Majel Connery

With past lives as an actor, opera singer, and academic, Connery approaches songwriting with an open embrace of diverse influences. Most recently, she wrote songs about porn, periods, and sad fish for 5 episodes of Radiolab’s “Gonads” series, including a Radiolab Live performance at NYU Skirball Center.

While Connery holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and a composition degree from Princeton, her writing is deeply influenced by her parents' eclectic cassette tape collection circa 1984, which explains a compositional style part Schubert and part Elvis Costello (that’s a mangled quote from the Wall Street Journal).

Former New York Times critic Steve Smith favorably compared her voice to Shara Nova/My Brightest Diamond and Joanna Newsom, while Peter Margasak, writing for Bandcamp Daily, describes her vocals as “expertly drawing upon a wide swath of approaches—British folk, madrigal, art rock.” In opera circles, Connery is best known as co-founder and director of Chicago-based opera company, Opera Cabal (2007-2018), whose premiere of G.F. Haas’s ATTHIS at The Kitchen was described as “one of the most … searingly painful and revealing operatic performances in recent times (New York Times).

Connery left academia following a stint as Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley in 2015 to launch a career as a solo artist. Since then, as Mohr Visiting Artist at Stanford (2017), she commissioned and performed Pulitzer Prize winner Caroline Shaw’s “Contriving the Chimes,” written for Connery and the St. Lawrence String Quartet, and staged by opera director Christopher Alden. In 2016, as Mellon Visiting Artist at Wellesley, she commissioned and performed Aeolus, a throat-singing rock opera by Rome- and Berlin Prize-winning composer Ken Ueno. Connery recently co-taught a “Voice” seminar at Princeton with poet & beloved collaborator Jeff Dolven. She is bi-coastal, based in Brooklyn, NY, and Berkeley, CA, where she lives with her partner, neuroscientist Matt Walker.

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