A two-time Tony Award-winning composer and a six-time Grammy Award-winning singer are bringing their boundary-pushing expertise to Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), as professors in the practice.
Jeanine Tesori, a composer of musical theater and opera, and Dawn Upshaw, a classically trained singer of opera and concert repertoire, both joined the faculty in July and will each teach one course per semester. Both are appointed in the Department of Music and Tesori also holds a fully joint appointment in Theater, Dance and Performance Studies. She has taught a course in the Shen Curriculum for Musical Theater, which is administered by both departments, every other year since 2012.
“We are so lucky to have two titans of the music world joining the Faculty of Arts and Sciences,” said Marc Robinson, the dean of Humanities in the FAS. “Jeanine Tesori’s profound works for music theater and Dawn Upshaw’s glorious performances in opera houses and concert halls have changed lives. I am thrilled that Yale students will now learn from their vast experience.”
Tesori’s body of work includes the scores for multiple Broadway musicals, including “Kimberly Akimbo,” “Fun Home,” “Caroline, or Change,” “Shrek The Musical,” and “Thoroughly Modern Millie.” She won the 1999 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Music in a Play for a production of “Twelfth Night” at Lincoln Center, and the 2004 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Music for “Caroline, or Change.” She has six Tony nominations, with two awards for best original score: one in 2015 for “Fun Home” (shared with Lisa Kron) and the second in 2023 for “Kimberly Akimbo” (shared with David Lindsay-Abaire).
“Fun Home,” based on the coming-of-age memoir of the same name by Alison Bechdel, a graphic novelist who joined Yale in 2024 as a professor in the practice in English and Film and Media Studies in the FAS, was a 2014 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Tesori has also composed music for numerous films and is a leading opera composer. Her works in the latter genre include “The Lion, The Unicorn, and Me,” “Blue,” which received the Music Critics Association of North America Award for Best New Opera, and “Grounded.” She was recently named the 2025-26 Lincoln Center Visionary Artist.
“She is basically the Giuseppe Verdi of 21st-century America,” said Gundula Kreuzer, chair of Yale’s music department. “Verdi wanted to tell stories that spoke to people of the time in music and stage performance. That’s exactly what Jeanine is doing.
“She is so skilled in bringing stories to Broadway that have never been done before, like ‘Fun Home.’ She’s breaking all kinds of taboos. But she’s also the most successful and influential woman ever in Broadway theater, and one of the first two women to be commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera.”
Upshaw is acclaimed worldwide for her opera performances, including nearly 300 at the Metropolitan Opera, where she began her career. She has made a point of working closely with composers and has premiered more than 25 works. A six-time Grammy winner, she is featured on more than 60 recordings, including one of Symphony No. 3 by Henryk Górecki, which was released in 1992 by Nonesuch Records and went on to sell more than a million copies.
She was the first vocal artist to be named a MacArthur Fellow, in 2007, and was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2008. She holds an honorary doctorate from Yale.
She has considerable experience mentoring young artists: she also heads the vocal arts program at the Tanglewood Music Center, in Lenox, Massachusetts, and was the founding artistic director of the vocal arts program at the Bard College Conservatory of Music.
Upshaw is joining Yale’s music department just after the retirement of Richard Lalli, a longtime music professor who helped nurture the musical and vocal scene at the university. Upshaw will both carry on that work and expand on it, said Kreuzer.
“Dawn Upshaw, like maybe nobody else, really paved a new career path for singers, especially female singers, beyond just being pigeonholed in a specific fach”— a method of classifying singers by their type of voice — “and learning its repertory,” Kreuzer said. “She started to commission music from contemporary composers early in her career and championed new work at a time when that wasn’t common. So she has working relationships with some of the most eminent composers, especially American composers, of our day.”
Collaboration and repertory
This fall, Tesori is teaching a course titled “The Spirit of the Original: Adaptation Lab,” for which she will bring in many of her previous collaborators (including Bechdel, from “Fun Home,” as well as James Lapine, David Henry Hwang, and Tazewell Thompson) to talk about adapting one art form into another.
“I like to teach what I think is missing in my industry,” Tesori said. “And what happens with a show that starts to behave on its own is you have to diagnose where the problem is, which is very tricky because there are so many variables. It’s a strange organism.
“But the very source of everything is that word, the source material. You can’t be more authentic than the thing you’re looking to adapt. I’m constantly returning to it. It’s this strange balance of honoring and betraying it — honoring your experience with the material, but then at a certain point, you have to go your own path. I feel like that hasn’t been studied for musical theater as much as other skill sets.”
Tesori is known within Yale and the larger theater world as a consummate mentor, said Shane Vogel, chair of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, and a professor of English and Black Studies.
“She’s established a reputation as a natural teacher whose pedagogical virtuosity mirrors her musical genius,” he said. “She demands a lot from her students, not only in required assignments, but also in the critical thought about the creative choices they make. And I think that will really drive this adaptation lab.”
Upshaw is teaching a vocal repertory class called “Inhabiting Text and Music in Contemporary Song Repertoire.” The course focuses on how to hone one’s performance skills, using late 20th- and early 21st-century song.
“It’s really about getting inside of a piece and trying to understand the composers’ choices and expression by way of looking at tempo, rhythm, harmony and expressive diction, as well as studying what was going on in the world at the time it was written,” Upshaw said. “It’s finding meaning through the text, but then putting that together with the music, combining the two to present something honest.”
Both Upshaw and Tesori have dedicated considerable time to nourishing and guiding the next generation of musical artists, including some who have become successful composers and performers, Kreuzer said. Now, at Yale, she added, “they’re bringing this full commitment to mentoring and bringing new ways of collaborating, new ways of thinking across what music is and what music can be.”
