New Executive Director and Board Member Appointed

At its May 15 meeting, the Board of Directors unanimously and enthusiastically approved Dr. Ted Latham as the new Executive Director of the Women’s Sacred Music Project, and Ms. Lisa Willson DeNolfo as the newest member of the Board. Dr. Latham and Ms. Willson DeNolfo’s bios are reprinted below. Welcome, Ted and Lisa!

Dr. Edward D. Latham (B.A., M.Phil., Ph.D., Yale University) is currently Director of Liturgical Music at St. Thomas of Villanova Parish in Villanova, PA and St. Katharine of Siena Parish in Wayne, PA, and Associate Professor of Music and Coordinator of the DMA in Music Performance at Temple University’s Esther Boyer College of Music and Dance in Philadelphia, PA, where he was the recipient of the 2008 Lindback Award and the 2007 Teaching Academy Award for excellence in teaching. Dr. Latham’s book, Tonality as Drama: Closure and Interruption in Four Twentieth-Century American Operas, is available from the University of North Texas Press. He is a Research Associate in the Department of Greek, Latin, and Classical Studies at Bryn Mawr College, where he directs the 30-voice Bryn Mawr Renaissance Choir, and is both the Music Director of the 40-voice Villanova Singers and the 60-voice Main Line Singers. As a professional singer, he has performed with the Philadelphia Symphonic Choir (the resident choir of the Philadelphia Orchestra), the Philadelphia Heritage Chorale (with Aretha Franklin, Andrea Bocelli, and Juanes, for Pope Francis), the Philadelphia Singers, the Philadelphia Chamber Choir, the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia, and the Minnesota Chorale, and has appeared in concerts and productions at the Kimmel Center, the Arden Theater, The Boyer College of Music and Dance, and the Philly Fringe Festival. He is a Yale Whiffenpoof, and sings locally with the all-male groups The Tonics and the Orpheus Club of Philadelphia.

Lisa Willson DeNolfo (MM, Vocal Performance, Manhattan School of Music; Juilliard Opera Center; Academy of Vocal Arts), a leading soprano singing throughout Europe and the United States, has taught voice for twenty years, including at her Willson Vocal Academy on the Main Line for eleven years. In addition to maintaining her private studio, Lisa is choral director for the Musical Coterie of Wayne’s Women’s Chorus. She was on staff at Merion Mercy Academy for seven years as a private voice instructor and Choral Director and has been an adjunct voice professor at Haverford and Bryn Mawr Colleges. Lisa’s students have have been prize winners in numerous competitions such as NATS, Tri-County Concerts Youth Festival, The Classical Singer and America’s Got Talent. Her students have gone on to prestigious universities and conservatories such as Harvard, Boston Conservatory, the Manhattan School of Music, The Berklee College of Music, New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and the Steinhardt School, NYU’s New Studio on Broadway, Cap 21, Boston University, Temple University, and University of Miami, to pursue their careers in classical performance, musical theater, commercial music, jazz, music education, music business, and music therapy.