BIOGRAPHY

Stephanie E. Leotsakos (she/her) is a Greek-Colombian-American composer, conductor, soprano, violinist, and educator whose work bridges classical tradition, multimedia storytelling, and communal imagination. Her creative voice reflects both her intercultural background and her conviction that music can be a force for empathy and transformation.

Her compositional work spans opera, orchestra, choral, chamber, and film music. Stephanie’s chamber opera Young Goodman Brown (2022) has received multiple international performances and was acclaimed as “seriously good” and “not to be missed by all music lovers” (The Fringe Buzz, U.K.). In 2024 she was awarded the National Opera Association’s Dominick Argento Fellowship for Opera Composition. Her music has been featured in the Festival International du Cinéma d’Auteur de Rabat (Morocco), the Cyprus International Film Festival, and exhibitions at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Recent premieres include Children Are the Spirit of the World for the Sussex County Music Educators Association’s 50th Anniversary, We Call the Moon for the Sparta High School Nightingales and the Wagner College Treble Choir, and Stephanie: A Self-Portrait, performed internationally by ensembles in the Netherlands, Australia, and the United States.

As a conductor and performer, Stephanie is known for her dynamic, collaborative approach to music-making that blurs the lines between creator and interpreter. Recent engagements include conducting Jeremy Beck’s Black Water with City Lyric Opera (NYC), Iris Karlin’s Yehudit (world premiere, 2024), and Fauré’s Requiem for the Princeton University Glee Club’s 150th Anniversary. She previously directed the Wagner College Treble Choir and String Ensemble, where she founded a student-run Composers Collective and led premieres of emerging composers’ works. Her conducting has been described as “supremely confident and gently flowing” (Princeton Town Topics), and her soprano singing praised as “brilliant and expressive” (Barre Montpelier Times Argus).

A prize-winning soprano, Stephanie has performed leading and supporting operatic roles with Amore Opera, New York Lyric Opera Theatre, and the Vermont Philharmonic Orchestra, including Così fan tutte, Carmen, Don Giovanni, Dido and Aeneas, and Il barbiere di Siviglia. She frequently performs both traditional and contemporary repertoire and continues to appear as a soloist and recitalist in the greater New York area.

As an educator and researcher, Stephanie is passionate about inclusive pedagogy and visual-spatial approaches to learning. She has taught composition, theory, and music technology at Wagner College and is the founder of Gnotes by Stephanie, LLC, an educational initiative developing creative resources and technologies for music learners. Her presentation of The Gnotes Method at the 2024 New Jersey Music Educators Association Conference marked a milestone in her ongoing research on color, geometry, and perception in music theory education.

Stephanie holds degrees in composition from Princeton University and Rutgers University, where she is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in Composition under Dr. Scott Ordway. Her mentors include Steven Mackey, Paul Lansky, Donnacha Dennehy, and Robert Aldridge.

Across her work—as composer, conductor, singer, violinist, and educator—Stephanie Leotsakos seeks to create spaces of shared resonance, where listening becomes a form of connection and transformation.