BIOGRAPHY

Praised for her “excellence in animated acting” (The Weekly Register Call), soprano Melaina Mills is equally at home on the operatic stage and in the concert hall. In 2022, she was a winner in the Colorado/Wyoming district of the Metropolitan Opera Laffont Competition.  This season, she is singing the role of Mariana in Joe Illick and Mark Campbell’s Frida Kahlo and the Bravest Girl in the World in Central City Opera‘s touring production throughout the state of Colorado. She is also excited to join Opera Colorado this season for their productions of Tosca and The Shining. As an emerging artist at the prestigious Seagle Festival in 2018 and 2019, she debuted the roles of Jocelyn Jordan (The Manchurian Candidate), Paquette (Candide), and Lucy (Billy Goats Gruff). Other favorite operatic roles include Miss Wordsworth (Albert Herring), Barbarina (Le Nozze di Figaro), Célie (Signor Deluso), and Griselda (La Griselda, Scarlatti).  In 2021 she sang The Governess in an innovative filmed version of The Turn of the Screw with The Boston Conservatory at Berklee, conducted by Andrew Altenbach. 

Ms. Mills has performed as a soloist in concerts throughout the United States, most recently as the soprano soloist in Handel’s Messiah and Fauré’s Requiem. As a soloist with Stetson University’s premier Concert Choir, Ms. Mills has toured throughout the state of Florida, most notably in J. S. Bach’s St. John Passion under the baton of Simon Carrington. Ms. Mills gives frequent recitals in Boston and in her home city of Denver.

A distinguished recipient of the Stetson Undergraduate Research Experience grant, Ms. Mills travelled to Salzburg, Austria in 2016, conducting an immersive study of Mozart’s soprano roles. During the summer of 2015, she sang with Oberlin in Italy in Arezzo, Italy, where she studied with renowned pedagogue and mezzo-soprano Delores Ziegler.  

Ms. Mills won First Prize in the Florida Federation of Music Clubs’ Stephen Foster Jeanie Competition, and First Prize in the Wednesday Morning Music Club of Daytona Beach Vocal Competition. She graduated magna cum laude, BM Vocal Performance with a minor in German, from Stetson University in DeLand, FL and earned her Master of Music in Opera Performance at The Boston Conservatory at Berklee.