Isabel Celata

About Isabel

            A classical soprano with a foundation in musical theatre, Isabel Celata is passionate about using musical performance to communicate relevant and important messages to her audience.

         As a musical theatre performer, Celata has been seen in a wide variety of roles, including Sophie Sheridan in Mamma Mia!, Heather Chandler in Heathers the Musical, and Marcy Park in The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. In each role, Celata strives to emphasize the truth, hoping to lead the audience to identify with and learn from her characters. Specifically, as Heather Chandler in Heathers the Musical, Celata and her cast utilized current sociological scholarship to analyze underlying themes and present them clearly to their audience.

         Equally at home on the opera stage, Celata has been recently seen as Krysia in Heggie's Two Remain: Out of Darkness, Zerlina in Don Giovanni, and as the Second Spirit in Die Zauberflöte at the Prague Summer Nights Young Artist Program. Celata has also frequently performed opera scenes, appearing as Adele in Die Fledermaus, Lakmé in Lakmé, Frasquita in Carmen, and Adele in L’elisir d’amore. Celata seeks to bring her love of communication, originally developed in musical theatre, to opera, helping to demonstrate its continued necessity and relevance as an art form.

         Celata hopes to use her voice to better the community around her. In affirmation of her efforts towards this goal, in 2019, she won the Louise Mercer Award at her undergraduate institution, Rhodes College. This award is given to the student who has most devoted themselves to their music department. Other awards and honors Celata has won include the Ruth Sherman Hyde Study Abroad Award, the “Without Music Life Would B-Flat” Fellowship for Study Abroad, and the Gladys Cauthen Concerto and Aria Competition. Both study abroad awards were used to fund her study at the Prague Summer Nights Young Artist Festival.

         Celata has performed multiple solo recitals and won a solo with the Rhodes College Orchestra, where she performed “Deh vieni non tardar” from The Marriage of Figaro and “Stizzoso, mio stizzoso” from La Serva Padrona.

         Celata is a first-year Doctorate of Musical Arts  student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison studying under Dr. Julia Rottmayer. She is a recent Masters of Music in Vocal Performance graduate from the University of Memphis, and graduated magna cum laude from Rhodes College in 2019, where she studied both music and political science.