ELLEN WESTELLEN WEST

Ricky Ian Gordon was born on May 15, 1956, in Oceanside, NY and raised on Long Island. After studying piano, composition, and acting at Carnegie Mellon University, he settled in New York City, where he quickly emerged as a leading writer of vocal music that spans art song, opera, and musical theater. Mr. Gordon’s songs have been performed and or recorded by such internationally renowned singers as Renee Fleming, Dawn Upshaw, Nathan Gunn, Judy Collins, Kelli O’Hara, Audra MacDonald, Kristin Chenoweth, Nicole Cabell, the late Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, Frederica Von Stade, Nadine Sierra, Andrea Marcovicci, Harolyn Blackwell, and Betty Buckley, among many others.

Stephen Holden, writing in the New York Times wrote of the work, “If the music of Ricky Ian Gordon had to be defined by a single quality, it would be the bursting effervescence in fusing songs that blithely blur the lines between art song and the high-end Broadway music of Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim…It’s caviar for a world gorging on pizza.”

Recent productions of his operas include The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (New York City Opera/Yiddish Folksbiene, lib. Michael Korie); Intimate Apparel (Metropolitan Opera/Lincoln Center Theater, lib. Lynn Nottage); Ellen West (Beth Morrison Projects, Opera Saratoga, lib. Frank Bidart); The House Without a Christmas Tree (Houston Grand Opera), 27 (Opera Theatre of St Louis, Pittsburgh Opera, Opera Montreal, and Intermountain Opera in Montana, lib. Royce Vavrek); Morning Star (Cincinnati Opera, OnSite Opera, lib. William Hoffman); A Coffin in Egypt (Houston Grand Opera, Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills, Chicago Opera Theater, Opera Philadelphia, and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, lib. Leonard Foglia); Rappahannock County (Virginia Opera, lib. Mark Campbell); Green Sneakers (Bravo! Vail Valley Music Festival, Hawaii Performing Arts Festival, Bay Chamber Festival, Opera Birmingham, and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, lib. Ricky Ian Gordon); The Grapes of Wrath (Minnesota Opera, Utah Opera, Pittsburgh Opera, Anchorage Opera, Disney Hall and Carnegie Hall, lib. Michael Korie); The Tibetan Book of The Dead (Houston Grand Opera, Eastman School of Music and Opera Grand Rapids, lib. Jean Claude Van Itallie); and Orpheus and Euridice (Lincoln Center (OBIE Award), Pittsburgh Opera, Fort Worth Opera, Minnesota Dance Theater, and Vermont Opera Project, lib. Ricky Ian Gordon). His musicals include Sycamore Trees (Signature Theatre, playwright Nina Mankin, Helen Hayes Award); My Life with Albertine (Playwrights Horizons, playwright Richard Nelson, AT&T Award, Gilman and Gonzalez-Falla Music Theater Foundation Award); and Dream True (Vineyard Theatre, playwright Tina Landau, Richard Rodgers Award).

Upcoming commissions include This House, a new opera for Opera Theater of St. Louis 50th anniversary season in 2025 with librettists Lynn Nottage and Ruby Gerber. His Huit Chansons de Fleurs, written for soprano, Erin Morley, will be released on a new Orchid Classic recording, and premiere at the Kennedy Center, May 13, 2024, and his Marvin Gaye Songs commissioned by the Tucson Song Festival for baritone Justin Austin, using poems by Vievee Francis, recently premiered at Carnegie Hall, March 5, 2024.

As a teacher Mr. Gordon has taught both Master Classes and Composition Classes in Colleges and Universities throughout the country including Yale, NYU, Northwestern, Juilliard, Manhattan School of Music, Catholic, Bennington, Vassar, Carnegie-Mellon, Elon, Michigan State, U of Michigan, Point Park (McGinnis Distinguished Lecturer) Texas Lutheran University, Eastman School of Music, Florida State University, Texas Christian University, and San Francisco Conservatory. He has been the featured Composer-in-Residence at various festivals including Bravo! Vail Valley Music Festival, The Hawaii Performing Arts Festival, The Van Cliburn Foundation, Voices of Change, Santa Fe Song Festival, Songfest at Pepperdine University, Chautauqua, Aspen Music Festival, and Ravinia. In 2018, he was the commencement speaker at the University of Michigan.

