Essential Opera

Founded by sopranos Erin Bardua and Maureen Batt in 2010, Essential Opera is committed to increasing equity, diversity, and inclusion in all forms for all humans. Recently, we have focused on doing this in the spheres with which we are most familiar: gender inclusiveness, disability, and advocacy for neurodiversity and mental health.

This translates to a mission to create and produce works that will allow us to employ a diverse group of artists, particularly women (including, of course, trans women), non-binary people, and non-cisgender men, as well as Black, Indigenous, 2SLGBTQIA+, disabled, neurodivergent/neuroqueer, and other frequently excluded and underrepresented people. We are striving to continue to improve our own contributions to this goal with each successive project.