MAGDALENEMAGDALENE

Danielle Birrittella is a California-based performer, composer, and creator of new operatic work whose projects have been lauded as “a breath of pure creative power” (Opera Wire). Danielle’s background in opera and experimental theatre yield an artist with an instinct for pushing the boundaries of contemporary classical music.

As a creator of new works, Danielle bridges new music, devised performance, and film with a particular focus on collaborative engagement with poets, dancers, and visual artists. Her dual roles as creator and performer of her projects offer intimacy and permeability. In addition, her work as a practicing depth psychotherapist heavily influences her creative endeavors. Through somatic, imaginal, symbolic, and mythic frameworks, she explores the psyche's capacity for healing and transformation. She is also the founder of Channel Contemporary, a California-based nonprofit supporting artist-led interdisciplinary performance.

Danielle’s work has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Opera Wire, The Financial Times, and on NPR. She is the creator of Sonnets To Orpheus, an immersive song cycle set to Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry, and co-creator of Magdalene, a chamber opera set to Marie Howe’s poetry scored by fourteen female composers. Her forthcoming project, Sentinel, tells the story of a woman confronting traumatic memories in virtual reality in order to find healing, and is on track to premiere in 2025/26. The piece merges immersive technology with live vocal performance in an exploration of memory, fragmentation, and repair.

Danielle’s “high, crystalline soprano” has been said to be “mesmerizing… as hypnotic to watch as she is to hear” (The Wall Street Journal, Parterre). As a performer she is “exposed, intelligent, earnest… powerful and persuasive” and has a “radiant, nearly angelic presence” (The New York Times, The Financial Times).

Select performances include PROTOTYPE Festival, The LAX Festival, The Chautauqua Institute, The Standard, KCRW Desert Nights, The Ace, SoFar Sounds, The Bootleg Theatre, Automata Arts, La Musica Lirica (Italy), La Main d'Or (France), and The Ludwig Foundation (Cuba), and most recently the West Coast Premiere of Magdalene at CalArts REDCAT located in Walt Disney Concert Hall.

Zoe Aja Moore is an artist and director who makes new performance, theater, and opera. She uses practices that are both experimental and rigorous to make work that is visceral and visual, exploring new forms to locate story in the body and articulate a female experience. Her work has been presented by LACMA, REDCAT, Prototype Festival, Long Beach Opera, Studio Teatrgaleria Warsaw, Beth Morrison Projects, The Ford, SFMOMA, Los Angeles Philharmonic, National Sawdust, HERE Art Center, CalArts’ Center for New Performance, National Gallery of Singapore, Williamstown Theater Festival, LAX Festival, the Tank, home LA, and the Theater at the Ace Hotel among others.As an educator Zoe has taught and been a guest artist at institutions that include University of Michigan, NYU, UCLA, CalState Dominguez Hills and CalArts. Originally from New York City, Zoe is a member of the Lincoln Center Director's Lab and holds an MFA in Directing from the California Institute of the Arts.

Marie Howe is the author of four volumes of poetry, Magdalene: Poems; The Kingdom of Ordinary Time; The Good Thief; and What the Living Do, and she is the co-editor of a book of essays, In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, Agni, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, and The Partisan Review, among others. She has been a fellow at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College and a recipient of NEA and Guggenheim fellowships, and Stanley Kunitz selected Howe for a Lavan Younger Poets Prize from the American Academy of Poets. In 2015, she received the Academy of American Poets Poetry Fellowship which recognizes distinguished poetic achievement. From 2012-2014, she served as the Poet Laureate of New York State.

Leila Adu is an astonishing force in the space where electropop, avant-classical and singer-songwriter meet. Exploring her roots in New Zealand, Britain and Ghana, Adu is an international artist who has performed at festivals and venues across the world.

Compared to Nina Simone and Joanna Newsome by WNYC, Adu has released five acclaimed albums, and has given visionary solo BBC and WQXR performances. Adu’s credits include Ojai Music Festival, Bang on a Can, the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, Late Night with David Letterman, and composing for a Billboard charted album.

Adu holds a Princeton University music composition PhD. In 2022, Leila Adu–Gilmore has been awarded a Charles Ives Composer Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Leila is the 2026/2027 Composer in Residence at the Wissenschaftskolleg, Institute of Advanced Study, Berlin.

