At Seattle Opera in 2021/22: Composer, Blue
Hometown: New York, NY
Seattle Opera Debut
Jeanine Tesori is a composer of musical theater, opera, television and film. She won the Tony Award for Best Score (with bookwriter & lyricist Lisa Kron) for the musical Fun Home. Her other musicals include Caroline, or Change (with Tony Kushner), Shrek the Musical (with David Lindsay-Abaire), Thoroughly Modern Millie (with Dick Scanlan), Violet (with Brian Crawley), Kimberly Akimbo (with Lindsay-Abaire) and Soft Power (with David Henry Hwang), which was her second work after Fun Home to be a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama. Along with Missy Mazzoli, she is one of the first women to be commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera. Her operas include A Blizzard on Marblehead Neck (Tony Kushner, libretto), Blue (Tazewell Thompson, libretto) which received the MCANA Award for Best New Opera, and the upcoming Grounded (George Brant, libretto) at the Met. In addition to her work as a composer, Tesori is the Founding Artistic Director of New York City Center’s Encores! Off-Center series, Supervising Vocal Producer of Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story, and lecturer in music at Yale University.
Last Updated: January 2022