PROJECTS

DRIFT (Opera Saratoga 2027) is an opera about motherlands, migration and memory set amidst the pressing crises of our time. DRIFT weaves a kaleidoscopic narrative, necessitating a radically new examination of identity, geography and the places and people we call home. 

CLOUD VARIATIONS (World Premiere, Carnegie Hall, 2025) is a piece for performers and chamber orchestra which reimagines poetic forms in a kaleidoscopic meditation on body, desire, environment, and empire. At the centerpiece of the work is “Cloud Pantoum,” a poem originally published in The Atlantic. Expanding on the concept of the cloud as it relates to body, patterns, and technology, repeated lines and chord clusters float and migrate across stanzas, repeated by the performers and musicians. I view language and sound as lenses to explore how multiplicities of the self reiterate across generations. Cloud Variations is a reimagining of the pantun and pastoral forms; throughout the piece, the body of the text and the body itself become landscape, language tumbling through terrains and histories, taking on the grains and textures of where it’s been. (Carnegie Hall Playbill, Oct. 2025)

ISOLA (Princeton University 2022, Long Beach Opera 2024)is a feminist monodrama that explores the body as island, a collaborative project undertaken J. Mae Barizo and composer Alyssa Weinberg. The title is taken from the word ISOLA, at turns meaning isolation, an island, or the archipelago in the Pacific Ocean where Barizo’s parents emigrated from the year before her birth.

WOMBWOUND / UTERO-HERIDA (2026, Houston Performing Arts and University of San Diego) is a hybrid cuicatl project with composer J.E. Hernandez and performer Priscilla Uvalle which illuminates the often-overlooked Indigenous pre-Hispanic roots of Mexican culture, focusing on the visceral, maternal bond and its cultural implications.