Juliana Snapper

Juliana Snapper is a contemporary opera singer, live performance artist, experimental theater director, voice scholar and musicologist. She received her B.M. in vocal performance from the Oberlin Conservatory where she studied under Richard Miller, and her M.A. in critical musicology at University of California, San Diego.

Snapper creates performances and installations that push the physical and expressive capacities of the singing body. As the Huffington Post put it, among some of our favorite opera innovators... transforming the future of opera... Snapper is a contemporary soprano who combines radical vocal techniques, improvisation and collaboration to push the operatic medium to its extreme limits.

She collaborated with performance artist Ron Athey on the piece The Judas Cradle which toured throughout the U.K. and premiered in the U.S. at Walt Disney Concert Hall's REDCAT Theatre (2005). Her Five Fathoms Opera Project premiered in 2008 at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center/MoMA NY. In May 2009, she collaborated with composer Andrew Infanti and costume designer Susan Matheson on the premiere of the world's first underwater opera You Who Will Emerge From the Flood at the Victoria Baths in Manchester, England. It is part of a site-specific work that has been staged till 2017 in the U.S., Slovenia, Portugal, Poland, Switzerland, and Australia.

A long-standing associate of French composer Philippe Manoury and mathematician and sound designer Miller Puckette, she has collaborated with them on several original works and concert works: Illud Etiam, En écho, Double Voiced ...

Her projects have been supported by grants and fellowships from The Metropolitan Opera Foundation, Arts Council of Great Britain, The Center for Research in Computing and the Arts and The Durfee Foundation.