By Tracy Cox Sometimes, as a fat singer in the opera industry, I don’t know why I bother at all. Except that I love to sing. And that I view the erasure of fat talent at the opera as both an artistic loss and a moral wrong. As a fat performer, artist, and activist, I have centered my work on body justice in the performing arts. And I want to make one thing clear: fat-shaming in the opera industry is not an issue of one bad actor. It is an industry-wide problem. We know, even

By Jennifer Cresswell and Kathleen Kelly Opera’s got a woman problem. Now, we love opera, make no mistake! But as women, particularly women in mid-life, it’s rare to see our lives reflected meaningfully on stage. We’ve concluded that this is largely a repertoire problem. And in true Middleclass Artist fashion, we’ve got some data to show why. So, just like our inquisitive sister Turandot, we’re going to start this party off with three questions - but these questions were firs

By Zach Finkelstein, Dana Lynne Varga, and Hillary LaBonte Women face extraordinary odds of success in the opera world, from the conservatory to young artist apprenticeships to the mainstage to leadership roles in administration. Middleclass Artist and the Empowered Musician, in an exhaustive analysis of the opera industry from top to bottom, through dozens of interviews and decades of publicly available census and industry data, will show systemic discrimination against wome