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Join us for a conversation between lauded composer Missy Mazzoli and acclaimed director Lileana Blain-Cruz, moderated by Mannes Opera's Managing Artistic Director Emma Griffin. 

CoPA Conversations is a series of curated talks between two artistic innovators drawn from our world-class faculty and selected guest artists. These conversations will cross genres and artistic practice areas and will touch on CoPA's core values of Socially Engaged Artistry, Experimentation & Technology, Improv & Collaboration with a focus on holistic artistic practice. 

Recently deemed “one of the more consistently inventive, surprising composers now working in New York” (NY Times) and “Brooklyn’s post-millennial Mozart” (Time Out NY), Missy Mazzoli has had her music performed by the Kronos Quartet, LA Opera, eighth blackbird, the BBC Symphony, Cincinnati Opera and many others. In 2018 she became one of the first two women to receive a main stage commission from the Metropolitan Opera, and was nominated for a Grammy award in the category of “Best Classical Composition". She is currently Composer-in-Residence at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and from 2012-2015 was Composer-in-Residence with Opera Philadelphia. Her 2018 opera Proving Up, a commentary on the American dream commissioned and premiered by Washington National Opera, was deemed “harrowing… a true opera for its time” by the Washington Post. Her 2016 opera Breaking the Waves was called “one of the best 21st-century American operas yet” by Opera News. She is currently working on a new opera, The Listeners, a collaboration with playwright Jordan Tannahill, librettist Royce Vavrek and director Lileana Blain-Cruz that will premiere in 2021 at the Norwegian National Opera and Opera Philadelphia. In 2016 she founded Luna Lab, a mentorship program for young female-identifying, non-binary and gender-nonconforming composers. Her works are published by G. Schirmer. missymazzoli.com

Lileana Blain- Cruz is a director from New York City and Miami. Recent projects include: Anatomy of a Suicide (Atlantic Theater Company), Fefu and Her Friends (TFANA); Girls (Yale Repertory Theater); Marys Seacole (LCT3, Obie Award); Faust (Opera Omaha); Fabulation, Or the Reeducation of Undine (Signature Theatre) ; Thunderbodies and Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again (Soho Rep.); The House That Will Not Stand and Red Speedo (New York Theatre Workshop); Water by the Spoonful (Mark Taper Forum/CTG); Pipeline (Lincoln Center); The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World (Signature Theatre, Obie Award); Henry IV, Part One and Much Ado About Nothing(Oregon Shakespeare Festival); The Bluest Eye (The Guthrie); War (LCT3/Lincoln Center Theater and Yale Rep.); Salome (JACK); Hollow Roots (the Under the Radar Festival at The Public Theater); She was recently named a 2018 United States Artists Fellow and a 2020 Lincoln Center Emerging Artist. She is a graduate of Princeton and received her MFA in directing from the Yale School of Drama. Upcoming projects include Dreaming Zenzile, and a new opera The Listeners at Opera Norway.