Download Bios - Majel Connery

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.