Cori Ellison

By Brian Potter on April 23, 2013.

Cori Ellison, a leading creative figure in the opera world, has served as staff Dramaturg at Glyndebourne Festival Opera and New York City Opera. She is a member of the Vocal Arts faculty at the Juilliard School, where she teaches History of Singing, and a master teacher at the Ravinia Steans Music Institute Program for Singers and the Crested Butte Opera Studio.  She has coached and taught master classes for singers at institutions including Glyndebourne, New York City Opera, Santa Fe Opera, Indiana University, Cincinnati College-Conservatory, Mannes College, University of Texas at Austin, Boston University, Boston Conservatory, Michigan State University, University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, DePaul University, and Martina Arroyo’s Prelude to Performance program, and regularly serves as a judge for the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions and many other vocal competitions.

Active in developing contemporary opera, she teaches dramaturgy for American Lyric Theater’s Composer Librettist Development Program and was the first dramaturg invited to participate in the Yale Institute for Music Theatre (2009). At New York City Opera, she was a curator of the annual VOX American Opera Showcase and also co-founded and led the company’s ‘Words First’ program for emerging opera librettists.  In addition, she is a sought-after dramaturgical consultant to companies including Glyndebourne, Canadian Opera, Opera Philadelphia, Fort Worth Opera, Pittsburgh Opera, and Beth Morrison Projects.

She also creates supertitles for opera companies across the English-speaking world, and helped launch Met Titles, the Met’s simultaneous translation system.  Her English singing translations include Hansel and Gretel (NYCO), La vestale (English National Opera) and Shostakovich’s Cherry Tree Towers (Bard Summerscape).  She has often written for the New York Times, and has contributed to books including The New Grove Dictionary of Opera,Metropolitan Opera Guide to Opera on Video, and The Compleat Mozart.  She has lectured at venues including Glyndebourne, the Royal Opera House/Covent Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and the Santa Fe, San Francisco, Cincinnati, Seattle, and Canadian opera companies.