Jasmine Arielle Barnes (she/her), composer
She Who Dared
Deborah D.E.E.P Mouton (she/her), librettist

Emmy Award-winning composer Jasmine Arielle Barnes is a Baltimore native now based in Dallas. Her music has been described as “refreshing,” “engaging” and “exciting” by San Francisco Classical Voice; “beautifully lyrical” by The Telegraph (U.K.); and “the best possible blend of Billie Holiday and Claude Debussy” by The Boston Globe. Barnes is managed by UIA Talent Agency, is a resident artist in the Composer Librettist Development Program at American Lyric Theater, is a resident artist for Opera Theatre of Saint Louis (2023–2024), and has held residencies at Chautauqua Opera and All Classical Portland. She has been commissioned by numerous organizations such as American Composers Forum, New York Philharmonic, Juilliard Pre-College, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, Washington National Opera and the Kennedy Center, Carnegie Hall, Aspen Music Festival and School, Apollo Chamber Players, Baltimore Choral Arts, and others.

She Who Dared
She Who Dared is a full-length opera that celebrates seven of the Black women who changed history by desegregating the Montgomery bus system. Rosa Parks gained all of the celebrity for her heroic refusal to exit the bus, but few people know the women who led her to that moment and turned her stance into an entire movement. From Jo Ann Robinson fighting with the Women’s Political Council to organize the boycott to the women who sat on the bus before Rosa (Claudette Colvin, Susie McDonald, Mary Louise Smith, and Aurelia Browder), setting a shining example, She Who Dared shows that it takes an entire community to change the world.

Created as part of the Composer Librettist Development Program with American Lyric Theater, this is the only opera of its kind. The seven-singer cast is composed of all Black women. Librettist Deborah D.E.E.P Mouton and composer Jasmine Arielle Barnes are making space for Black women to embody new, rich, and authentic characters in the genre.

Sivan Eldar (she/her), composer
Nine Jewelled Deer
Ganavya Doraiswamy (she/her), librettist

Sivan Eldar’s music has been described as “resolutely of our time” (Opera Forum), “striking in its singularity” (ResMusica), “luxurious and rapturous” (San Francisco Classical Voice), “vividly imagined” (The Boston Globe), and “with a unique sensitivity to dramaturgy” (Diapason). Recent projects include the opera Like Flesh (with Cordelia Lynn), the choral work The stone the tree the well (with Ganavya Doraiswamy), the vocal concerto Una Mujer Derramada (with Amyra León), the solo work Heave (with Juliet Fraser), and the quartet Solicitations (with Diotima and Mivos quartets). Recent recognitions include the 2022 Prix de Rome, 2021 Fedora Opera Prize, 2023 New Musical Talent Prize, and residencies at MacDowell, Civitella Ranieri, Camargo, Royaumont and Fulbright foundations, Cité Internationale des Arts, Snape Maltings, and Villa Albertine. Eldar has served as composer in residence at Montpellier National Opera (2019–2022) and holds degrees from the New England Conservatory (B.M.), UC Berkeley (M.A./Ph.D.), and IRCAM (Cursus). Her music is published by Durand-Universal Music Classical.

Nine Jewelled Deer
In a grotto, an ancient mural survives. In it, a man is drowning. A magical deer saves him. He betrays her. An army comes to capture her. Uncapturable, she jumps outside the mural, into a new world past our grasp. In a kitchen, a grandmother fashions instruments from pots and grains. In it, women and children sing the secrets of their lives, just beyond the reach of those who betrayed them. The Grandmother listens and offers them each the promise of love.

In a garden, a teacher reveals the secrets of enlightenment: Learn to open — your eyes. Learn to see the ever-present — sun and moon. Learn to feel ever-perfect love — for the world. Holy liberation is the equality of all things. Inspired by three sources — the parable of the “Nine Jewelled Deer,” the life story of musician Seetha Doraiswamy, and the opening chapter of the 2,000-year-old Vimalakirti Sutra — this opera tells of humans striving for liberation. It invites the ear to listen to voices that live just past the grasp of power, whose whispers offer sanctuary.

