Draft:Patrice Michaels

Michaels began serious vocal studies as a senior in college^[9] and went on to earn BAs in Music and Theater from Pomona College, an MFA in Voice from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities and a certificate from the Banff Centre's Music Theatre Studio Ensemble after a post-graduate residency there.

Her voice teachers included Roy Schuessler,^[10] Thomas Wikman^[9] and Shirlee Emmons,^[11] and she studied composition at the University of Minnesota with Dominick Argento.^[12]

From 1994-2011 she was a Professor of Music and Opera Theater at Lawrence University’s Conservatory of Music.^[3] She was Director of Vocal Studies at the University of Chicago from 2010 to 2020, and has been Lecturer in Voice and Opera at the Bienen School of Music at Northwestern University from 2019 to the present.

Michaels performed with choruses and ensembles such as Music of the Baroque in the late 1980s and into the 1990s, and made her operatic debut in 1990-91 as Marzelline in Fidelio with the Cleveland Opera.^[9] In a review of a 1992 album that featured Argento's Six Elizabethan Songs, the Chicago Tribune wrote that the piece's "bittersweet lyricism finds grateful expression in the vibrant soprano of Patrice Michaels Bedi."^[13] In 1993 she appeared as Eurydice in Monteverdi's L'Orfeo.^[14]

In 1994 Cedille Records released her first recital CD, Songs of the Romantic Age. The same year she made her recital debut in New York, and her debut with the Chicago Lyric Opera in Hal Prince's remount of Candide.^[9]

Michaels' recordings include recital albums such as Divas of Mozart's Day (2002),^[15] a BBC and Fanfare featured pick, the first CD release of Gian Carlo Menotti's opera The Medium (1997),^[16][17] American Songs (2006),^[18], and the first recording of Edward Joseph Collins' songs and instrumental duos.^[19] Since 1992 she has appeared on more than 20 other albums of baroque, classical, and contemporary chamber, orchestral, and operatic music released by Cedille Records and other labels.^[20]

Michaels has appeared as a soloist on stage with the Florentine Opera,^[21] Lyric Opera of Chicago,^[9] Chicago Opera Theater, Tacoma Opera, and and other opera companies, and in concert or on recordings with many U.S. and other symphony orchestras including the Czech National Symphony, Shanghai Symphony, and Milwaukee, Atlanta, and St. Louis Symphonies.

Michaels has composed numerous works, notably vocal and choral works, beginning in 2014 with the Cedille Records album Intersection: Jazz Meets Classical Song^[22], which included Michael's poetry and piano playing as well as singing. Her most prominent work is a song cycle that appeared on the 2018 album Notorious RBG in Song, a tribute to her mother-in-law,^[23] Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Michaels has also composed incidental music for Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a one-act opera on Euripides’ The Trojan Women, and a children’s show called A Song for Harmonica.^[2]

In July 2019 her choral work "Refuge" was premiered at the Kennedy Center.^[24]

Another song cycle, RESOLVED: Songs of Women's Suffrage and the 19th Amendment, premiered in 2020.^[25] The work was commissioned by The National Constitution Center, Lyric Fest of Philadelphia, and Musicians Club of Women,^[26] and aired on NBC/Peacock with J'Nai Bridges, mezzo-soprano and Laura Ward, piano.^[27]

Michaels served as a music editor and compiler for the 2019 and 2025 editions of the Royal Conservatory of Music’s anthologies Resonance: A Comprehensive Voice Series.^[33]

Her choral work "Refuge" is published by GIA Publications Inc. on the Global Encounters for Young Choirs series.^[34]

Michaels is on the Advisory Board of SOS Children's Villages^[3] and is co-founder with James Ginsburg of the RBG for SOS Endowment.^[35]

• Full discography:
• Cedille Records discography: