Carnegie Hall

Countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo began performing professionally at the age of 11 and has since appeared in opera, concert, recital, film, and Broadway productions. In June 2024, he began his tenure as the general director and president of Opera Philadelphia.

He has appeared with many of the world’s leading opera houses including the Metropolitan Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, San Francisco Opera, Opera National de Paris, English National Opera, Houston Grand Opera, Opera Philadelphia, Los Angeles Opera, Canadian Opera Company, Glyndebourne Opera Festival, Dallas Opera, Teatro Real Madrid, Spoleto Festival USA, Glimmerglass Festival (where he served as the 2023 Artist-in-Residence), and Finnish National Opera.

In concert he has sung with the New York Philharmonic (where he was The Mary and James G. Wallach Artist-in-Residence for the 2021–2022 season), The Cleveland Orchestra, National Symphony Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, Met Orchestra Chamber Ensemble, Boston Baroque, Berliner Philharmoniker, NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra, and London Symphony Orchestra. He has also been presented in recital in Vancouver, Princeton University Concerts, Duke Performances, and at the Morgan Library. He has performed at a wide-ranging variety of venues including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Versailles, The Kennedy Center, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Jordan Hall, Wigmore Hall, National Sawdust, Minamiza Kyoto, Joe’s Pub, Guggenheim, Park Avenue Armory, and Madison Square Garden.

Mr. Costanzo’s most recent album, Anthony Roth Costanzo & Justin Vivian Bond: Only an Octave Apart was released in January 2022. His first solo album, ARC, was released in September 2018 and nominated for the 2019 Grammy Award for “Best Classical Solo Vocal Album.” He also stars on the Metropolitan Opera’s recording and DVD of Akhnaten, which won the 2022 Grammy Award for “Best Opera Recording.”

A champion of new work, Mr. Costanzo created roles in the world premieres of John Corigliano’s The Lord of Cries and Gregory Spears’s The Righteous at the Santa Fe Opera, Jimmy Lopez’s Bel Canto at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, and Jake Heggie’s Great Scott at the Dallas Opera. He has also premiered works written for him by Joel Thompson, Matthew Aucoin, Paola Prestini, Gregory Spears, Viet Cuong, Carlos Simon, Suzanne Farrin, Bernard Rands, Scott Wheeler, Mohammed Fairouz, Steve Mackey, and Nico Muhly.

Over the past decade, Spanish pianist and scholar Javier Arrebola has emerged as an important figure in art song for his creativity, artistry, performances, and scholarship. Mr. Arrebola is a frequent guest at Carnegie Hall’s SongStudio, Tanglewood Music Center, The Juilliard School, New England Conservatory, SongFest, Bard College Conservatory of Music, and the Hochschule für Musik Karlsruhe. In the past, he has held positions as co-artistic director and director of the piano program at SongFest, head of piano in the program for singers at Ravinia’s Steans Music Institute, chair of collaborative piano at Boston University and visiting professor at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music.

In recent years, Mr. Arrebola’s work and contributions have extendedbeyond the realms of performance and scholarship by being the video editor and illustrator of, among other projects, Wigmore Hall’s Schubert in Life & Songs, a seminal series by pianist and scholar Graham Johnson, and of SongFest’s Songs of Unity & Hope, a 15-hour online event conceived and curated by Mr. Arrebola that included more than 60 countries and 40 different languages from all over the world.

Mr. Arrebola holds a doctoral and master’s degrees from the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, as well as degrees in from the Madrid Royal Conservatory. His doctoral studies included the public performance of Schubert’s complete piano sonatas on both historical fortepianos and modern instruments, as well as a dissertation on the unfinished piano sonatas of Franz Schubert.

Jonathan McCrory is a Tony Award–winning producer, two-time Obie Award winner, Emmy Award nominee, and Harlem-based artist who has served as executive artistic director at National Black Theatre since 2012 under the leadership of Sade Lythcott, chief executive officer. He has directed numerous professional productions and concerts. To learn more visit jonathanmccrory.com.

a.k. payne (they/she) is a playwright, artist-theorist, and theater maker with roots in Pittsburgh. Their plays love on and engage the interdependencies of Black pasts, presents, and futures, and seek to find/remember language that might move us towards our collective liberation(s). They hold a bachelor’s degree in English and African American Studies from Yale College and a master’s degree in playwriting (where they studied with Tarell Alvin McCraney) from the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University. A 2023–2024 Van Lier New Voices Fellow, their work has been a finalist for the L. Arnold Weissberger New Play Award and a two-time finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. Their work has been developed with The O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, The New Harmony Project, Great Plains Theater Conference, and Manhattan Theater Club’s Groundworks Lab. She is currently a resident artist-fellow with National Black Theatre’s I AM SOUL Playwrights Residency and the Pittsburgh Foundation’s Advancing Black Arts in Pittsburgh. They are a proud graduate of Pittsburgh public schools; grandchild of the Great Migration; descendant of a music teacher and a carpenter, who both march every year with their unions in Pittsburgh’s Labor Day parade; a non-binary and genderqueer abolitionist affected in community by the “New Jim Crow”; and part of a great lineage of Black women storytellers and living-room archivists—all of which deeply informs, uplifts, and amplifies their work as a playwright, community organizer, and space maker.

