Oliver Prezant has presented lectures and education programs for the Santa Fe Opera, the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, Opera Southwest, Chamber Music Albuquerque and many other organizations. His unique presentations have helped thousands of music lovers deepen their understanding and enjoyment of music.

Lucy Yates (soprano, pianist, coach) made her conducting debut in 2018 as maestro al cembalo at Seattle Opera with the “extremely inventive” O+E (Gluck/Calzabigi 1762 Orfeo ed Euridice), in an “elegantly poetic” English version she created for that production. She made her Rossini Opera Festival debut in 2014 as assistant conductor and onstage continuo fortepianist in Mario Martone’s staging of Aureliano in Palmira.

Miss Yates first drew international attention as Violetta in a 2002 Franco Zeffirelli/Plácido Domingo production of La traviata (Teatro Verdi di Busseto) and was immediately engaged by Gian Carlo Menotti for Spoleto (Monica in The Medium, under his direction) and Francesco Maria Colombo for the Orchestra Verdi di Milano. Critics called her Gilda “perfect,” her Beatrice di Tenda “dazzling,” and her Fiordiligi “deliciously feminine”. She appeared as Nedda in Pagliacci at Sarasota Opera and as Rosina in Il barbiere di Siviglia with the Opera Company of North Carolina.

Through twenty years with Bel Canto at Caramoor—now Teatro Nuovo—with Will Crutchfield, Miss Yates has emerged as a cogent and lyrical translator and teacher of Italian poetry. She teaches for dell’Arte Opera Ensemble under Christopher Fecteau, and has served as dramaturg, titlist, and coach for the New York City Opera, and panelist on the Metropolitan Opera Radio Quiz.

Miss Yates is a Lecturer in Opera in the Herb Alpert School of Music at UCLA and a guest lecturer in the Thornton School of Music at USC. In spring 2020 she joined The Industry on keyboards for Sweet Land (music: Du Yun and Raven Chacon; direction: Yuval Sharon and Cannupahanska Luger) and was made a company member. She is presently preparing the Italian version of Ricky Ian Gordon and Michael Korie’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis.

Rodney Gilfry is a two-time Grammy nominee, singer and actor, and has performed in all the world’s music capitals, and appears on over 30 commercial recordings. He was born and raised in Southern California, and earned degrees from California State University Fullerton, and the University of Southern California. From 1987 to 1989 he was a member of the Frankfurt Opera ensemble, and from 1989 to 1994 he was a member of the Zurich Opera ensemble.

Rod is acclaimed world-wide in opera, musicals, recitals and cabaret. An important part of his 75-role repertoire are the 12 leading roles he has created in new operas. Recent performances include the Los Angeles Opera productions of David Lang’s solo opera the loser, Matthew Aucoin’s Crossing, and Eurydice; and Jake Heggie’s It’s a Wonderful Life at the San Francisco Opera. He will create the role of Robert MacNamara in Huang Ruo’s Written in Stone at the Washington National Opera in 2022. He was recently Claudius in Brett Dean’s Hamlet at the Glyndebourne and Adelaide Festivals, a role he will reprise at the Metropolitan Opera next year. His tour with Renée Fleming in Kevin Puts’s The Brightness of Light began with concerts at the Tanglewood Festival, Colorado Symphony and the Kennedy Center, and will resume with the Dallas Symphony, Baltimore Symphony, Los Angeles Opera, Chicago Lyric Opera and others.

Mr. Gilfry is in his 12th year as a Professor of Vocal Arts at the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music in Los Angeles.

To a growing list of accomplishments, Diana Solomon-Glover now adds the title of librettist. This Little Light of Mine, an opera about Civil Rights activist, Fannie Lou Hamer, with music by Chandler Carter was commissioned by Opera for All Voices and is scheduled to debut at the Santa Fe Opera in October 2022. This achievement crowns a career spent serving humanitarian efforts and social causes through her work on the operatic stage, concert, oratorio, recital, musical theater, cabaret and radio and television across the United States, Canada, Europe, the Caribbean and Central America.

Solomon-Glover has been a featured soloist for The Innocence Project’s Annual Gala, which celebrates the emancipation of wrongly incarcerated Americans and producer of Project People Foundation’s “Celebration of Life” concerts, which raised over $250,000 for programs benefiting South African children orphaned by AIDS. Ms. Solomon-Glover is co-owner with singer/composer Kristin Norderval of Reduta Deux, a not-for-profit dedicated to producing theatrical works that represent an unusual integration of vision and techniques whose subject matter reflects a broad human consciousness.

Colleen Lucey, Ph.D., is assistant professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at the University of Arizona. She earned a B.A. in Russian from Barnard College and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her scholarship focuses on works by both canonical writers (Fyodor Dostoevsky, Lev Tolstoy) and the texts of their lesser-known contemporaries. In addition to the representation of femininity and debates on “the woman question,” her research and teaching interests include the history of Russian theatre and performance (from the nineteenth century to the present), and Russian language instruction. She is the author of Love for Sale: Representing Prostitution in Imperial Russia (Cornell University Press, 2021).

“Lucey directs [with] contemporary flair…dousing the classic with a touch of Modern Monty Python alongside Carol Burnett show moments.”
Broadway World Review

Shawna Lucey is an opera & theater director based in New York City. Her work has been seen at the Santa Fe Opera, The San Francisco Opera, The Bread & Puppet Theater, Lyric Opera of Kansas City, Dallas Opera, Skylight Music Theater, The Bolshoi Theater, and Schauspiel Hannover. Recent directorial engagements include a new legacy production of Tosca for The San Francisco Opera, Pearl Fishers for The Santa Fe Opera and Falstaff for Dallas Opera. Later this season, Lucey directs Lucia di Lammermoor for Lyric Opera of Kansas City and Die Fledermaus for Opera Theater of St. Louis. Lucey is known for her feminist staging’s of classic and modern pieces, bringing passionate new resonance to the warhorses of opera and grappling with contemporary works through a feminist paradigm.

After completing her undergraduate degrees in Theater (BA) & Italian (BA) at the University of Texas at Austin, she moved to Russia in order to pursue a Master’s degree. Her first project in Moscow, directing and designing a puppet version of Primo Levi’s If This is a Man, performed at the Moscow Art Theater and toured within Russia. During her five years in Russia, Shawna pursued work with theater institutions while completing her MFA in Directing & Movement from the Boris Schukin Theatre Institute of the Vakhtangov Theater in Moscow.

After touring and performing with The Bread and Puppet Theater, Shawna pursued a career directing opera. She has been an associate and assistant director at The Metropolitan Opera, The San Francisco Opera, LA Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Houston Grand Opera, Gran Teatr del Liceu, The Bolshoi Theater, working with Francesca Zambello, John Caird, Stephen Lawless, Lee Blakeley, and Sir David McVicar.

In the fall of 2020, Shawna joined Columbia’s Master of Science program in Nonprofit Management in order to invest in her plans of joining the management of a major American Opera House. Coursework includes: Board Governance, Fundraising, Major Gifts, Ethics, amongst others for a robust and profound understanding of leadership needs for the nonprofit sector and bring that expertise to the opera world.