Stephanie Leotsakos

• 2020 Prize winner of the NJ Masterwork Music and Art Foundation’s Vocal Competition Award. Awarded for “her outstanding artistic skill and talent, her commitment to excellence in the arts, and the range of her musical accomplishments.”
• 2016 Recipient of the Isidore and Helen Sacks Memorial Prize for “extraordinary achievement in the arts” at Princeton University. Awarded especially for the composition and staged-production of her trans-historical senior thesis opera, titled “OMG,” premiered in Taplin Auditorium in April, 2016, and funded independently by six university departments.
• 2016 Young Leadership Award for service as President of the Orange Pan-Hellenic Association at Princeton University. Awarded by the Hellenic Federation of NJ for co-producing yearly fundraising concerts of Hellenic and other cultural musics with student and professional musicians for the benefit of the local community between 2012 - 2016.
• 2014 - 2016 Princeton University Center for the Study of Religion Research fellowship recipient. Awarded for the independent study of Early-Christian Byzantine Music, and for the composition of a Junior Thesis work titled “Kyrie Eleison: for the Rotunda in Thessaloniki” inspired by a fusion of Western and Eastern sacred vocal traditions.
• 2015 Princeton University Lewis Center Peter B. Lewis Summer Fund research scholarship recipient. Awarded for studies in the Italian operatic tradition and for historical research on the cross-roads of Christianity between East and West based in Italy.
• 2014 First prize winner of the Kozani International Music Festival Interpretation Competition for her public performance of "Sposa son disprezzata" by G. Giacomelli.
• Vocal Reviews:
• "Young soprano Stephanie Leotsakos, who had most of the solo work, sang with brilliance and expressiveness, emanating from the orchestra beautifully." — Rutland Herald, VA 2018
• “… and Stephanie Leotsakos’ Frasquita was a standout. (And when does Frasquita stand out?)” — Parterre Box Reviews, NYC 2017
• “As Belinda, Stephanie Leotsakos warmed up well to her role, singing comfortably in the higher register.” — Princeton Town Topics, NJ 2015
• Conducting Reviews:
• "Ms. Leotsakos led the Glee Club with supreme confidence and a gentle flow to her conducting gestures, eliciting a very bright sound for Rachmaninoff’s Hvalite Ghospoda. The Russian words were consistently very crisp, and the closing “Alliluyia” especially resonant... especially in the case of Ms. Leotsakos, the University music department has produced career-level instrumentalists, singers and orchestral conductors, and now also choral directors." — Princeton Town Topics, Feb. 24, 2016

Composer-performer Stephanie Leotsakos is an American-born Greek-Colombian lyric soprano who has performed operatic roles and public concerts on stages in America and Europe. She has sung with Amore Opera Company, New York Lyric Opera Theatre, Princeton University Opera Theatre, Riverside Opera Company, OperAverona, the Vermont Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Sussex County Youth Orchestra. Mainstage roles have included Fiordiligi (Cosi fan Tutte), Berta (Il Barbiere di Siviglia), Frasquita (Carmen), Susanna/Barbarina (Le Nozze di Figaro), Belinda (Dido and Aeneas), Anna (Tobias and the Angel), Fortune/Venus (The Coronation of Poppea), Amelia (Amelia Goes to the Ball), Zerlina (Don Giovanni), and Poussette (Manon). Stephanie was recently named the 2020 winner of the first annual NJ Masterwork Arts Foundation Vocal Competition, a $10,000 prize for “her outstanding artistic skill and talent, her commitment to excellence in the arts, and the range of her musical accomplishments.”

Stephanie holds a M.A. in composition from Rutgers University (‘21) and B.A. in composition from Princeton University (‘16) with certificates in Vocal Performance and Music Education. At Rutgers, she studied opera composition with Grammy-award winning Head of Composition, Dr. Robert L. Aldridge, and computer composition with Associate Director of Music, Dr. Steven Kemper. At Princeton, Stephanie’s primary voice teacher, which whom she continues to study today is tenor, David Kellett, and her primary composition mentors included Grammy-award winning composer,Steven Mackey, Paul Lansky, and Donnacha Dennehy, who was her senior thesis advisor. Stephanie also studied with Greek composer, Panayiotis Dimopoulos in Kozani, Greece during the summer of 2014.