San Francisco CA, July 1 2019 – Contemporary opera company Opera Parallèle’s Board of Directors has elected arts management leader Nancy E. Petrisko as its new President, effective August 1. Petrisko brings more than 35 years of arts management experience to the role having served on staff with leading organizations including UC Davis’ Mondavi Center for the Arts, San Francisco Performances, Washington Performing Arts Society in Washington DC and BlackRock Center for the Arts. www.operaparallele.org .
“Building on our great momentum, our Board of Directors has unanimously and enthusiastically elected Nancy to serve as our next Board President,” says outgoing President Jerome Roth. She has a multi-faceted distinguished career in the arts which makes her the absolutely perfect person to govern OP as we move into our next chapter.”
‘It is a very exciting time for the creation and presentation of contemporary opera,” observes Petrisko on her election. “We are in a renaissance of creativity and wonderful age of artistic talents. Opera Parallèle provides proof of this with each of its productions—joining artistic vision, fresh voices and gutsy storytelling for amazing results. The upcoming 2019-20 season marks this remarkable young company’s tenth anniversary and lays the foundation for a long and successful future. I’m honored to be part of the team of artists, administrators, and volunteers who make it all possible.”
About Nancy E. Petrisko
Nancy E. Petrisko’s career in arts management has spanned over thirty-five years. Currently the director of development at the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts, UC Davis, she has held executive or major positions in a wide variety of performing arts organizations on both US coasts. Many years were dedicated to presenting organizations—San Francisco Performances, San Francisco Symphony, Washington Performing Arts Society, the Kennedy Center and BlackRock Center for the Arts. However, she has worked extensively with new and established opera companies and organizations dedicated to the vocal arts—San Francisco Opera, Washington National Opera, Vocal Arts Society, Opera Lafayette, and Washington Concert Opera.
As an independent consultant, she is most proud of her work with young organizations to build resources, engage in successful planning to effect a financial turnaround and establish fundraising efforts for success. Her accomplishments include a successful capital campaign to build an arts education center for an underserved community, bi-coastal fundraising to establish ambitious music recording efforts, interim leadership during periods of organizational stress and change, strategic planning for staffing and governance success and an international effort to establish health care education and resources.
For a decade, she served as an adjunct professor in performing arts and public administration departments at American University. Teaching graduate courses in non-profit management, finance, and fundraising, she is proud to have helped students begin careers in arts management and public service. Additional work in the field includes panel review for the National Endowment for the Arts, Maryland Association of Nonprofit Organizations, Maryland State Arts Council, California Arts Council, and Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation.
About Opera Parallèle
Celebrating its tenth season in 2019-2020, award-winning Opera Parallèle develops and performs contemporary operas in a dynamic balance of known and new works, in new productions that shed light on their subject matter and engage audiences’ senses and sensibilities. Opera Parallèle is the only organization in the Bay Area presenting fully-cast and staged contemporary operas exclusively. Opera Parallèle also commissions new orchestrations of contemporary grand operas, to give a sense of intimacy to its productions and to give a new life to works which might not otherwise be performed.
Opera Parallèle’s 2019-2020 tenth season reflects its decade of innovative and provocative commitment to socially relevant, artistically superb opera. The Company’s founders—Artistic Director and Conductor Nicole Paiement and Creative Director Brian Staufenbiel—have scheduled an ambitious and re-imagined version of Stewart Wallace’s and Michael Korie’s 1995 Harvey Milk in celebration of the activist and martyred San Francisco Supervisor who was murdered in 1978, a milestone event in the continuing struggle for LGBTQ rights in America. Wallace and Korie have worked with OP to re-imagine a new two-act version of the work 25 years after its premiere to make it an even more impactful and intimate look at the civil rights icon, his life and inspiration. In addition, OP will remount Lee Hoiby’s 1989, Bon Appétit! based on two television episodes of culinary icon Julia Child’s “The French Chef” at San Francisco’s famed Hayes Street Grill. The evening, featuring dinner and cocktails during the performance, will culminate in this one-woman tour de force featuring Catherine Cook as Julia Child. The season opens with a recital by tenor William Burden, mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade and OP’s own resident pianist Keisuke Nakagoshi, and also features the annual benefit gala. The season runs September 19, 2019, through May 17, 2020 with performances at The Blue Shield of California Theater at YBCA, Hayes Street Grill, Caroline H. Hume Concert Hall at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and the War Memorial Green Room. For more information, visit www.operaparallele.org .