BIOGRAPHY
Melaina Mills likes to make beautiful music, ask uncomfortable questions, and play characters who make questionable decisions.
A soprano and crossover performer working in opera, musical theatre, and new music, she is most interested in work that puts people and their imperfections at the center. She gravitates toward stories about identity, desire, politics, power, and the ways people love each other badly and beautifully.
She believes classical music can be weird, contemporary, funny, queer, political, and deeply interesting, and she wants to be part of making it so.
Melaina is a past district winner of the Metropolitan Opera Laffont Competition and has most recently worked with Regina Opera and Central City Opera. She is excited to be making her debuts this season with Queens Opera Theatre and CounterCodex.
In 2026, Melaina made her debut with Regina Opera as La Prima Sorella Cercatrice in Suor Angelica. In 2025, she performed multiple roles in the world premiere of Noah Magnus’ Death of the Mouse with NYC’s New Music Theatre Project. In the 2023-2024 season, she sang the role of Isabel in The Pirates of Penzance and covered Rose Maurrant in Street Scene as an Apprentice Artist with Central City Opera.
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 Gretel (Hänsel und Gretel) Miss Wordsworth (Albert Herring), Barbarina (Le Nozze di Figaro),and Célie (Signor Deluso). 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. In the upcoming season, she looks forward to her debut with CounterCodex as Elizabeth Taylor in the world premiere of Plague Mass and her role debut as Giulietta in I Capuleti e i Montecchi. Melaina is also the founder of Catharsis Arts Collective.
Melaina has performed as a soloist in concerts throughout the United States. As a touring artist with Central City Opera, she performed in a concert of Spanish art song at the Denver Art Museum. Also with Central City Opera, she starred in the children's opera Frida Kahlo and the Bravest Girl in the World, which toured throughout the state of Colorado for several years. Melaina has performed as the soprano soloist in Handel’s Messiah, Fauré’s Requiem, J. S. Bach’s St. John Passion, and Beethoven’s Mass in C Major.
A distinguished recipient of the Stetson Undergraduate Research Experience grant, Melaina 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.
Melaina 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.