Whitney George (she/her), composer
NO MAN’S LAND
Bea Goodwin (she/her), librettist

Whitney George’s music traverses the affective terrain between tragedy and ecstasy, fragility and strength, bringing together romantically delicate intimacy and the spectacular darkness of the macabre. Her operas, staged multimedia works, and chamber music coloristically explore the mysteries of irrationality, nightmare, and memory, sonically seeking lost objects and hidden subjects. Given George’s theatrical inclinations and preoccupation with the tragic, she has turned again and again to opera as both a composer and conductor. Her operatic endeavors were recognized in 2017 when she received the Elebash Award for her orchestration of Miriam Gideon’s opera Fortunato. In the same year, she was commissioned to write Princess Maleine for dell’Arte Opera Ensemble and Julie for New Camerata Opera. In 2023, Fresh Squeezed Opera commissioned George to write Fizz & Ginger, which premiered in 2023 with the Curiosity Cabinet and was performed by Chicago Fringe Opera in 2024. For more information, visit whitneygeorge.com.

NO MAN’S LAND
NO MAN’S LAND tells the story of a Faustian bargain made by a young farm girl during the Great Depression in Oklahoma’s panhandle, exploring American desperation during the Dust Bowl: one of the top man-made climate disasters of all time. An optimistic chorus gloats about the American dream and monetizing the untouched Midwestern land. Here we meet a family of interest: new settlers in No Man’s Land. Tilly dreams of going to college and escaping rural domestic life. She is gifted a golden locket from the family’s migrant worker, Santi, as a promise he will come back for her. When Tilly’s sister falls ill with dust pneumonia, Tilly gives away her golden heart to a suitcase farmer who promises her he can save Sissy’s soul. This bargain creates a never-ending rain, until Sissy must make the ultimate sacrifice for her family.

Rebecca Gray (she/her), composer/librettist
BUS Opera

Rebecca Gray is an American composer, soprano, and improviser passionate about performing and creating both classical and contemporary repertoire. As a soprano, she has performed with Pacific Opera Victoria, Esprit Orchestra, Tapestry Opera, and OperaQ, and she is a member of FAWN Chamber Creative. Gray loves contributing to Canada’s queer opera scene as a performer and composer, and she has presented interdisciplinary work at the Atlantic Music Festival, the Banff Centre, Westben Centre, and Château de la Napoule in France. She composed and performed in a multimedia video Jess, which was named a winner of OPERA America’s Awards for Digital Excellence in Opera. She has composed unique vocal music for Voces Boreales in Montreal, New Music Concerts in Toronto, Pro Coro Canada in Edmonton, and Soundstreams in Toronto. A winner of the Mécénat Musica Prix 3 Femmes, she developed Raccoon Opera — a fable of the housing crisis involving Toronto raccoons — with her sister, Rachel Gray, and the opera was presented at Salle Bourgie in Montreal in May 2024.

BUS Opera
BUS Opera is an absurdist musical narrative that follows the mind of an alienated millennial as their hopes, anxieties, and gender identities collide on an overnight bus ride. Blurring the lines between opera and theater, this work navigates dreamscapes, nightmares, and reality as washed-up passengers interact on a 3:00 a.m. bus ride. Composer/librettist Rebecca Gray drew inspiration from her personal experiences on countless overnight bus trips, capturing the harrowing effects of sleep deprivation and the yearning for connection. Centered on a sleep-deprived protagonist, BUS Opera portrays the pressures of capitalism, grief, and loneliness that surface during budget public transportation journeys. The opera alternates between dream sequences and spoken real-world interactions on the bus, and each dream world presents its own absurdist logic. Audiences will be thrust into the office of a creepy dentist demanding to know one’s sexual preferences, into a silent Trouble! Game, and into a nightmare where demons scream criticisms of one’s driving. These dreamscapes mirror the personalities of real-world bus passengers, including a conspiracy theorist and a #girlboss pitching a multi-level marketing scheme.

Elizabeth Hoffman (she/her), composer and librettist
On Circe

Elizabeth Hoffman is a New York City-based composer who works in acoustic, electroacoustic, and computer media and has created collaborative projects with performers including Ivan Goff, Jane Rigler, Margaret Lancaster, Gamin, Marianne Gythfeldt, Elena Demyanenko, String Noise, and Azalea Twining. She also recently created a work for Glass Farm Ensemble’s Nieuw Amsterdam New York album on Innova. Hoffman teaches in NYU’s Arts and Science Music Department. Her electroacoustic music is published by empreintes DIGITALes. She has received Bourges, Prix Ars, Pierre Schaeffer, and Sonic Circuits prizes; MacDowell, NEA, Seattle Arts Commission, and Jerome Foundation grants; and an International Computer Music Association commission. Her interactive music connects computer processes to acoustic instruments in textural, tuning, and spatial explorations, or algorithmic application as in a permanent installation in the Bobst Library atrium. Her interest in feminist retellings and in the imprint of society on subjectivity, in dialogue and intervention through music, is a long-standing focus. Hoffman is also a pianist.

