Born in London and raised in Rome and New York, Judith Barnes works in the visual and performing arts. She is the founding artistic director of Vertical Player Repertory, an indie opera company in Brooklyn that “has developed a following for intense performances of unusual works” (The New York Times), staging opera in urban venues such as an oil tanker at the Red Hook Marine Terminal and a factory courtyard on the Gowanus Canal. Praised as “vocally and dramatically present in every moment” (Parterre), she has inhabited an eclectic assortment of operatic roles from the 17th to the 21st centuries. She has been recognized as a “soprano-impresario” (The New Yorker) for her adventurous productions, and as a stage director of “matchless and unending imagination” (ConcertoNet). Judith is a voice teacher and opera workshop director, a published translator of literature and poetry from Spanish and Hungarian, and has adapted opera libretti from numerous languages. In past and parallel lives she has been a sculptor, woodworker, and conga drum builder.
Training in vocal performance The Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University OperaWorks L.A.; Ann Baltz Creating the Dramatic Character in Opera; Lauren Flanigan, American Opera Projects and the SITI company Bel Canto Bootcamp; Rachelle Jonck & Derrick Goff Red Bull Theatre; workshop with Olympia Dukakis Voice study with Virginia Zeani, Nicola Rossi-Lemeni, Klara Barlow, Diana Soviero, David Jones, Francesca Mondanaro Mind Body Music School Integrated Musicians Certificate Program, in progress
Teaching Active Private Voice Studio Opera Workshop Director and Voice Instructor, Lucy Moses School at Kaufman Center, 2010-present Past positions: Director of Summer Vocal Arts, Brooklyn Music School, 2018-2021 Voice instructor, Frank Sinatra School of the Arts, Brooklyn Conservatory, Brooklyn-Queens Conservatory Opera Stage Director: La Guardia HS, CityWide Youth Opera, Manhattan School of Music Baroque Aria Workshop Training in visual arts The New York Studio School (Bruce Gagnier, Jock Ireland, Elaine DeKooning, Leland Bell, John Lees) The Art Students League (Marshall Glasier, José de Creeft) Greenwich House Pottery (Peter Lane) Studies with Pat Passlof, Ben Dienes Studio apprentice to sculptor José de Creeft
Exhibitions Salon des Refusés, BWAC Gallery, 481 Van Brunt Street, Red Hook, Brooklyn NY, 2024 Gowanus Open Studios, Behind the Door, Brooklyn, NY, 2018 Sculptural work featured in Women of Salt and Longing, a live performance at the LEIMAY SOAK Festival, 2018 Group Show at The Old Garage Gallery, Pine Hill, NY, 2016 Solo show at Basta Pasta, NYC, 2014 PROCESS: GOWANUS, Norte Maar Curated Studio Tour, 2014 Gowanus Open Studios at New Clay Studios, Brooklyn, NY, yearly 2010-2017
Other affiliations LEIMAY Fellow, 2016-2018 Member of New Clay Studios, Brooklyn, 2010-2020
artist statement My roots are in the visual arts, and I pursue a parallel vocation as an opera singer and director. In recent years, I returned to a studio practice I’d put on hold while concentrating on opera. I continue to perform, direct, and teach opera, while developing a new body of sculptural work, and I serve as artistic director of the indie opera company Vertical Player Repertory.
All my life I’ve been pulled between the poles of the most ephemeral, music, and that most durable of art forms, sculpture. I’m constantly looking to reconcile these seemingly different expressive languages within myself, and find the common threads between them. As a singer I am drawn to storytelling and text, while being fascinated by the musical structure imagined by the composer. I seek to mold myself and my voice to serve the shape of the piece. Directing opera feels like creating a living sculpture in time, space, and sound, in deep engagement with other people. I love the collaborative nature of theater and music making. Working in the art studio, a quieter, more solitary pursuit, engages me in an ongoing conversation with the vivid voices of art history and other living artists. There’s no direct equivalence, but the roots of both music and art reach deep in me and have formed the inner landscape I try to bring forth into the world.
about my recent sculpture Clay. A primal material pressed into forms that reflect, extend and support the human body. The clay figure, with its hard fleshiness, holds a unique spiritual charge. The clay vessel holds water, food, the ashes of the dead. It protects and encloses an empty space full of possibility. In sculpture that refers back to the body, I look to shape the empty space inside form, the inside/outside of the body/vessel, the conflicting experience of the body as a deeply interior place and yet an external, protective shell. I am drawn to explore both the fragility and the endurance of our physical being. The visceral experience of wrestling form from earth, water, and fire mirrors my own wrestling match with my body and its limitations and contours.
mentors My teachers in the visual arts have included Pat Passlof and Ben Dienes, with whom I studied painting as a teenager, the potter Ellen King, who taught me how to work with clay in her Brooklyn studio, and Elaine DeKooning, Leland Bell, Jock Ireland, John Lees and Bruce Gagnier at the New York Studio School. I was introduced to large scale figure drawing by Marshall Glasier at the Art Students League, and studied ceramic technique with Peter Lane at Greenwich House Pottery. I was apprenticed to sculptor José de Creeft in his Chelsea, NYC studio, and learned traditional carving techniques with the woodcarver Orsós Jakab in Hungary. I worked as assistant to Jay Bereck of Skin on Skin Percussion in Brooklyn, NY, building conga drums. Other important mentors and influences include my father John Barnes, a filmmaker and passionate humanist, my mother Jeanne Barnes, violinist and founder of the Brooklyn Heights Orchestra, and family friends Milton Hebald, John Waddell, Nancy Spero and Leon Golub.
CONTACT JUDITH: vpropera@gmail.com
Photo credits: Top, Michael Nagle for The New York Times; bottom, Frances Burgos Linares
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