Other honors include the 2003 Alumni Merit Award for exceptional achievement and leadership from Carnegie-Mellon University, A Shen Family Foundation Award, the Stephen Sondheim Award, The Constance Klinsky Award, and many awards from ASCAP, of which he is a member, The National Endowment of the Arts, and The American Music Center.

Mr. Gordon’s works are published by Presser Music, Carl Fischer Music, Williamson Music, and Hal Leonard and are available everywhere. His works are also widely recorded on various labels. (Discography)

Bidart is a native of California and considered a career in acting or directing when he was young. In 1957, he began to study at the University of California at Riverside, where he was introduced to writers such as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound and started to look at poetry as a career path. He then went on to Harvard, where he was a student and friend of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. He began studying with Lowell and Reuben Brower in 1962.

He has been an English professor at Wellesley College since 1972, and has taught at nearby Brandeis University. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and he is gay. In his early work, he was noted for his dramatic monologue poems like "Ellen West," which Bidart wrote from the point of view of a woman with an eating disorder, and "Herbert White," which he wrote from the point of view of a psychopath. He has also written openly about his family in the style of confessional poetry.

He co-edited the Collected Poems of Robert Lowell which was published in 2003 after years of working on the book's voluminous footnotes with his co-editor David Gewanter.

Bidart was the 2007 winner of Yale University's Bollingen Prize in American Poetry. His chapbook, Music Like Dirt, later included in the collection Star Dust, was a finalist for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. His 2013 book Metaphysical Dog was a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry and won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

He currently maintains a strong working relationship with actor and fellow poet James Franco, with whom he collaborated during the making of Franco's short film "Herbert White" (2010), based on Bidart's poem of the same name.

In 2017, Bidart received the Griffin Poetry Prize Lifetime Recognition Award and the 2017 National Book Award for Poetry for his book Half-light: Collected Poems 1965–2016.

He was awarded the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Half-light: Collected Poems 1965–2016.

Emma Griffin is a director and a producer working in opera, theater, and education

Emma Griffin is a theater and opera director; she is also the Managing Artistic Director of Mannes Opera, a program at the College of Performing Arts at The New School.

Griffin has a diverse background in theater, musical theater and opera. Her productions have been seen in performance venues all over the country. She is a frequent collaborator on new music/theater pieces; projects include the Ricky Ian Gordon/Frank Bidart operatic poem Ellen West (with Beth Morrison Projects & Prototype), Phil Kline’s Out Cold & Zippo Songs at BAM’s Next Wave Festival, Corey Dargel’s Removable Parts; and Susan Bernfield and Rachel Peters’ Stretch, a fantasia. Opera highlights include Sweeney Todd at Wolf Trap Opera, La Fanciulla del West at Opera Colorado, the world premiere of Charpentier's La Feste de Ruel with Catacoustic Consort; La Boheme at Crested Butte Music Festival, Three Decembers at Atlanta Opera; Don Giovanni at Boston Lyric Opera; The Cunning Little Vixen and Don Giovanni at Juilliard Opera; Wozzeck at Opera Philadelphia/Curtis Opera Theater. She was the Artistic Director of the OBIE-award winning Salt Theater, based in NYC; highlights with Salt include Stage Door (FringeNYC Excellence Award as Best Director), The Cherry Orchard, Scenes from a Marriage and Conquest of the Universe. She has theater credits at many regional theaters including Perseverance Theater, Geva Theater Center, Syracuse Stage, Southern Rep, Actor’s Express, Virginia Stage, and Williamstown Theater Festival.

Her career as an educator is as central to her artistry as her directing career. She spent many years as adjunct faculty at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts (working with students in Undergraduate Drama, Graduate Acting, and Graduate Design). She was on the faculty at SUNY Stonybrook, and she has worked extensively at both The Curtis Institute of Music and at Juilliard. Prior to her appointment to Mannes Opera, she spent four years as the Professor of Opera Stage Direction at the University of Cincinnati’s CCM. She is currently a member of the faculty at The Chautauqua Institute in the Opera Conservatory, where she will be returning for her second summer as a director in 2026.

