CHRISTINA FARRELL’s extensive experience as a Teaching Artist includes classroom residencies and professional development for Gateway to the Arts Aesthetic Education Institute and the Western Pennsylvania Wolf Trap Institute for Early Learning in the Arts. She is the Founding Director of Opera Ignite, a company dedicated to creative education through music, drama and movement. Through Opera Ignite, she conducts classroom residencies, professional development for teachers and audience engagement workshops. She is also the Educational Director for Prime Stage Theatre which promotes literacy skills to reluctant adolescent readers through theater-based experiences. Her professional development workshops have been featured at various Pennsylvania Music Educators Association Conferences, the 2010 Pittsburgh Association for the Education of Young Children Conference and the 2011 Conference on Eugene O’Neill in association with New York University. She was chosen as the 2007 Gateway to the Arts Hardie Artist of the Year in recognition of her outstanding commitment to arts education and is a recipient of the 2011 Fred Rogers Memorial Scholarship.

Christina received her BFA in Vocal Performance from Carnegie Mellon University and MA in Educational Theatre from New York University. She has performed with Washington National Opera, Baltimore’s Opera Vivente, Opera Theater of Pittsburgh, Westmoreland Symphony Orchestra and at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts as a Finalist with the National Symphony Orchestra’s Young Soloists’ Competition. She has served on the voice faculties of The Peabody Preparatory in Baltimore and The Levine School of Music in Washington, D.C., and taught six years as a middle school music teacher.