the U.S. at such venues as conferences for the National Association for Ethnic Studies and National Association of Negro Musicians, and internationally at venues in Europe and Africa. He presented as the only American scholar at the “In Mourning and In Rage” conference held at Università Roma Tre. His paper “From Without the Veil” is published in the Atti del Convegno. Other publications include “Neglected Legacy” (OPERA America Magazine), “Whence Comes Black Art” (Lawrence University Honors Projects), and the forthcoming release of “This is Just My Job: Duty and Intervention in Our Fidelio” (Presses Universitaires du Septentrion in Lille), a collaboration with Heartbeat Opera.
Recent operatic roles include Escamillo in Opera Ithaca's Carmen, Rocco in Heartbeat Opera's Fidelio, and Antron McCray in the Pulitzer Prize-winning production of The Central Park Five with Long Beach Opera.