Under Griffin’s leadership, Mannes Opera has become a vital program in the training and study of opera for the next generation of performers and makers. In both workshops and full productions, Griffin, her team and their students have collaborated with and produced work by composers such as Mark Adamo, Ricky Ian Gordon, David T. Little, Missy Mazzoli, Nico Muhly, Rachel Peters, Huang Ruo, Kamala Sankaram, Sarah Kirkland Snider, Kate Soper and Greg Spears. Establishing the school as a new work incubator, Mannes Opera has partnered with industry leaders in the support of contemporary opera, bringing companies such as Wolf Trap Opera, Santa Fe Opera, Beth Morrison Projects, Opera Saratoga and others into collaborative projects with students and guest artists. As a director, she has helmed the following productions at Mannes Opera: In the Green, La Calisto, Die Zauberflote, Don Giovanni, and La Passion de Simone.

Upcoming work includes The Silent Serenade, the US premiere of a lost operetta by Erich Korngold; and Eugene Onegin at Wolf Trap Opera.

Lidiya Yankovskaya is a conductor with powerful range – from Verdi and Wagner to Price and Prokofiev – and an unshakeable sense of classical music as a living, responsive art form. Her bold, collaborative leadership has shaped the development of dozens of world premieres – including over 20 new operas – and brought fresh urgency to performances with major orchestras and opera companies across the globe. In addition to her international work, she made a transformative local impact as Music Director of Chicago Opera Theater, earning consistent recognition from the Chicago Tribune, which credited her with “raising the profile of COT immensely, her interpretations bracing and repertoire head-spinningly varied” and named her Chicagoan of the Year.

Scenic Designer, Snow in Midsummer

In one season at OSF: Hamlet.

Other theatres: Broadway: Marvin’s Room.

Off-Broadway: The Wolves, Queens (Lincoln Center Theater); Mary Jane (New York Theatre Workshop); Mary Page Marlowe (Second Stage Theatre); The Treasurer, A Life, Marjorie Prime (Playwrights Horizons); The Antipodes, Everybody (Signature Theatre); Small Mouth Sounds (Signature Center, National tour). MCC, The Public Theater, Atlantic Theater Company, Ars Nova, The Debate Society, The Mad Ones. Regional: Williamstown Theatre Festival, Yale Repertory Theatre, Bard SummerScape, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Cincinnati Playhouse, South Coast Repertory. 

Opera: Opera Theatre of St. Louis, Boston Lyric Opera, Opera Philadelphia, Atlanta Opera. 

Awards: Obie Award (Sustained Excellence in Design); Lucille Lortel award (A Life); Lucille Lortel nomination (The Nether); Hewes Design Award (A Life); Drama Desk nomination (A Life).

Education: MFA, New York University.

Josh Epstein is a lighting designer for theater, opera and dance as well as environmental and event spaces.

He has spent much of his over-twenty-year career designing in many of the top regional theaters across the country including: the Guthrie Theater, Mark Taper Forum, South Coast Repertory, Goodman Theater, Geffen Playhouse, Kirk Douglas Theater, Philadelphia Theater Company, Pasadena Playhouse, Baltimore Center Stage, Trinity Rep, Geva Theatre Center, Playmakers Rep, Paper Mill Playhouse, Long Wharf Theater, Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, Actor's Theater of Louisville and The Alliance Theater. He has also served multiple times as the Resident Lighting Designer for the O'Neill Playwrights Conference.

His opera and dance work include productions at The Joyce Theater, Minnesota Opera, Ft. Worth Opera, Danspace at St. Marks, Virginia Opera, Opera Saratoga, Opera Santa Barbara, Wolf Trap Opera Company, The 92nd St. Y’s Harkness Dance Project, Berkshire Opera festival and the Manhattan School of Music.

