Ardea Arts

ARDEA ARTS is an incubator of groundbreaking, new opera-works redefining American Opera within a contemporary vernacular framework. Our mission is to make the opera experience accessible but challenging to widely diverse audiences of all ages. New work is made by exciting, unexpected artists who speak to these audiences through the medium of opera. Opera bursts forth with our own cultures and resonates with our own languages—enchanting, challenging, and inspiring multi-generational audiences, and makes us laugh, cry, and acknowledge who we are. These are the same ideas that inspired the beginnings of opera back in 1590, and they are what we strive to re-capture in these new works by the artists of today. Ardea Arts and its founding director Grethe Barrett Holby have been tackling difficult issues through the arts since 2006, and the Family Opera Initiative (FOI) since 1995—spearheading, commissioning, developing, and producing opera and music-theater works for youth, family, and under-served audiences. To this end, we involve communities to the greatest extent possible in the process and performance of the work. We engage composers, writers, designers, singers, musicians, tech crew, and digital artists to collaborate on these new works. Ardea Arts is a 501(c)(3) charitable organization.