About Laura
Laura Mamakos is a classical singer with a rich lyric spinto voice.
Beyond her attraction to conventional repertoire and performance, she is often drawn towards creatively unconventional productions.
In her own projects and concerts Laura seeks out interesting collaborations and unusual venues as a means of exploring convergence and synthesis with other artists and their art forms, such as dance, visual art, video art, narration, etc.. Her aim is to create a transportive experience for the audience through the music, the context and the texture of the performance.
Laura’s latest inspiration is her future project «Together Again», a cross-collaborative allegory lending a voice and a spotlight to the International Refugee Crisis through its archetypal parallels to the story of The Parthenon Sculptures.
Some of Laura’s past productions include «One | Seven» one recital in seven languages with customized video-mapping performed at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center in Athens, Greece and «Nekroloulouda» (flowers for the dead), a collaboration with a story teller and a pianist, intertwining opera, poetry, myths, prose, and music.
Laura is an international performer who has sung in Europe (Italy, Spain and Greece) and the USA either as a soloist or interpreting roles such as Nerone in L’Incoronazione di Poppea (Monteverdi), Donna Elvira in Don Giovanni (Mozart) Musetta in La Bohème (Puccini), Annina in La Traviata (Verdi), Frasquita in Carmen (Bizet), Susanna and Barbarina in Le Nozze di Figaro (Mozart).
She has been fortunate to work with conductors like Jorge Rúbio, Dante Mazzola, Tony Amato, David Barón, and Dino Anagnost; stage directors Giancarlo del Monaco, Dimitri Papaioannou, Aggelliki Stellatou, Ricardo Campelo and Michael Travis Risner; coaches and voice teachers Juan Antonio Alvarez Parejo, Ana Luisa Chova, Aris Christofellis, Dimitris Yiakas, Barbara Gavakou, Christina Giannakopoulou, Yiannis Aeriniotis, Yiannis Tsanakaliotis, Marcy Lindheimer, Julie Christie, Cesare Rufini, Christa Ludwig, and Fedora Barbieri.
Beyond her work as a performer and producer Laura also teaches Opera and Musical Theatre at Kodály Conservatory in Athens as well as at her private studio. She is also proud of her work with El Sistema Greece where she teaches music, chorus and voice to refugees and under-privileged children.
Laura was born and raised in San Francisco and currently lives in Athens, Greece. She has also lived in Italy, Spain and New York. She studied music and piano at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and her Diploma in Voice is from Kodály Conservatory in Athens, Greece.
She holds a BA in French and Italian Language and Literature from Barnard College, Columbia University and an MA in International Relations from NYU (awarded a US government scholarship).
Laura is President and Co-Founder of DionysiaTrust, a non profit in support of the arts, and often performs pro bono for worthwhile causes, such as the Lifeline charity in New York where she was invitied to sing by the Crown Princess Catherine of Serbia.
