PROJECTS

DRIFT (Opera Saratoga 2026) is an opera  about motherlands, migration and memory set amidst the pressing crises of our time. In a glacial landscape scarred by a catastrophic war, archivists aim to preserve remnants of the past. They discover Esmeralda, a young woman unmoored from time whose memory they are trying to map. Navigating landscapes both toxic and ethereal, DRIFT weaves a kaleidoscopic narrative, necessitating a radically new examination of identity, geography and the places and people we call home. 

ISOLA (Princeton University 2022, Long Beach Opera 2024)is a feminist monodrama that explores the body as island, a collaborative project undertaken J. Mae Barizo and composer Alyssa Weinberg. The title is taken from the word ISOLA, at turns meaning isolation, an island, or the archipelago in the Pacific Ocean where Barizo’s parents emigrated from the year before her birth.

WOMBWOUND / UTERO-HERIDA (2026, Houston Performing Arts and University of San Diego) is a hybrid cuicatl project with composer J.E. Hernandez and performer Priscilla Uvalle which illuminates the often-overlooked Indigenous pre-Hispanic roots of Mexican culture, focusing on the visceral, maternal bond and its cultural implications.