Background
Claudia Stevens continues in her appointment as "Visiting Scholar" in Music. With degrees in music from Vassar College, California at Berkeley, and the Doctor of Musical Arts from Boston University, her academic positions have included Williams College and the College of William and Mary, as Adjunct Associate Professor of Piano. Among her numerous honors as a creative and performing artist are twelve consecutive touring grants from the Virginia Commission for the Arts, artist in residencies including the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Gitameit Art Center in Rangoon, Burma, RS9 Studio Theater in Budapest, and appointment as Visiting Scholar/Artist at Brandeis University's Women's Studies Research Center.
Claudia has created some fifteen solo plays for her own performance as musician/monologue artist, which continue to be presented by leading universities and arts centers. This year's engagements performing her newest work, "Pigeon" (2011), include the University of Southern California, Western Michigan University, Whittier College and the University of California at Davis. Also in 2011 and 2012, her appearances-both as a performer of original works and as a speaker-include Southern Methodist University, the University of Arizona, James Madison University, Villanova University, Hampden-Sydney College, the University of North Dakota, Grinnell College, Northern Iowa University, and other venues in Pennsylvania, Washington, Florida, Virginia and California.
Claudia Stevens is also a librettist and a co-producer of chamber operas in the San Francisco area in collaboration with the composer Allen Shearer. Their recent projects include "The Dawn Makers," featuring the noted tenor John Duykers, which premiered at Herbst Theater, San Francisco in 2009, receiving acclaim in national and foreign press; a short comic opera "A Very Large Mole," presented in San Francisco by "Composers, Inc." in October 2010; "Riddle Me," a chamber opera for youth audiences produced by the Opera Theater at the University of Southern California at Santa Cruz in March 2011; and a new chamber opera, "A Perfect Woman," based on George Eliot's Middlemarch, currently in progress.