Meet The Industry’s New Company Artists

As we continue to imagine paths forward for The Industry, we know that our commitment to artists remains the core of our identity. That’s why we launched The Industry Company two years ago to cultivate opportunities for talent on every level of opera’s creation and to shine a spotlight on the artists who have created our ambitious productions.

Each year we add artists from the various disciplines that make our projects so exciting: singers, designers, writers, and instrumentalists. This year we are thrilled to welcome librettist Douglas Kearney and voice artist Sharon Chohi Kim to the Company.

While we are unable to celebrate Douglas and Sharon in person, we can see them and their work on-screen via these new artist feature videos. Read on to learn more about these artists and their wonderful work with The Industry.

Meet Douglas Kearney

For the past seven years, we have been inspired by Douglas’s poetry, librettos, and performance. In his collaborations with The Industry, he wrote most of the libretto for our first major production Crescent City, and he wrote half of the libretto for our most recent production Sweet Land. In both works, Douglas excavated the complexities of trauma and violence in our culture with incredible empathy and style. For more from Douglas, watch his interview about Sweet Land here and check out his new Company artist feature video below. If you’re interested in experiencing more of his work, his poetic Afterword to Sweet Land in the opera’s digital program was a powerful and evocative experience in and of itself.

I’m interested in how writing libretti forces me to not account for every aspect of the writing.  And leaving those things vacant is exciting when you have collaborators that you trust.

Douglas Kearney

Meet Sharon Chohi Kim

We are awed by watching voice artist Sharon push her practice to the extremes and her communion with her material, roles, and collaborators. Most recently for The Industry, Sharon embodied the terrifying Wiindigo in Sweet Land. Her improvisations haunted and disorientated us in thecentral Crossroads scene. You may also remember Sharon from one of the most harrowing scenes in our production of Hopscotch, Chapter 22, where two Luchas journey to the depths of despair, searching for their lover. For more from Sharon, watch her new Company artist feature video below.

I admire singers who can take risks and push themselves, even when they risk cracking, or looking dumb, or looking ugly.  I really wanted to get out of this looking feminine and sexy and pretty and embodying traditional female roles.

Sharon Chohi Kim

You can experience both Sharon and Douglas’s incredible work in Sweet Land, which is available for streaming here. 

Stay tuned for more news from The Industry coming soon!

Elizabeth Cline, Executive Director