Dawn Upshaw is a world-renowned soprano hailed as the voice of modern opera due to her soulful style and support of contemporary composers. Winner of the MacArthur Foundation's Genius Prize, she overcame a struggle with breast cancer in 2006 to achieve even greater heights and now has five Grammy Awards to her credit.
Born in Nashville, Tennessee, she grew up in Illinois where she graduated from university with a bachelor of arts degree. She moved to New York where she studied with Ellen Faull at the Manhattan School of Music and earned a masters degree in 1984. She claimed top prize in two competitions, joined the Metropolitan Opera Studio and made her professional debut in 1986 at New York's Alice Tully Hall.
Since then, Upshaw has performed in operas including most works of Mozart plus Debussy, Handel and Stravinsky as well as modern composers such as John Harbisan ('The Great Gatsby') and Kaija Saariaho ('Clemence'). She spends much of her time in recitals in the world's great concert halls from Amsterdam to London to Paris with a repertoire that includes songs by Vernon Duke, George Gershwin and Rodgers and Hart.
She tours regularly with pianists Margo Garrett, Richard Goode and Gilbert Kalish and has worked with celebrated conductors such as Peter Sellars and Esa-Pekka Salonen. She is the artistic director of the Graduate Program in Vocal Arts at the Bard College Conservatory of Music and she teaches at the Tanglewood Music Center. A regular at California's Ojai Music Festival, she also appears frequently at Glyndebourne and Salzburg. She appeared with President Bill Clinton in the 1995 'Christmas in Washington' on NBC-TV and her 1996 London Proms Concert, 'Dawn at Dusk', which featured American show tunes, was broadcast on BBC television.
A 2008 story in the Guardian newspaper quoted conductor Robert Shaw on Upshaw: 'It's her nature to sing, just like it's a bird's nature. That's why she's here on Earth.'
