BIOGRAPHY

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Not long after my mother died, I sang a concert I had committed to months earlier. I wondered how it would be possible to sing at all.

But once the music began, something unexpected happened. The effort to perform fell away, and the music seemed to move through me rather than from me.

In that moment I realized something essential: music isn’t only about performance or skill. It’s also about connection—the invisible thread that can link artist, listener, and something larger than both. I have been reaching for that experience ever since.

Opera taught me discipline, collaboration, and the profound emotional power of music. I spent decades bringing extraordinary existing music to life. But increasingly, I became curious about what might happen if I loosened my grip on what I already knew.

Then, a musical collaborator invited me into improvisation in a way I had never experienced before. At first, it was foreign territory. I had spent a lifetime learning how to prepare—to know the music, understand it, rehearse it, refine it. Now I was being asked to make music without knowing what came next.

And something opened.

I began to discover another way of making music: listening, responding, following an impulse before I could explain it. In collaboration with other artists, I discovered moments when it became difficult to tell where one person’s musical instinct ended and another’s began.

That is the territory I’m exploring now.

What becomes possible when none of us knows what comes next? What can we discover together that none of us could find alone?

My work now moves among spontaneous music-making, creative gatherings, collaboration, writing, and anything the exploration asks for.

I live in the Southwest, where the wide desert sky continually reminds me that creativity, like music, begins with expanding our horizons.