Manchester Township High School Class of 2016 graduate Amanda Batista is the next big thing on opera’s stage.

During her high school career here at MTHS, Batista was cast in every musical, including You’re A Good Man Charlie Brown (2013), The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (2014), Grease The Musical (2015), and Thoroughly Modern Millie (2016).

After graduating, Batista attended and graduated from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, then she took her talents to the Juilliard School, where she was a proud recipient of the Kovner Fellowship. 

According to her website,she made her Juilliard Opera debut in the 2021-2022 season as Frau Fluth in Nicolai’s Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater in New York, where she was praised for her “vibrant, wide-ranging career voice” (Opera News) and her “darker, spinto sound… sizable and impressively even from top to bottom” (Parterre Box). Batista made her Alice Tully Hall debut singing Ben Moore’s So Free Am I for Juilliard Songfest in collaboration with pianist Brian Zeger. Additionally, Ms. Batista was the Second Place winner in the 2022 Eleanor McCollum Competition at the Houston Grand Opera. Ms. Batista joined the prestigious Merola Opera Program during the summer of 2022, where she sang the title role in Daniel Catán’s Florencia en el Amazonas, and Salud in de Falla’s La Vida Breve on the  Schwabacher Summer Concert. She appeared as a featured soloist in A Celebration of American Song, and the Merola Grand Finale concert on stage at San Francisco’s War Memorial Opera House.  

This season, Ms. Batista joined the Lindemann Young Artist Development Program at the Metropolitan Opera House, where she will make her house debut as the High Priestess in Verdi’s Aida in Spring 2023. 

You can learn more about Amanda Batista at her website, https://amandabatista.com/

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