2026 Judges
Jane Bunnell
Mezzo-soprano Jane Bunnell has enjoyed an illustrious international career for 40 years. She has an especially long association with the Metropolitan Opera where she has sung 30 roles in more than 420 performances, including new productions of Ariadne auf Naxos, Otello, Les Troyens, Faust, and Romeo et Juliette, and the Met premieres of Nico Muhly’s Marnie, Britten’s A Midsummer Nights’ Dream and Wolf-Ferrari’s Sly. She has also recorded with the Met for Sony/BMG and has toured Europe and Japan. She is frequently heard on Sirius XM radio.
She has sung with the opera companies of Toulouse, Vienna, Cologne, and Schwetzingen and with such American opera companies as Houston Grand Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, San Diego Opera, Minnesota Opera, Florida Grand Opera and New York City Opera. Ms. Bunnell has collaborated with such notable conductors as James Levine, Valery Gergiev, Seiji Ozawa, and Robert Shaw. She has appeared in concert with the Boston Symphony, Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Atlanta Symphony, and the Minnesota Orchestra.
Jane Bunnell joined the faculty of Michigan State Universities College of Music in August 2015 ,as professor of voice. Ms. Bunnell was on the faculty of New York University for nine years before joining the faculty at DePaul University from 2006 to 2015. Her students have sung with the Metropolitan Opera, Opera Toledo, and Dayton Opera, and they have been young artists at the Ryan Center in Chicago, LA Opera, Lyric Opera of Kansas City, Milwaukee Opera, and Opera Madison in Wisconsin as well as creating new music in LA and New York.
Colin Brush
Colin Brush is the director of the Sarah and Ernest Butler Houston Grand Opera Studio. Previously, he was the Artistic Administrator at the Washington National Opera and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, collaborating on artistic planning, casting and social impact programming. During his WNO tenure, he worked on the company's first complete Ring cycles; the revised world premiere of Philip Glass's Appomattox and several new productions. He produced Francesca Zambello's sold out production of West Side Story for the National Symphony Orchestra. He was WNO's central programmer for the opening festival of the John F. Kennedy Center's REACH expansion and sat on the selection committee for the Kennedy Center's first Culture Caucus.
Brush has produced programs for and served on panels at the Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of Women in the Arts, National Gallery of Art, Georgetown University, Italian Embassy and many others. He has presented over 100 lectures at the Kennedy Center. He holds a Master of Music in Opera from the University of Maryland and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Carnegie Mellon University.
Michelle DeYoung
Michelle DeYoung has already established herself as one of the most exciting artists of her generation. She continues to be in demand throughout the world, appearing regularly with the New York Philharmonic, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, The Met Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Vienna Philharmonic, and the Concertgebouworkest. She has also performed at the prestigious festivals of Ravinia, Tanglewood, Saito Kinen, Edinburgh, and Lucerne. In Australia she has appeared multiple times with Sydney Symphony, and most recently sang Kundry in concert performances of Parsifal at Opera Australia.
Equally at home on the opera stage, DeYoung has appeared with the Metropolitan Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Teatro alla Scala, Bayreuth Festival, Berliner Staatsoper, Paris Opera, Theater Basel, English National Opera and the Tokyo Opera. Her many roles include the title roles in Samson et Dalilah and The Rape of Lucretia, Fricka, Sieglinde and Waltraute in The Ring Cycle; Kundry in Parsifal, Venus in Tannhäuser, Brangäne in Tristan und Isolde, Eboli in Don Carlos, Amneris in Aida, Santuzza in Cavellaria Rusticana, Marguerite in Le Damnation de Faust, Dido in Les Troyens, Judith in Bluebeard’s Castle, and Jocaste in Oedipus Rex. She also created the role of the Shaman in Tan Dun’s The First Emperor at the Metropolitan Opera.
Michelle DeYoung is associate professor of music in voice at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music.