Molly Joyce’s music has been described as “serene power” (New York Times), written to “superb effect” (The Wire), and “impassioned” (The Washington Post). Her work is primarily concerned with disability as a creative source. She has an impaired left hand from a previous car accident, and the primary vehicle in her pursuit is her electric vintage toy organ, an instrument she bought on eBay which suits her body and engages her disability on a compositional and performative level.

Molly’s creative projects have been presented at TEDxMidAtlantic, Bang on a Can Marathon, Danspace Project, Gaudeamus Muziekweek, National Gallery of Art, Classical:NEXT, VisionIntoArt’s FERUS Festival, and featured in outlets such as Pitchfork, Red Bull Radio, WNYC’s New Sounds, and I Care If You Listen. Additionally, she has written for publications 21CM, Disability Arts Online, and collaborated across disciplines including with visual artists Lex Brown and Julianne Swartz, choreographers Melissa Barak and Jerron Herman, director Austin Regan, and writers Marco Grosse and Christopher Oscar Peña.

Molly is a graduate of The Juilliard School, Royal Conservatory in The Hague, Yale School of Music, alumnus of the National YoungArts Foundation, and currently serves on the composition faculty at New York University Steinhardt.

Emma O’Halloran is a GRAMMY-nominated Irish composer whose music is driven by a fascination with joy, wonder, hope, and human connection. Freely intertwining acoustic and electronic music, her work seeks to capture moments of intimacy and magic, and has been described as “intensely beautiful” (Washington Post) and “unencumbered, authentic, and joyful” (I Care If You Listen).

Emma’s work spans collaborations with folk musicians, chamber ensembles, turntables, laptop orchestra, symphony orchestra, opera, and theatre. Known for her distinctive fusion of pop, rock, and electronic influences with the rich colours and textures of acoustic instruments, her work has found a wide audience and has been featured at various music festivals such as Classical NEXT, Cork International Choral Festival, PODIUM Esslingen, New Music Dublin, Tokyo’s Born Creative Festival, and Bang on a Can LOUD Weekend. Additionally, her music has been performed by Crash Ensemble, Chamber Choir Ireland, ensemble reflector, Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra, PRISM Saxophone Quartet, and the Irish National Symphony Orchestra, amongst others.

In recent years, Emma’s passion for storytelling has led her towards multidisciplinary projects such as soundwalks and opera. She has written for Irish National Opera, Boston Lyric Opera, and Beth Morrison Projects, and her recent operas TRADE and Mary Motorhead received critical acclaim at LA Opera and New York’s PROTOTYPE Festival, with the Los Angeles Times describing her as “a kind of modern-day Monteverdi.” Released on Signum Records in 2025, the album of these operas earned Emma a GRAMMY nomination for Best Opera Recording at the 68th GRAMMY Awards.

Emma loves working with people of all ages to explore and create music, and she has served as a mentor for various composition programmes in Ireland and the United States. In 2021, in partnership with the Irish National Concert Hall, she founded the Creative Lab, an award-winning mentorship programme for young composers from traditionally underrepresented groups in music composition. Emma holds a PhD in Music Composition from Princeton University.

Ellen Reid is one of the most innovative artists of her generation. An American composer and sound artist whose breadth of work spans opera, sound design, film scoring, avant-pop, ensemble and choral writing. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music for her opera, p r i s m, in 2019. Reid's orchestral work has been performed by the New York Philharmonic, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, among many others.

Reid created Ellen Reid SOUNDWALK, a GPS-enabled work of public art that reimagines urban parks as interactive soundscapes. SOUNDWALK premiered in New York's Central Park, and continues to expand to urban parkland around the world, including Los Angeles' Griffith Park, London's Regent's Park & Primrose Hill, and Tokyo's Ueno Park. An album of music written for the project, Big Majestic, was released on New Amsterdam / Eclipse Projects. Its featured performers include the Kronos Quartet, Shabaka Hutchings, James McVinnie, and Lisel.

Reid is known for her dynamic, lyrical film scores, and she has worked with A24, Amazon Studios, and the Duplass Brothers Productions. Her work has been featured at film festivals including SXSW, IFC Fest, TriBeCa Film Festival and the Toronto Film Festival. Her concert work was also an inspiration for artist Alex Prager’s short film RUN.

