American mezzo-soprano born Joyce Flaherty in Prairie Village, Kansas on February 13, 1969, Joyce DiDonato has distinguished herself on the world's greatest opera stages, alongside the growing success of her recorded recitals. The daughter of an Irish-born architect, she received a Catholic upbringing and trained as a singer in school shows before entering the University of Wichita, where from 1988 to 1992 she took lessons to become a professor. Interested in teaching, she discovered opera with Mozart's Don Giovanni and made her debut in a production of Johann Strauss II's The Bat. After graduating from a private singing academy, she continued her studies in Philadelphia, before joining the Santa Fe Opera Company in 1995, where she sang her first major roles in The Marriage of Figaro (Mozart), Salome (Richard Strauss) and the premiere of Modern Painters (David Lang). Her career then developed at the Houston Opera (Texas), in San Francisco and in competitions. Second prizewinner in the Eleanor McCollum Competition (1996), Joyce DiDonato won the William Matheus Sullivan Award (1997), the George London Prize (1998), and came second, behind French baritone Ludovic Tézier, in the Operalia-Placido Domingo Prize awarded in Hamburg (1998). Since then, one great role follows another: La Cenerentola (Rossini) at La Scala, Milan (2000) and Covent Garden, London (2002), Giulio Cesare (Handel) at Opéra de Paris (2001), Dead Man Walking (Heggie) in New York (2002), The Barber of Seville (Rossini) in Tokyo, and a debut at Carnegie Hall, New York, in J. S. Bach's Mass in B minor conducted by Peter Schreier. After a performance in Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, the mezzo-soprano made her Metropolitan Opera debut in New York in The Marriage of Figaro in 2005. In addition to her many operatic engagements, Joyce DiDonato records recitals in a wide variety of repertoires, including The Deepest Desire (2006), ¡Pasión ! (2007), Furore: Mad Scenes from Handel Operas (2008), Colbran, the Muse (2009), Drama Queens (2012), Stella di Napoli (2014), Joyce & Tony - Live at Wigmore Hall with Antonio Pappano at the piano (2015), In War & Peace: Harmony Through Music (2016) and Songplay (2019). Among the many awards on her list, the mezzo-soprano has won three Grammy Awards (2012, 2016 and 2019), the Handel Prize (2018) and the Laurence Olivier Award (2018). She regularly collaborates with conductor Maxim Emelyanychev and the ensemble Il Pomo d'Oro, recording Handel's operas Agrippina (2020) and Theodora (2022), as well as her recital Eden (2022) and Purcell's opera Dido & Aeneas (2025), produced with Michael Spyres and Fatma Said.
