Hildegard

Composer Sarah Kirkland Snider writes music of direct expression and vivid narrative that has been hailed as “rapturous” (New York Times), “groundbreaking” (Boston Globe) and “ravishingly beautiful” (NPR). Recently named one of the “Top 35 Female Composers in Classical Music” by The Washington Post, she has had works commissioned and/or performed by the New York Philharmonic, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, National Symphony Orchestra, Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Philharmonia Orchestra, Birmingham Royal Ballet, Emerson String Quartet, Renée Fleming and Will Liverman, Deutsche Grammophon for mezzo Emily D’Angelo, percussionist Colin Currie, eighth blackbird, A Far Cry and Roomful of Teeth, among many others.

She was the winner of the 2014 Detroit Symphony Orchestra Lebenbom Competition. Snider’s recent works include Forward Into Light, an orchestral commission for the New York Philharmonic inspired by American women suffragists; Drink the Wild Ayre, the final commission for the legendary Emerson String Quartet’s farewell tour; Mass for the Endangered, a Trinity Wall Street-commissioned prayer for the environment for choir and ensemble, programmed by dozens of choirs the world over; Embrace, an orchestral ballet for the Birmingham Royal Ballet; and Hildegard, an upcoming opera on 12th-century visionary/polymath/composer St. Hildegard von Bingen, co-commissioned by Beth Morrison Projects and Aspen Music Festival, to premiere (venue TBA) in 2025. Her four full-length LPs – The Blue Hour (Nonesuch/New Amsterdam, 2022), Mass for the Endangered (Nonesuch/New Amsterdam, 2020), Unremembered (New Amsterdam, 2015), and Penelope (New Amsterdam, 2010) – have garnered year-end nods and critical acclaim from the New York Times, NPR, Boston Globe, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Gramophone, Pitchfork, BBC Music Magazine, The Nation, and many others.

A founding co-artistic director of Brooklyn-based nonprofit New Amsterdam Records, Snider has an M.M. and Artist’s Diploma from the Yale School of Music, and a B.A. from Wesleyan University. She was a Visiting Lecturer at Princeton University in Fall 2024. Her music is published by G. Schirmer.

Learn more at SarahKirklandSnider.com.

From: San Francisco Bay area. LA Opera: Lucia di Lammermoor (2014, mainstage debut), after previously directing Judas Maccabaeus at the Cathedral (2008).

Elkhanah Pulitzer is a highly esteemed opera director known for her bold, nuanced stage direction that explores the intersection of music and theater through innovation and hybridized forms, creating compelling and visually stunning productions. Recent projects include directing John Adams’ Antony and Cleopatra, which premiered at San Francisco Opera in 2022; she makes her Metropolitan Opera directorial debut with this production in May 2025. Other recent highlights include a new production of Handel’s Julius Caesar with Opera Theatre of St. Louis in June 2024, and European productions of David Lang’s prisoner of the state, which premiered at the New York Philharmonic in 2019.
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Additionally this season, Pulitzer continues her collaboration with cellist Alisa Weilerstein directing Fragments, a groundbreaking, multi-year project for solo cello that weaves together the 36 movements of Bach's solo cello suites with 27 newly commissioned works. The second and third installments of Fragments will be performed at Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall on January 21 and May 20, 2025 respectively.
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Past projects include a live tour of Esperanza Spalding’s album 12 Little Spells and DIORAMA, an art installation at the I.O.U. in San Francisco. Pulitzer has directed projects with the Los Angeles Philharmonic including John Adams’ Nixon in China and Leonard Bernstein’s Mass, the latter of which was also staged at the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center. She has also directed John Adams’ The Gospel According to the Other Mary at the San Francisco Symphony. 

Pulitzer directed The Flying Dutchman at San Francisco Opera in 2013 and returned to serve as artistic curator of SF Opera Lab, an experimental chamber opera two-year program from 2015-17, where she developed the mission, brand and programming. She has directed multiple productions at West Edge Opera, among them Lulu, Thomas Ades’ Powder Her Face, and Luca Francesconi’s Quartett. She has collaborated on next-generation projects with Washington National Opera, Lyric Opera of Kansas City, Boston Lyric Opera, Opera Omaha, Opera Theater of Saint Louis, and the Canadian Opera Company. Theater directing credits include work with Impact Theater, Cutting Ball, Riverside Theater, and Ensemble Theater Company. 

Pulitzer was honored with the Opera America Success Award for her libretto Dream of the Pacific, an opera composed by Stephen Mager, commissioned and performed by Opera Theatre of St. Louis.

She graduated from UC Berkeley in Theater Arts Phi Beta Kappa and holds an MA from Columbia in Directing. Born in Boston and raised in St. Louis and Marin, Pulitzer also serves as board vice president of the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, which advances experimentation in art curation, installation and live programming.

Learn more at Elkhanah.com.

Deborah Johnson is a multimedia artist, designer and educator, creating multifaceted visual experiences for stage and screen. She inhabits many creative selves, including creative director, visual librettist, video designer, animator, and performer, collaborating with a breadth of artists including Sufjan Stevens, Sofi Tukker, M83, St. Vincent, Beth Orton, Sarah Kirkland Snider, Annie B. Parson, Tamar-kali Brown, Ray LaMontagne, Kronos Quartet, Alarm Will Sound, Bang On A Can, and Wilco, with performances at Coachella, Disney Concert Hall, Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Museum of Modern Art, MASS MoCA, Radio City Music Hall, Madison Square Garden, The Fillmore, The Ryman, and Wiener Konzerthaus.

She has produced site-specific performances and installations at SXSW, Lighthouse ArtSpace, Sundance, Brooklyn Academy of Music, 92Y Tribeca, MoMA, Chicago’s Millennium Park, and the Baltimore Museum of Art, with artist residencies at MASS MoCA, The Experimental Television Center, and The Atlantic Center for the Arts. She is a professor at The Pratt Institute, espousing the magic of time and movement and light, color, and design. 

As a creative director and visual designer, she celebrates the collaborative nature of live performance, accessing a diverse and enduring network of fabricators, lighting designers, artists, and programmers to create transcendent, responsive experiences by merging digital and handmade processes. Everything from lines of code to piles of charcoal is in this studio. If it works, use it — there are no rules.
 

Beth Morrison is the creative producer of Beth Morrison Projects. Her long collaboration with LA Opera began with Dog Days in 2015. The 2025 presentation of Adoration marks BMP's 16th collaboration with the company.

She is an opera and theater producer, singer, and voice teacher with bachelor and master of music degrees and a master of fine arts in theater management/producing from the Yale School of Drama, as well as many years of experience in the development of new opera and theater works. She first cultivated her extensive experience in arts administration at the Boston University Tanglewood Institute where she served as administrative director for four years. Beth served a founding tenure as the Producer for the Yale Institute for Music Theatre from 2009-2011, as well as Producer for New York City Opera’s VOX: Contemporary American Opera Lab from 2010-2011.

Beth Morrison Projects is the realization of Beth‘s vision, which stems from a deep commitment to nurturing composers and other artists and fostering the development of new opera and other new music-theater works. Established in 2006, Beth Morrison Projects (BMP) identifies and supports the work of emerging and established living composers and their multi-media collaborators through the commission, development, production and touring of their works, which take the form of contemporary music-theater, opera-theater, and multi-media concert works. BMP has established itself as a composers’ producer and the New York Times said, “The production of new [opera] works in the city still falls mostly to the tireless Beth Morrison and her Beth Morrison Projects…”

Learn more at BethMorrisonProjects.org.