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Majel Connery is a scholar, vocalist, actress and stage director. She is cofounder and Executive & Artistic Director of Opera Cabal, an arts think tank for the conjunction of academic and creative work on opera, and serves in an ongoing capacity as performer and producer with the group. Connery is the producer Opera Cabal’s operaSHOP series, the commissioning force behind the premieres of Phyllis Chen’s The Slumber Thief and Pulitzer Prize-winner Caroline Shaw’s Ritornello. Connery is curator and co-founder (with physicists Sidney Nagel and Young-Kee Kim) of the Hyde Park Salon Series (Chicago), and co-founder and co-curator (with neuroscientist Matthew Walker) of the Berkeley Salons (Berkeley, CA). Recent and ongoing artistic projects include the world stage premiere of Georg Friedrich Haas’s ATTHIS (actress/producer, The Kitchen, NYC); vocals and performance for Hong Kong Graft, an opera in progress co-created with Rome prize-winning architect Thomas Tsang and Rome- and Berlin-prize winning composer Ken Ueno; stage direction for Death With Interruptions, a new opera by Kurt Rohde, a former Guggenheim Fellow, and Tom Laqueur, Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award recipient (Oberlin Dance Collective, San Francisco); composition and vocals for two albums in process – Hecuba and The Passionate Pilgrim – co-created with Elliot Cole, Brad and Doug Balliett and Alexander Overington (producer of Q2 Music’s Meet the Composer podcast), and co-produced by Opera Cabal and Oracle Hysterical; and vocalist/performer in Opera Cabal’s newest commission, an opera by Sarah Kirkland Snider written for vocalist Shara Worden (My Brightest Diamond). As stage director, Connery assisted opera director Christopher Alden at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, Den Norske Oper (Oslo) and at Chicago Opera Theater. Recent and current collaborators include Matana Roberts, Myra Melford, Ken Ueno, Thomas Tsang, Caroline Shaw, Phyllis Chen, Kurt Rohde, Hai-Ting Chinn, Teddy Rankin-Parker, Oracle Hysterical (Doug and Brad Balliett, Elliot Cole), American Contemporary Music Ensemble, Nadia Sirota, Ariadne Greif, Habib Azar, Left Coast Ensemble, Del Sol Quartet and New Vintage Baroque. Connery has appeared at venues including The Stone, The Kitchen, Spectrum, Merkin Concert Hall, Kaufman Music Center, Carroll Place, Chicago Fine Arts Building, Constellation, Mana Contemporary Chicago, High Concept Laboratories, the Logan Center for the Performing Arts, Mandel Hall, Oberlin Dance Collective, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and at performance halls at the University of Chicago, Princeton University, Oberlin Conservatory and the University of California, Berkeley. Connery’s scholarly work aims to unite the more abstract concerns of musicology with the pragmatic realities of contemporary staging practice. She holds a Ph.D. in musicology and an M.A, in ethnomusicology from the University of Chicago, where she studied under David J. Levin, Martha Feldman and Berthold Hoeckner. Excerpts of her dissertation, “The Revelation of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies: Theology and Theatricality in the MidCentury Stage Works” have appeared in The Opera Quarterly, where she recently co-edited (with James Steichen) a special issue on opera and dance. This past year Connery completed a position as Visiting Assistant Professor and Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, where she also served as a fellow at the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities, and at Art Research Center (ARC). Majel holds an A.B. in music composition from Princeton University (magna cum laude, 2001), where she was awarded both the Music Departmental Prize and the Isidore and Helen Sacks Memorial Prize upon graduation.