Tamara Acosta has been a member of the Ithaca College Voice faculty since 2017. She strives to create an environment in the studio that supports, encourages and celebrates each singer's unique talents. Her teaching is grounded in the 'bel canto' tradition which is applied to all genres of music. The objective is to provide students with the necessary tools to become the artist they choose to be, reaching their greatest potential.
Her extensive performance career has taken Ms. Acosta to many of the great opera and concert stages of the world, including Lyric Opera Chicago, The Santa Fe Opera, Sarasota Opera, Nashville Opera, Opera Delaware, Opera Pacific and Opera Theatre of St. Louis, where she appeared in the world premiere of Judith Weir’s The Vanishing Bridegroom. The New York Times has called Tamara Acosta’s soprano “ solid…her singing clarion-toned and ardent." Recently, Tamara appeared as the soprano soloist in Brahms' Ein Deutsches Requiem, first with the Symphony of the Mountains in Bristol, TN, followed by a performance with the Cayuga Chamber Orchestra at Cornell University having previously performed the same piece with Orquesta Sinfónica de Xalapa in Xalapa, Mexico.
Recognizing a need for greater diversity in the classroom and on the concert stage, Tamara is a co-founder of ONEcomposer, an arts advocacy initiative dedicated to telling the stories of neglected musical voices. ONEcomposer’s collaboration with the Philadelphia Orchestra to present the original orchestration of Florence Price’s Piano Concerto in One Movement was hailed as “a knockout” by The Philadelphia Inquirer. On July 26, 2024, ONEcomposer released Beyond the Years: Unpublished Songs of Florence Price, the organization’s inaugural commercial recording, featuring previously unpublished and unrecorded art songs of Florence Price as performed by soprano Karen Slack and pianist Michelle Cann. The album was awarded the 2024 GRAMMY Award for Best Classical Solo Vocal Album. Tamara co-produced the album and authored the liner notes.
Ms. Acosta earned her Master of Music Degree from the New England Conservatory and her Bachelor of Music from the Cleveland Institute of Music.