While There’s Light: An Opera by Vincent Katz and Sarah Sarhandi

Feminist avant-garde poet, novelist, essayist, translator, editor, and educator Rachel Levitsky is a founder of Belladonna* Collaborative. She is a Professor of Writing at Pratt Institute, Naropa University, and occasionally for Poets House and The Poetry Project. She was born in New York City and earned an MFA from Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado.

British mezzo-soprano and director Loré Lixenberg specializes in contemporary music, and has performed widely in opera, concert repertory, and music theatre, working with many leading composers. She regularly collaborates with composer and librettist Richard Thomas, Peaches/Baby Janes, Millie and Death, among others. She runs Berlin-based art space La Plaque Tournante with composer Frederic Acquaviva, a space devoted to avant garde exhibitions, installations, and performances.

Poet, translator, and hybrid-form prose writer Vincent Katz is the author of the poetry collections Broadway for Paul (2020), Southness (2016), Swimming Home (2015), and the book of translations, The Complete Elegies of Sextus Propertius (2004). His writing on contemporary art and poetry has appeared in Art in America, the Brooklyn Rail, and The Poetry Project Newsletter. As curator of the Readings in Contemporary Poetry series at Dia:Chelsea from 2010-2021, Katz edited the anthology Readings in Contemporary Poetry (Dia Art Foundation, 2017). In 2021, pieces from an opera in collaboration with composer Sarah Sarhandi were performed at the Tête-à-Tête Opera Festival in London. He lives in New York City.

Based in London, Sarah Sarhandi is a composer and virtuoso violist with joint British and Pakistani heritage. She studied viola as a performer at the Royal Academy of Music. Her music weaves together fluid sometimes fragmented melody, viola, voices including her own, sound and electronica. She is particularly interested in and recognized for her collaborative work. She has recorded and performed worldwide, written and recorded for film and TV. Recently she has begun to create her own videos as well as initiate projects driven by her music with film and video practitioners.

British opera director Bill Bankes-Jones is Artistic Director and founder of Tête à Tête. He is best-known for his work in new opera, having directed over 100 world premieres. He lead the company’s expansion and creation of Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival in 2006. In 2012, he was listed in the Evening Standard’s 1000 Most Influential Londoners for his work on the Festival. In 2020, he was involved in the Department for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport’s pilot performance for the safe return of opera during the COVID-19 pandemic as Tête à Tête’s Artistic Director, and worked on ensuring that year’s Festival went ahead safely. He was awarded a British Empire Medal in that year’s Queen’s Birthday Honours for “services to Opera and Diversity.”