Ellen Denham

Dr. Ellen Denham is a singer and stage director with a versatile background in multiple genres. Praised for her interpretive skills, clear tone, and effortless ornamentation, Denham is equally comfortable on the opera and musical theatre stage, as a concert soloist, and in multi-disciplinary, collaborative, and improvised works. Opera and musical theatre roles include Violet in Rorem’s A Childhood Miracle, Martha Sheldon in Ward’s The Crucible, Jenny in The Threepenny Opera, Cinderella’s Stepmother in Into the Woods, and the Actress in Love Games, a new musical by Joseph Turrin. She is a past winner of the Encouragement Award from the North Carolina District Metropolitan Opera Council and has performed roles with Indianapolis Opera, Piedmont Opera Theatre, Intimate Opera of Indianapolis, Longwood Opera, and Lyric Theatre at Illinois. She has appeared as the soprano soloist in numerous choral works including the Monteverdi Vespers, Mozart Vespers, Mozart Requiem, Handel Dixit Dominus, and multiple Bach cantatas. Denham pursued Theatre and Directing as a secondary area of doctoral studies, serving as Assistant Director for the mainstage University of Illinois operas Orpheus in the Underworld and The Merry Widow. In 2013, she was invited to direct the Umbrella Project of the Indy Convergence residency, an exploration of the subject of Otherness based on her concepts and created collaboratively by the performers using dialogue, dance, and an improvised soundscape of voices and instruments. Other directing projects have included a comic soundscape based on internet memes and an exploration of different ways to utilize improvisation in opera. She has received two grants from the Indiana Arts Commission for her collaborative work.