Marisa Winter

Diva Marisa is a maverick singer and performer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Upon hearing her sing, Francis Ford Coppola added a singing scene for her in his indie vampire movie, Twixt. Marisa sings opera on the trapeze in various settings, including the Thunderdome at Burning Man, and has performed the National Anthem several times for the Raiders (and once for the A’s), to crowds of over 60,000.

Some of her favorite venues include exploring the intersection of art and technology, as at the Sonic Runway, both at Burning Man and San Jose City Hall, and at Adobe’s Festival of the Impossible.

Her signature aria is that piece from the movie The Fifth Element, you know, the blue alien one? Well, it’s the Diva Dance, and the character is Diva Plavalaguna.

Marisa has been seen as Miss Jessel (on the trapeze) in D.C. Public Opera‘s Turn of the Screw, Queen of the Night in New York Lyric Opera‘s Magic Flute, and Violetta in La Traviata and the title roles in Norma and Lucia, with Verismo Opera.

A conservatory-trained opera singer, Marisa has sung with the San Francisco Opera, the Oakland East Bay Symphony, Chris Brubeck, and multiple times in recital with Frederica von Stade. Among other luminaries, she has sung for celebrities from Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame to Jean-Paul Gaultier.

At San Jose City Hall, she rode her motorcycle down the steps before singing the aria from the fifth element. At the Burning Man festival in Nevada, she has been the singer prior to the burning of David Best’s temples burns since 2002, and rides a zipline into the Thunderdome before performing her compositions of operatic vocal pyrotechnics. In 2009, she debuted her “opera on trapeze” act with Gregangelo’s Velocity Circus and, in 2011, she added a motorcycle to her opera on trapeze act at The Crucible in Oakland. Since then, she’s performed the act for Hubba Hubba Revue, in Death Guild’s Thunderdome at Burning Man, for Supernova Circus, and for D.C. Public Opera.

In 2017, Marisa conceived and created Third Wall Music, a salon-style performance concept that brings music, and the stories behind them, into people’s homes. You should go, or host one! If you’re interested in being added to the mailing list or hosting, please email Marisa.

Marisa is always looking for unique places to perform, particularly for audiences who are not familiar with opera. She’s also, with Third Wall as well as other productions, begun bringing into the world the types of experiences she wants to see. She seeks to educate, to perform music in context, and to elevate other performers and provide new performance experiences.