VerismoComm Welcomes Lidiya Yankovskaya to Roster
“One of the hottest young conductors forging a path in the world of opera today… Lidiya Yankovskaya is the future of opera.” As Music Director of Chicago Opera Theater, Lidiya is the only woman to hold that title in a multimillion-dollar opera company in the United States.
November 5, 2018
Verismo Communications is proud to welcome Russian-American conductor Lidiya Yankovskaya to the roster. As Music Director of Chicago Opera Theater, Yankovskaya is the only woman to hold that title in a multimillion-dollar opera company in the United States.
Under her leadership, COT has established the Vanguard Initiative, a three-pronged investment in new opera that includes a two-year residency for emerging opera composers. Committed to developing the next generation of artistic leaders, she also serves on the Advisory Board of Turn The Spotlight, a foundation dedicated to illuminating the path to a more equitable future in the arts.
Yankovskaya is Founder and Artistic Director of the Refugee Orchestra Project, which proclaims the cultural and societal relevance of refugees through music, and has brought that message to the United Nations and hundreds of thousands of listeners around the world.
In the 2018/19 season, Ms. Yankovskaya leads the Chicago premieres of Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta and Heggie’s Moby-Dick at COT, the world premiere of Kamala Sankaram’s Taking Up Serpents at Washington National Opera, and the world premiere of Ricky Ian Gordon’s Ellen West at Opera Saratoga. She conducts Grétry’s Belgian rarity Zémire et Azor at Carnegie Mellon University, workshops Justin Chen’s The Life and Death(s) of Alan Turing at COT and Paola Prestini’s Edward Tulane at Minnesota Opera, and makes her Mobile Symphony debut in Carmina Burana. She also debuts at Trinity Wall Street, leading the New York premiere of Laura Schwendinger’s Artemisia, and returns to New York’s National Sawdust to close her season with the Hildegard Competition Concert, which features the work of emerging female, trans, and nonbinary composers.
Turn The Spotlight Foundation to Mentor Arts Leaders
Turn The Spotlight’s mission is to identify, nurture, and empower leaders, and in turn, illuminate the path to a more equitable future in the arts. The foundation was created to pair top-tier mentors with exceptional women, people of color, and other equity-seeking groups in the arts.
July 31, 2018
Lumos Fellows Elena Uriote and Melissa White. Photo by Daniel Cavazos
Today, twenty-one arts leaders and activists announce the launch of Turn The Spotlight, a foundation created to pair top-tier mentors with exceptional women, people of color, and other equity-seeking groups in the arts. Beth Stewart, a New York City-based arts entrepreneur and classical music publicist, will lead the foundation, which is supported by an Advisory Board of arts world luminaries, including soprano Julia Bullock, journalists Anne Midgette and Celeste Headlee, conductors Lidiya Yankovskaya and Nicole Paiement, stage director Francesca Zambello, classical music publicist Mary Lou Falcone, arts advocates Monica Yunus and Camille Zamora, and women’s rights advocate Amanda Mejia.
“We believe that systemic change is crucial,” said Turn The Spotlight Founder Beth Stewart. “We also believe that one-on-one mentoring can have real impact, particularly in an industry in which so many professionals are freelancers working outside an established institutional framework. Our mission is to identify, nurture, and empower leaders, and in turn, illuminate the path to a more equitable future in the arts.”
Stewart has recruited ten industry-leading mentors from a wide range of artistic specialties, including Emmy Award-winning documentarian Kristin Atwell Ford, producer/director Avery Willis Hoffman, Metropolitan Opera mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton, and composer Kamala Sankaram. They will join arts activists Alysia Lee, Rebecca McFaul and Anne Francis Bayless, sopranos Heidi Melton and Corinne Winters, and designer Jessica Jahn in mentoring the foundation’s fellows during the 2018/19 season.
“Nearly all of our first cohort of Lumos Fellows have founded organizations, produced or commissioned new work. Each has a distinctive voice and clear personal mission, and they are committed to using their art to strengthen their communities. We believe these versatile and inventive arts leaders and activists are the way forward,” said Stewart.
The 2018/19 Lumos Fellows will collaborate on a striking breadth of projects, ranging from building community investment in arts entrepreneurship to developing a line of gender non-binary swimwear, and confronting personal violence through performance. The Fellows include vocalist Lucy Dhegrae, founder of the Resonant Bodies Festival, director/producer Jamil Jude, founder of The New Griots Festival, violinist and Fulbright Scholar Teagan Faran, who studies how music can strengthen community togetherness, and composer Frances Pollock, whose music examines social issues through collaboration outside traditional academic circles.
Emerging classical singers Rehanna Thelwell, Felicia Moore, and Anush Avetisyan, costume designer Sueann Leung, and DC Strings Artistic Director Andrew Lee will round out the first cohort, along with violinists Elena Urioste and Melissa White, whose company Intermission was founded to teach musicians yoga techniques to support the demanding physicality and emotional undertaking of performance.
At the conclusion of the mentorship season in May, one Lumos Fellow will be chosen by the Spotlight Advisory Board to receive the Hedwig Holbrook Prize, to include $5,000 and a website designed by Stewart’s PR firm, Verismo Communications.
“It’s my hope that this prize, named in honor of the late soprano Jennifer Holbrook, will represent a galvanizing force in one fellow’s life each season,” said Stewart. “I expect each of our Lumos Fellows to emerge from this experience with a clearer vision of the path of his or her personal mission, and a deeper well of fuel to get there.”
Though the organization’s day-to-day operations will be focused on individual mentorship, Turn The Spotlight leaders hope that their cumulative efforts will contribute to addressing inequity across sectors of the arts industry.
“The classical music industry continues to lag woefully behind when it comes to diversity, especially in leadership positions within larger-budget organizations,” said conductor Lidiya Yankovskaya, founder of the Refugee Orchestra Project and the only female Music Director in the top 50 opera companies in the United States. “Turn the Spotlight is providing the essential mentorship and support those from marginalized groups require in order to reach high-level career goals. I am thrilled to be part of this vital resource for deserving artists across the field.”
“The arts provide the prism through which we can first envision, and then build, a better and more just world,” added Camille Zamora, co-founder of Sing for Hope and a leading voice in the artist-as-citizen movement. “Turn The Spotlight is poised to do exactly what the name suggests: refocus the illuminating power of the arts.”