Soprano Marisa De Silva is an active performer, voice teacher, and Certified Teacher of the Alexander Technique based in Southern California. She received her Doctorate of Musical Arts at the University of Southern California with emphases in early music performance, musicology, opera directing, and vocology. A versatile singer, her interests also include Iberian and Japanese song repertoires, new music, and working on session and recording projects. She has been a featured Early Music soloist with L.A. Camerata, the USC Early Music Ensembles (Baroque Sinfonia and Collegium Workshop) at both the Berkeley and Boston Early Music Festivals, and the American Bach Soloists Academy. She also performed as featured soloist with the Joe Hisaishi Symphonic Orchestra performances at Carnegie Hall and Microsoft Theater.

Dr. De Silva is on faculty at Loyola Marymount University, where she serves as Assistant Professor of Voice and Opera. Her diverse research interests include Musician’s Performance Anxiety, Alexander Technique in music education, and rhetorical gestures used in performance practice. With Marylin Winkle, Marisa is currently working to expand the biography of Camilla de Rossi (fl. 1700-1710); their research has been presented at conferences in Rome and Florence, IT. In 2016, she received a grant from the Early Arts Guild of Victoria to further study the art of gesture under the tutelage of Helga Hill, OAM in Victoria, Australia and she hopes to be able to include ideas of rhetorical gestures in the process of future opera directing projects. She is a member of the American Society for the Alexander Technique, the National Association of Teachers of Singing, and the Screen Actors Guild  (SAG-AFTRA).