Josh designed the lighting for the award-winning Macy's New York City Holiday Windows for a number of years. He has designed the lighting environment for VIP party spaces at the MTV Video Music Awards and the VH-1 Hip Hop Honors. He has also designed lighting for a multitude of different events and fashion shows throughout the New York area. He is also the creator of innovative, digital collaboration software for live events. Cuelist has rethought the
incredibly antiquated process of marking and sharing the placement of cues during rehearsal.

Annotating scripts, describing cues, sharing information and making necessary changes is now an instantaneous, collaborative and environmentally friendly process. His software is used by Universities and professional designers around the world.

Josh received his B.A. from the University of Chicago and his MFA from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. Prior to joining Chapman University, he served as a faculty member at the USC School of Dramatic Arts, UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, and Sarah Lawrence College.

Josh is an LA Stage Alliance Ovation Award Winner, Knight of Illumination 2019 Winner, Washington D.C. Helen Hayes Award Nominee and a Knight of Illumination Theatre Shortlisted Designer for his work in 2018. He was also a recipient of the highly prestigious NEA/TCG Career Development Program for Designers. Josh is an IAMA Theatre Company Ensemble Member and also currently serves on the O'Neill Playwrights Conference Artistic Council.

He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and three daughters.

Kaye Voyce is a New York City based designer for theatre, opera, dance and film. Her previous opera work with Christopher Alden includes A Quiet Place, L'Ile du Merlin, Luisa Miller, Bluebeard, and La Grande-Duchesse du Gérolstein. Her theatre work has been seen on Broadway in New York, theatres across America, and festivals in Europe, including Festival d'Automne á Paris, Kunstenfestivaldesartes in Brussels, Steiricher Herbst Festival in Graz, Wiener Festwochen, and the Barbican Festival, London. Her work with auteur Richard Maxwell has been seen at the Whitney Biennial, the Museum of Contemporary Art Buenos Aires, the Walker Art Center, and the Warhol Museum. Ms Voyce designed the two final dances choreographed by modern dance legend Trisha Brown, Toss and Rogues.

Soprano Jennifer Zetlan is internationally recognized for her artistry and captivating stage presence. She has been seen and heard on opera and concert stages worldwide, as well as on Broadway. In the current season, she is seen in Ricky Ian Gordon’s TheTibetan Book of the Dead with Grand Rapids Opera. Additionally, she is taking part in numerous workshops of new operas with American Lyric Theater and Works&Process at The Guggenheim as well as a forthcoming recording of Louis Karchin’s Tribute to the Angels and a premiere of a new work for chamber ensemble and soprano with the Washington Heights Chamber Orchestra by composer Paul Brantley.

Through his performing career and life-long study of singing, Nathan Gunn has encountered an abundance of expressions of excellence and creativity in the performing arts. He feels it is a privilege to share these experiences with audiences, artists, and communities in order to encourage thoughtful, healthy, and expressive artistry. His interest in music began in South Bend, Indiana where he grew up. He sang in his school musicals and his church choir, but it wasn’t until his junior year of high school after being introduced to Mozart’s opera, Die Zauberflöte, that he thought of devoting his life to it. Consumed by a desire to learn more, Nathan went the University of Illinois to study music and was mentored by pianist John Wustman and master teacher William Miller. As a performer, Nathan is respected as an artist, a musician, and as a singing actor. He has performed on the greatest stages in the world, and television, radio, video recording, and live simulcasts. Nathan’s famous portrayal of Papageno (The Magic Flute) was brought to the world stage in the first ever live HD broadcast performed at the Metropolitan Opera. In addition to Papageno, Nathan has reinterpreted classic roles such as Billy Budd, Figaro, and Don Giovanni, garnering many awards, including a Grammy award for his portrayal of Billy Budd and the coveted Beverly Sills award. He has also been widely acclaimed for his work in musical theater. His performances of Billy Bigelow, Lancelot (both for Live at Lincoln Center) and most recently Max von Mayerling at the John F. Kennedy Center’s Broadway Center Stage have been widely acclaimed as well and have led to collaborations with such Broadway stars as Mandy Patinkin, Stephanie J. Block, Kelli O’Hara, and Audra McDonald.