CITY OPERA sets itself apart from other music related performing arts organizations in three ways: first, we focus on presenting contemporary and original works performed by innovative and adventurous performers and ensembles with real crossover appeal; second, we have a comprehensive, innovative, site-specific collaborative outreach initiative unlike any other—one that's truly electrifying students, teachers, and neighborhood stakeholders all across the entire city; finally, we have a uniquely cooperative style of governance enabled by an eclectic roster of extraordinarily dedicated and creative people empowered to perform the music closest to their own hearts and simultaneously most meaningful to you.

These qualities of CITY OPERA resulted in its election as one of the first participants in LAUSD's Arts Community Partnership Network, and the company is vetted by L.A. Unified to provide music education services to any of its more than 850 schools. CITY OPERA is also the first professional performing arts company of its kind to offer its services directly to all of L.A.'s growing number of neighborhood councils.

The breadth and variety of new music you'll find at CITY OPERA gives the company a unique voice in the Los Angeles performing arts scene. We constantly strive to ensure both our programming and our roster fairly reflect the diverse people and cultures throughout the L.A. metropolitan area while simultaneously maintaining the widespread appeal and accessability of the music we present.

CITY OPERA is a company dedicated to:

  • maintaining the world's legacy of great traditional and contemporary orchestral and vocal music while championing new forms, genres, and styles of music.

  • redefining the experience of live concert music.

  • improving access to this music for urban, suburban, and rural communities all around the world.

  • incorporating innovative technological solutions to improve the diversity, quality, and distribution of this music.

  • modelling new strategies for governance and profitability in a performing arts organization.


Our educational outreach mission is to:

  • train and mentor confident and creative leaders in the collaborative, interdisciplinary, and multicultural skills needed to succeed in music and in life.

  • empower student and adult audience members with artistic imaginations and creativity.

  • expand general appreciation and knowledge of all types of music in schools and neighborhoods throughout the entire city.

  • highlight for students the relationships between music and other academic disciplines.

  • foster special awareness and sensitivity for music honoring the diverse cultural heritage shared by students and adults within their respective communities.

  • enable students, teachers, neighbors, and all community stakeholders and business partners to confidently realize their own goals via promoting collaborative interaction within real world environments.


Company History

CITY OPERA was formed in 2004 by a small team of expert artists and teachers with a background in opera. From its inception, the initial purpose of the company was to expressly serve the needs of the Los Angeles Unified School District's Arts Community Partnership Network. Since 2004, the company has continued to evolve and expand rapidly into one of L.A.'s most exciting and dynamic professional performing arts organizations.

CITY OPERA is a cooperative social enterprise which accomplishes its mission through entrepreneurial earned income strategies. For several years prior to its initial activities, CITY OPERA's founding and principal team members engaged in a careful and long-term review of the most recent research into what does and does not work in orchestral business operations, including the careful monitoring of a pivotal 10 million dollar study in 26 communities across America conducted by the Knight Foundation, as well as the recommendations of other leading non-profit performing arts organization advisors across the U.S. Armed with this information and coupled with the extensive first-hand insights of our artists, team leaders, and advisory board, CITY OPERA was purposefully founded as a virtual company with no single brick and mortar venue serving as a permanent and dedicated base of operations. Except for the company's school and neighborhood related outreach events, productions independently underwritten and staged within the Los Angeles area by CITY OPERA are generally four-walled at leased venues, or otherwise enabled via creative partnerships with the managing interests of any given site. Moreover, the company's cooperative talent pool was established with a portable and modular nature integral to our broad-based citywide outreach mission. All transactions in our paperless virtual office are handled online. CITY OPERA's uniquely contemporary business model allows for tremendous operational efficiency, solvency without excessive reliance on philanthropy, as well as flexible, dynamic, and audience-responsive programming. We consider the entire county of Los Angeles our home and we go to our audiences rather than expect our audiences to come to us. Finally, the subsequent savings in overhead are passed on to the concert-going public and to our community business partners as a competitive and viable option to many of the city's less nimble non-profits. All of these advantages enable CITY OPERA to serve as the vendor of choice for classical, crossover, and world music related services throughout L.A.

Collectively, within Los Angeles alone, our artists have produced or performed in concerts at every major venue, including the Music Center's Disney Hall and Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the Los Angeles Convention Center, the Hollywood Bowl, the Kodak Theater, the Ford Amphitheater, UCLA's Royce Hall, the Pasadena Civic Auditorium, the Ambassador Auditorium, Glendale's Alex Theater, Canoga Park's Madrid Theater, West Adam's Nate Holden Performing Arts Center, San Pedro's Warner Grand, and many, many more, including schools, churches, plazas, libraries, community centers, retail developments, and other public sites spread across the entire city. Internationally, our artists have worked in locations as distant as Africa and China and the Middle East. Moreover, they have worked locally with or within all of the city's major non-profit performing arts organizations, including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Los Angeles Opera, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Pasadena Symphony, California Philharmonic, and with virtually every community and regional orchestra and opera company within Los Angeles County. The artists themselves and the vision of our leadership are the backbone of CITY OPERA, and together they bring with them an infinitely deep well of experience that guarantees the company's future success.