Our People
Executive Team & Leadership Members
Alexis Peart, Executive Director
A multifaceted operatic mezzo-soprano, teaching artist, and arts administrator, Alexis Peart is a fierce advocate for diversity in opera and accessibility in arts education. As a performer, Ms. Peart’s range stretches from baroque to contemporary, with recent roles including Brittomara in Jake Heggie’s If I Were You, Taller Daughter in Missy Mazzoli’s Proving Up, the title role in Handel’s Giulio Cesare, and Ada Lovelace in the world premiere first reading of Elena Ruehr’s The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage.
Ms. Peart has presented a variety of DEIA-focused lectures and moderated discussions as a part of the 2020 Gender Equity in Music Conference and the SUNY Fredonia Masters in Music Education Program. She has also worked closely with the Eastman School of Music, Boston University, Sigma Alpha Iota, Washington Concert Opera, and Thompson Street Opera Company on their DEIA practices and community engagement programming. Ms. Peart is a New York State certified K-12 music teacher, teaching students throughout Rochester, NY prior to her relocation to Boston. Ms. Peart is a Teaching Artist with Castle of Our Skins.
Patricia-Maria Weinmann, Artistic Director
Patricia-Maria Weinmann has worked with many national opera companies and festivals including Utah Opera, Opera on the James, Syracuse Opera, Florida Grand Opera, Seagle Music Colony, Boston Lyric Opera, Central City Opera, Opera Boston, Ashlawn Opera Festival, the American Opera Project, Opera Providence, and Mississippi Grand Opera. She has collaborated on a number of premier performances including Daniel Pinkham’s The Cask of Amontillado, the staged orchestral premier of Scott Wheeler’s The Construction of Boston and Wheeler’s Democracy as a work-in-progress for the American Opera Project in New York. Recent directing engagements have included Miss Havisham’s Wedding Night, Hansel and Gretel, Cosi fan tutte, The Mikado, The Pirates of Penzance, Cole!, Cenerentola, Carmina Burana, L’elisir d’amore, Sweeney Todd, Don Pasquale and Faust and Marguerite (BOC). Over the past 20 years, Weinmann served on the faculties of both Boston Conservatory and the New England Conservatory of Music. As a guest director and coach for Utah Opera’s Young Artist Program and a faculty member of American Institute of Musical Studies in Graz, Austria, she continues to train some of the most promising young singers in the United States and abroad.
Greg Smucker, Artistic Director
Greg Smucker is a director and teacher of theater and opera. He studied with the late Wesley Balk, a noted pioneer in the field of singer-actor training. Greg was co-founder and artistic director of 15 HEAD, a critically acclaimed experimental theater company in Minneapolis and served as managing director of Theatre for Young America in Kansas City, a professional theater for children. Greg served for seven years on the faculty of the Opera Studies Department at New England Conservatory of Music and is currently a faculty member of the American Institute for Musical Studies in Graz, Austria. As a freelance director, Greg has directed productions and workshops for theaters and opera companies in Boston and the Twin Cities.
Board of Directors
PRESIDENT
Drew Mittelman
VICE PRESIDENT
Jack Silversin
CLERK
Ann Welch
MEMBERS
Chelsea Beatty
Jennifer Caraluzzi
Josh Daniels
Wendy Quiñones
Jonathan Saxton
Margaret Suby
IMMEDIATE PAST PRESIDENT
Erik Johnson
ADVISORY BOARD