In 2016, Reid co-founded Luna Composition Lab with composer Missy Mazzoli. The organization provides mentorship, education, and resources for young female, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming composers ages 13-18, and is the only initiative of its kind in the United States.

In addition to the Pulitzer Prize for Music, Ellen Reid’s p r i s m was the winner of the Music Critics Association of North America award for Best New Opera in 2019. Reid is a recipient of Lincoln Center's Emerging Artist Award, she has been one of Musical America’s 30 Professionals of the Year, and she is a Sundance Institute Interdisciplinary Program Grantee.

Born in Oak Ridge Tennessee in 1983, Ellen Reid received her BFA from Columbia University and her MA from California Institute of the Arts. Ellen Reid has served as the Contemporary Music Chair of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and she was the first composer to be in residence with both Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw Concert Hall and Concertgebouw Orchestra simultaneously. Ellen Reid’s music is exclusively published by Chester Music, part of the Wise Music Group. She continues to live and work in New York City and Los Angeles.

Mila Henry is a music director and pianist who maintains an active and versatile career leading works that defy genre, from rock musicals to folk operas to reimagined classics. She has worked with Lileana Blain-Cruz, Heather Christian, Bill T. Jones, George Lewis, Missy Mazzoli, Wayne Shorter, and esperanza spalding. Recent and upcoming projects include Conductor for The Old Man and the Sea (Opera Columbus); Music Director/Pianist for Precipice (PROTOTYPE); and Associate Music Director for Black Swan (American Repertory Theater).

Hailed “a stalwart contributor to the contemporary opera scene” (Opera Ithaca), Mila frequently collaborates with Beth Morrison Projects and their PROTOTYPE festival. She was Conductor for Magdalene; Music Director/Pianist for Eat the Document; Pianist for Mata Hari and Thumbprint; and Répétiteur for the Pulitzer Prize-winning Angel’s Bone and p r i s m, among others. Other notable collaborations include Conductor for The Old Man and the Sea (BMP, VisionIntoArt); Music Director for The Hunt (Miller Theatre); Associate Music Director for The Comet / Poppea (AMOC* Festival, Lincoln Center); Pianist for We Shall Not Be Moved (Opera Philadelphia, The Apollo, Dutch National Opera) and Looking at You (HERE); and Répétiteur for Iphigenia (Real Magic, Octopus Theatricals). She has also worked with American Opera Projects, Death of Classical, Experiments in Opera, and Opera on Tap, and has played at venues ranging from The Stone to the Library of Congress.

Mila’s musical theater work includes Vocal Director for the Obie-winning The World is Round (Ripe Time); Music Director for Early Decision (McCarter Theatre, Princeton University); and Assistant Music Director for The Night Falls (BalletCollective, PEAK Performances). Other favorite projects include workshops for Barnum’s Bird (Circle in the Square, Circle Series), These Girls Have Demons (Pittsburgh CLO), Swell (HERE), Saint Sebastian (The Theater Center), Something Blue (Page 73), Sun Songs (Hi-ARTS, Judson Memorial Church), and The Debutantes (Manhattan Musical Theatre Lab). She has performed at Joe’s Pub with John Kelly and 54 Below with John C. Hume, and brought together a 9-piece all-women band for Lindsay Rider’s “Yes, And…” at Merkin Concert Hall. Her supportive approach has connected her to thesis projects at BerkleeNYC, Columbia University and NYU Tisch, as well as "practice" auditions for LDC Artist Representation.

A strong advocate for mentorship, Mila is an active Maestra member, serving as Co-Program Head (with Rebecca Steinberg) for their First Takes program and previously participating as both a mentor and mentee. She has participated on grant panels for Loghaven, New Music USA, and OPERA America, and in 2025, was one of nine honorees for OPERA America's Marineau Opera Grants for Women Opera Directors and Conductors. .

Mila holds degrees from the Manhattan School of Music (Master of Music, Collaborative Piano) and Elizabethtown College (Bachelor of Arts in Music, Piano). She is based in New York and plays accordion, melodica, ukulele, and an assortment of other tiny instruments with the alt-country band The Opera Cowgirls. milahenry.com