On Circe
Circe appears in Greek mythology as a minor goddess who unintentionally makes Scylla (who seduced Circe’s fiancé) a monster. For that, Circe’s father banishes her to eternal island arrest. It is a solitary existence except for moments when she is visited by happenstance travelers (e.g., Odysseus) who land or whom she lures to shore. This opera in development is a contemporary retelling of the myth, revisited with empathy for Circe’s anguish: She is an outsider from birth; betrayed by inauthentic lovers; and distressed by unethical behaviors of gods and humans. She also uses her powers for good. Most literary characterizations of Circe are starkly negative stereotypes: e.g., seductress, siren, temptress, witch. But, Circe’s complex motivations and strategies of undoing the constraints of patriarchal society, which also harm the men in the myth, are the opera’s subject. Circe compromises her life to act in line with her beliefs.

Sultana Isham (she/her), composer
Rogue Objects
Janani Balasubramanian (they/them), librettist

Sultana Isham explores sound as biology through composition and ethnomusicology. She is an award-winning composer, violinist, scholar, and interdisciplinary fellow at the Sundance Institute. Her score for the Emmy-nominated documentary The Neutral Ground premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, earning her an IDA nomination for best score of 2021. In 2023, she made her composer/conductor debut with the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra. Isham’s recent score for the HBO docuseries Stax: Soulsville, USA premiered at SXSW, winning the TV Premiere Audience Award, and was broadcast on Max in May 2024. Isham has been published in academic and archival journals such as e-flux and UNC Press’ Southern Cultures. Her scholarship has expanded into a touring a multisensory exhibition on the lives and works of performer-musicologists Dr. Geneva Handy-Southall and D. Antoinette Handy, in collaboration with the descendants of Handy Heights, Emory University, University of Minnesota, and University of Iowa Women’s Archive. 

Rogue Objects
Based on the research of the brown dwarf astrophysics group at the American Museum of Natural History, Rogue Objects is an immersive opera for planetaria that explores the emerging science of brown dwarfs: a lesser-known class of in-between celestial bodies, neither planets nor stars. Brown dwarfs are primarily bright in the infrared — a segment of the electromagnetic spectrum just outside the wavelengths of human sight — and to observe them we, humanity, had to make the creative leap that darkness was worth looking at. This opera will be performed in multiple planetariums with live and prerecorded elements. Through animation of original and archival images, data from the new James Webb and Gaia space telescopes, and an operatic score built from sonified light curves of nearby brown dwarfs, Rogue Objects invites audiences into the wonderful life of these objects that abound and sing in the dark.

Dina Maccabee (she/her), composer
Roses Are Blue
Jesse Olsen Bay (he/him), librettist

Dina Maccabee is a composer, songwriter, and performer originally from the San Francisco Bay Area. She studied composition at Wesleyan University with Paula Matthusen, Ron Kuivila, and Neely Bruce and viola at University of Michigan. Maccabee has been company composer for Just Theater in Berkeley, California, and artist in residence at Headlands Center for the Arts and Byrdcliffe Colony. Moving fluidly among contemporary genres and practices, her work includes scores for narrative media; solo performance for viola, voice, and electronics; the score for the musical Sweet Land, which premiered at History Theatre in St. Paul, Minnesota; and the a cappella score for Amy Siewert’s ballet In the Time at ODC in San Francisco, in collaboration with Jesse Olsen Bay. Maccabee has performed extensively over two decades with numerous artists and ensembles, including Ramon & Jessica, Julia Holter, the Red Room Orchestra, Lovers’ Almanac, Ghost Train Orchestra, Real Vocal String Quartet, Carla Kihlstedt, and many others.

Roses Are Blue
Roses Are Blue, based on text by Gertrude Stein, is the story of a child awakening to her unique identity as an individual. “Where, when, why am I a little girl named Rose?” she asks, striking out into an external wilderness and an internal jungle of doubts and expectations. Searching for herself, she encounters sweet, mysterious, frightening, and strange situations along the way. In Rose’s world — her dog, her school, her family — each interaction is both familiar and new. After a vision of “a mountain near and it was all clear,” she’s possessed by the urge to climb, despite dangers: a scary forest, a rushing waterfall, monsters, and devils. During a dark night, she ritualistically carves her name into a tree. As the sun rises on a new day, Rose goes under a rainbow to the mountain’s peak, where she sits “all alone on top of everything.”