Two-time Bessie Award winner, Hope Boykin was an original member of Complexions, danced with Philadanco!, and retired from the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater after a 20 year collaboration. She has choreographed for numerous universities and dance companies including The Juilliard School, Kent State, USC Glorya Kaufman School of Dance, Philadanco!, Dallas Black Dance Theatre, BalletX, London’s Ballet Black, American Ballet Theatre Studio Company, Collage Dance Collective, and has created four works for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, with a new work for Paul Taylor to premiere at the Kennedy Center in 2025. Featured on the October 2023 cover of Dance Magazine, she created States of Hope, a fully scripted, evening length, new dance theater work, which premiered at The Joyce Theater in October of 2023 to great acclaim.

In 2021, Hope premiered The Other Side, a co-commission from the Kennedy Center, which returned there in 2024 and also had its New York premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The Other Side brings the award-winning children’s book by Jacqueline Woodson to life on stage. As a director and dance-maker, she received a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for her own Covid safe residency #BoykinBubble, and in the fall of 2021, she premiered a full evening of her choreography, An Evening of Hope, at 92NY. Hope released Beauty Size & Color, a short film commenting on what has changed in the first 20 years of the 21st century on pbs.org, which was nominated for a 2023 New York Emmy Award, as well as a weekend of her own work, Moments By Hope … a concert.

She serves as artistic advisor for dance education for the Kennedy Center and artistic lead for the Kennedy Center Dance Lab. She is artist-in-residence at USC Glorya Kaufman School of Dance and received the Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU Fellowship for 2022–2023. In 2024, she founded the nonprofit organization HBArts Collective Inc., a collaborative space where creators refine their craft, build community, and shape the future in music, film, theater, and dance. She was nominated for the 2024 Washington DC Mayor’s Arts Awards, and honored as one of Crain’s Notable Black Leaders.

Michael Rishawn is an American actor best known for his work on Broadway, television, and film. To date, he can be seen guest starring on CBS’s FBI: Most Wanted, Disney’s Bunk’d, and Netflix’s Raising Dion and Survival of the Thickest. Other TV spin-offs include HBO Max’s And Just Like That and the multi-camera comedy series Crutch for Paramount+. On stage, Mr. Rishawn has originated roles in several plays, including Table 17, which was a Critics’ Pick from The New York Times and won two Vivian Robinson AUDELCO Awards; Handjob; and Jordan E. Cooper’s high-octane Broadway comedy Ain’t No Mo’ produced by Lee Daniels. He can also be seen in John-Michael Powell’s independent feature The Send Off, which debuted at Cinequest and is available on Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV. With a slate of national commercials running from Bose, Hennessy, and Verizon, his warm yet engaging voice also moves effortlessly through many literary titles that can be found on Audible. Visit michaelrishawn.com for more information.

Hailing from Baton Rouge, Terri Ayanna Wright is a New York–based multidisciplinary artist, with roots in filmmaking, architectural design, and live performing arts. Ms. Wright has a bachelor’s degree in dance and computer science from Fordham University and The Ailey School and a master’s degree in design and technology from The New School’s Parsons School of Design. She has performed on many stages across the globe, most notably as an Ailey II touring company member, an ensemble member for the Metropolitan Opera, and a featured dancer and actor for HopeBoykinDance. A part of Boykin’s work States of Hope, Ms. Wright’s performance was described as “riveting” (Fjord). Ms. Wright continues to pursue artistic endeavors that aim to lift the Black experience from an Afrocentric lens.

National Black Theatre (NBT) is a Tony Award–winning and Emmy Award–nominated institution founded in 1968 by the late visionary Dr. Barbara Ann Teer. The nation’s first revenue-generating Black arts complex, NBT is the longest-running Black theater in New York City and one of the oldest theaters founded and consistently operated by a woman of color in the nation. It has been included in the permanent collection of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC.

NBT’s core mission is to produce transformational theater to help shift the inaccuracies around African Americans’ cultural identity by telling authentic stories of Black lives. As an alternative learning environment, NBT uses theater arts to educate, enrich, entertain, empower, and inform the national consciousness around current social issues that affect our communities.

Under the leadership of Chief Executive Officer Sade Lythcott and Executive Artistic Director Jonathan McCrory, NBT makes the American theater field more inclusive by providing an artistically rigorous and culturally sensitive space for artists of color to experiment, develop, and present new work. Visit nationalblacktheatre.org for more information.