Anne Sutton is a multidisciplinary artist working as a stage director and soprano
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As a director, Anne works across the US and UK and harbors a particular passion for working with emerging singers. This summer, she will be a 2026 Young Artist Director at Waterperry Opera Festival. She recently directed Semele at Richmond Opera, and Rinaldo and La finta semplice at University of North Carolina Opera. She works regularly as a guest director at the University of Cambridge, where she directed A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Britten), Carmen, The Elixir of Love, and Hansel and Gretel. She was recently an apprentice director at Opera Neo in San Diego, CA, where her direction of the Studio Artists’ scenes program was described as being “accomplished with finesse” (San Diego Story). An active assistant director, she has worked at the Opera Company of Middlebury (US), Royal Academy Opera, Devon Opera, The Guildhall School of Music and Drama, The Halifax Summer Opera Festival (CA), and The Maryland Opera Studio. She completed a Royal Opera House directing observership in 2023 for the revival of Antony McDonald’s Hansel and Gretel.
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As a soprano, she was praised for her “bright and engaging” performance as a soloist in Bach’s St. John Passion with the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, and she made her Wigmore Hall debut as the soprano soloist in extracts from Bach’s B Minor Mass with Rachel Podger. She was an Associate Artist at Nevill Holt Opera, a Voces8 UK Scholar, and won second place and the early music prize in the AESS Patricia Routledge National English Song Competition. She is a member of the Serpentine Ensemble (emerging from the Londinium Consort), an group combining early and contemporary music with performances at the Brighton Festival, Skipton Festival, and upcoming at the Utrecht Early Music Fringe Festival. She was an Emerging Artist Fellow at St. Martin-in-the-Fields and a company member for the National Gilbert and Sullivan Opera’s Summer 2023 Season. She has performed with leading choral groups in the UK in venues including the Royal Albert Hall (BBC Proms), the Southbank Centre, Cadogan Hall, and the UK Houses of Parliament. In competition, she was a finalist at the David Clover Festival of Singing Competition and the New Elizabethan Competition (with duo partner Emanuele Addis), and won first place in the North Carolina division of the NATS (National Association of Teachers of Singing) Competition.
Anne often draws upon her affinity for research to curate unique concert experiences. She recently created the Opera by American Women Workshop, which explored unrecorded works of the first female American opera composers. She culminated this project by directing Mabel Wheeler Daniels’ operetta, A Copper Complication (1900) in the work’s historic UK premiere. She also developed a lecture-recital performance of rarely performed medieval songs by Guillaume de Machaut in which she examined their categorization and performance practices. Anne was a grant recipient of the Tom and Elizabeth Long Excellence Fund, the Mildred Brown Mayo Research Fund, and the Robinson Honors Research Fellowship to create a lecture-recital following the life and career of Handelian soprano Faustina Bordoni, an exploration of how singers influence composition and musical culture though the lens of Baroque Opera. As a part of this project, Anne created a modern score of extracts from Attilio Ariosti’s Lucio Vero written for Bordoni in 1727, later performing them in the US.
Anne was an Opera Directing Fellow at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and completed her Masters in Voice at the Royal Academy of Music as a Marshall Scholar. She previously studied at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, receiving both a Bachelor of Music and a Bachelor of Arts in Geography.