Channel, Amazon Prime, and Vox discussing how music relates to our world today. Born in Japan and raised in London and Boston, Ferguson resides in New York City. For more information, visit emiferguson.com.

Soprano Susanna Phillips (BM ’03, MM ’04, voice) continues to establish herself as one of today’s most sought-after singing actors and recitalists. A recipient of the Metropolitan Opera’s 2010 Beverly Sills Artist Award, Phillips has sung at the Met Opera for 12 consecutive seasons, in the roles of Musetta, Pamina, Donna Anna, Rosalinde, Antonia/Stella, Donna Elvira, Fiordiligi, Clémence, Micaëla, and most recently Countess Almaviva. Highly desired by the world’s most esteemed orchestras, Phillips has appeared with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra, and Santa Fe Symphony. Other career highlights include Stella in Previn’s A Streetcar Named Desire opposite Renée Fleming, Birdie in Blitzstein’s Regina, and singing at the Washington Performing Arts in a program co-curated by uth Bader Ginsburg. Phillips co-founded Twickenham Fest, a chamber music festival in her native Huntsville, Alabama, with bassoonist and Huntsville native Matthew McDonald.

Lincoln Center’s emerging artist of 2019, and Detroit native Endea Owens (MM ’18, jazz studies) is a vibrant bassist whose mentors include Marcus Belgrave, Rodney Whitaker, and Ron Carter. She has toured and performed with Jennifer Holliday, Rhonda and Diana Ross, Jazzmeia Horn, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Steve Turre, and Lea DeLaria from the Netflix Original Series Orange Is the New Black. Owens has participated in music exchange programs in Cuba and Trinidad and Tobago and performed in numerous other countries. She is the bassist with Juilliard Creative Associate and alumnus Jon Batiste’s Stay Human, which is the house band for The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. She has been featured on ABC News (New York) with Sandy Kenyon, as well as ABC’s Here and Now. She has also been featured on The Indie Beat with the Manhattan Neighborhood Network. Owens has graced the cover of the Japanese magazine The Walkers and been featured in the Wall Street Journal and Billboard magazine. In June 2020, she founded the Community Cookout, an organization dedicated to distributing hundreds of hot meals and free music concerts to neighborhoods in NYC.

Evan Yionoulis, an Obie award-winning theater director and nationally recognized teacher of acting, is the Richard Rodgers dean and director of the drama division. She has directed new plays and classics in New York, across the country, and internationally, including Adrienne Kennedy’s He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box(world premiere) and Ohio State Murders (Lortel Award, best revival) for Theatre for a New Audience, Richard Greenberg’s The Violet Hour (Broadway), Three Days of Rain (Manhattan Theatre Club), and Everett Beekin (Lincoln Center Theater), and, during her 20 years as a resident director at Yale Repertory Theatre, productions including Richard II, Cymbeline, Brecht’s Galileo, Ibsen’s The Master Builder, and Guillermo Calderón’s Kiss. She serves as president of the executive board of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society.