“Ohh, I GET IT NOW: Even making it in this industry isn’t making it. Here I am waiting for my ship to come in so I can be legitimate so my life can start. FUCK THIS. So I had a baby, and I started making my art, and now I’m just as lost as I always was, but I am now more fulfilled and purposeful and whole than I ever was. I like being lost like this.”

And when I stepped out of that old world of making art and success according to other people’s standards and started choosing my own, I felt really lost at first. A good kind of lost, but lost.

How did other people make cool things happen with their art?

How do we stop being stage puppets and start creating what we want to see on stage?

How do we treat people the way we wish we would be treated as creatives and performers?

How do we make art AND a life we can be proud of?

I kept seeing all these biographies and autobiographies of singers who had made it according to every industry standard, talking about how they were good little soldiers, going from one prestigious artist program to the next, predictably ending up on the Met stage.

But where were the ones about the people who did something completely unpredictable talking about how they made that pivot?

Where were the ones about the folks who were changing the way we think about our art and our industry and what we should expect from it in a time when literally everything about the way our culture consumes entertainment has changed yet again around our over 200 year old art form?

Makin’ It in Opera has been my exercise to find peace with the first ten years of my professional life, striving and failing to get picked as the best and prettiest puppet for the opera stage, and to learn how to find my power and autonomy as an artist by keeping the company of artists who have done just that.

Now in its second season, I’ve been honored and inspired to interview some of the most exciting activists, artists, and innovators inside (and outside) the opera industry today, including Raehanne Bryce-Davis, Jayme Alilaw, Jonnet Solomon of the National Opera House, Julie Wyma and Anastasia Nikolov of Opera Programs Berlin, Andrew Simonet of Artists U, and Jillian Kuhn of Meisner in Music.

The best decision I ever made as an artist was to stop trying to “make it” in opera. It was a decision I reached sometime in 2018 - roughly ten years out of my undergrad degree in Vocal Performance.

As I told Charlotte and Peri in their interview with me on the Thrilled to Announce Podcast,