Marisa De Silva

Dr. Marisa De Silva is a singer, voice teacher, opera director, and Certified Teacher of the Alexander Technique based in Southern California. She serves as Assistant Professor of Voice and Opera at Loyola Marymount University, where she directs the Sinatra Opera Program and teaches vocal area courses.

An active performer, Dr. De Silva has appeared in festivals and concert series throughout North America, Europe, and Asia. In addition to operatic repertoire, she specializes in early music, Iberian and Ibero-American art song, Japanese song repertory, and new music. She has studied with artists including Jake Heggie, John Harbison, Martin Katz, Teresa Berganza, Miguel Zanetti, and José María Gallardo del Rey.

As a soloist, she has performed with L.A. Camerata, the USC Early Music Ensembles, the American Bach Soloists Academy, and the Tuscia Opera Festival in Italy. She has appeared at both the Berkeley and Boston Early Music Festivals and performed as soprano soloist in Bach's Mass in B Minor under Jeffrey Thomas. She was also featured as a soloist with Joe Hisaishi's Symphonic Orchestra in performances at Carnegie Hall and the Microsoft Theater. Her debut recording, Marisa, was released in Japan in 2013.

Dr. De Silva earned her Doctor of Musical Arts from the University of Southern California with emphases in early music performance, musicology, opera directing, and vocology. She was the recipient of the Colburn Foundation Scholarship in Early Music. Her research interests include historical performance practice, music performance anxiety, Alexander Technique in music education, and rhetorical gesture in vocal performance.

In 2016, she received a grant from the Early Arts Guild of Victoria to study seventeenth-century operatic gesture with Helga Hill, OAM, in Australia. Her current research explores the life and works of the early eighteenth-century composer Camilla de Rossi, with presentations at conferences in Rome and Florence.

Dr. De Silva holds Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Vocal Performance from Illinois State University and is a member of the National Opera Association, the National Association of Teachers of Singing, the American Society for the Alexander Technique, SAG-AFTRA, and the American Musicological Society.