Daily Inspiration: Meet Michele Patzakis

Today we’d like to introduce you to Michele Patzakis.

Hi Michele, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
My Story: A Life in Music Comes Full Circle
Growing up in Los Angeles, there was no local opera company, and pursuing a career in opera generally meant leaving home—and often going to Europe. I could never have imagined then that I would build a life in music that would take me around the world and ultimately bring me right back to Los Angeles in ways I never could have predicted.
Today, I feel incredibly fortunate to have a full life and career in music as a singer, educator, director, and arts administrator. My story is literally a voyage that began—and continues—in Los Angeles.
From Hospitals to Opera Houses—and Back Again
As a child, I would visit my physician father in the bowels of LA County Hospital and dream of becoming a doctor who would sing to my patients. Instead, I became an opera singer—with a Doctorate in Music!—who now sings with patients through my work in Arts and Health. It is one of the many full-circle moments of my life.
Since 2022, as a program coordinator for LA County Arts and Health Week, I have been part of an LA Opera Connects team bringing opera singers and creative programs into communities throughout Los Angeles County—including LA General Hospital, the very place where some of those childhood dreams began.
I never could have imagined that my interests in medicine and music would eventually intersect as part of a growing arts-and-health movement exploring creative, sustainable—and FUN—ways to support wellness.
Opera is uniquely suited to this work because it brings together so many art forms: singing, instrumental music, theater, dance, visual art, language, and storytelling. In fact, the Greek concept of musiki invokes the collective arts of the Muses. To use these tools today to promote empathy, healing, self-expression, and community brings me a kind of joy and satisfaction I never could have anticipated when I first dreamed of becoming a singer.
An LA Artist Goes Out Into the World
My journey began in the public schools of the San Gabriel and San Marino, where extraordinary teachers gave me musical opportunities and, perhaps even more importantly, the confidence to imagine a life in the performing arts. My high school choral director led me to The Young Americans and then America’s Youth in Concert where I was a soloist for concerts from Carnegie Hall to the Vatican at age 16. When I returned, I knew I wanted to go to USC Thornton where I earned my Bachelor of Music. I continued on with my Master of Music from the New England Conservatory of Music and Tanglewood before embarking on a professional singing career.
I made my New York operatic debut with New York City Opera and my European operatic debut with the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels. As a leading soprano, I had the extraordinary opportunity to perform throughout North America and Europe with companies including Zurich Opera and the Spoleto Festival and in concert halls like Vienna’s Musikverein, collaborating with remarkable artists and conductors along the way.
And yet, eventually, Los Angeles called me home.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
When the World Stopped Singing
One of the greatest challenges—and unexpected turning points—came during the pandemic.
Suddenly, singing was considered a “superspreader” activity. Opera houses, schools, choirs, churches, and concert halls went silent and aspects of our entire field shut down.
Yet something fascinating happened at the same time. Across social media, people began singing, dancing, creating, and sharing art from their homes. The arts became an organically viral means of connection, healing, and community-building.
After learning about a London program using opera singers in breathing work with people experiencing long-term effects of COVID-19, I helped co-create LA Opera Connects’ Opera for Life and Wellness, a breathing and singing program in collaboration with UCLA Health.
The work was subsequently featured by CNN and Inside Edition and presented as part of the Healing Breath Initiative’s Virtual Research Workshop with Johns Hopkins Medicine and the LA County Arts and Health Week.
What began during a moment when singers were being told that our voices posed a danger became an opportunity to explore how those same voices—and the breath supporting them—could heal.
My Arts and Health work with LA Opera Connects has continued through wellness resource videos and programs such as Creative Care, helping make creative experiences accessible to people who might never set foot inside an opera house.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
Finding New Ways to Use My Voice
After years of performing, I returned to USC and completed my Doctor of Musical Arts at the Thornton School of Music in 2019, focusing on Music Teaching and Learning, Directing for the Operatic Stage, and Vocal Arts Medicine.
That decision opened an entirely new act in my life.
As a Teaching Artist with LA Opera Connects, I now have opportunities to bring together areas that once seemed unrelated: performance, education, health, research, storytelling, and community engagement.
One exciting example is developing curriculum and teaching for a research collaboration with the USC Brain and Creativity Institute and the Los Angeles Children’s Chorus exploring the social-emotional benefits of music theater and storytelling for elementary-age students. The hope is ultimately to make these kinds of expressive artistic experiences available to more children.
I am also faculty at Chapman University, Pasadena City College, and Azusa Pacific University and with LA Opera Connects for their Leadership Academy. Having performed Anna in The King and I, I often think about Oscar Hammerstein’s famous lyric: “If you become a teacher, by your pupils you’ll be taught.” That has certainly been true for me. I learn constantly from the diversity of students and colleagues around me. Helping young artists discover their own voices, develop confidence, and imagine futures they may not yet see has become one of the most transformational parts of my career.
Heritage, Storytelling, and the Greek Diaspora
Another thread that has woven through my life is my Greek-American heritage. I grew up participating in Greek Orthodox Church programs throughout Los Angeles, deeply connected to the language, music, dance, history, and traditions of my ancestors. And yes—if you saw My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Greek Language School and Greek dancing really were part of the experience!
Today, I have the privilege of bringing that heritage into my professional and artistic life. I co-produced Maria Cominis’ 2023 NEA Award-winning play The Women of Zalongo and created roles in the 2023 world premiere of Theodosia Roussos’ chamber opera Polymnia, produced by the UCLA Stavros Niarchos Center for Hellenic Studies, where I now serve as Chair of the Community Advisory Board. I also perform in and direct concerts for organizations throughout the Greek Diaspora.
These projects remind me that art can connect us not only to one another, but also to the people, histories, and cultures that came before us.
Giving Back to the Organizations That Gave Me a Start
Some of the most meaningful roles in this chapter of my life involve returning to organizations that once supported me as a young singer.
I was once an award recipient of the Loren L. Zachary National Vocal Competition; today I serve as its Associate Director, Board Member, and Adjudicator. In 2019, The Loren L. Zachary Society for the Performing Arts honored me for my contributions to the field.
Similarly, after winning awards in the Los Angeles District and Western Region of the Metropolitan Opera Laffont competition as a young artist, I now serve as Director of the San Francisco District of the Metropolitan Opera Laffont Competition.
Raising my children in Los Angeles also has brought full-circle moments with them also graduating from San Marino High School, my son being a football champion at Pasadena City College, a daughter graduating from USC, and a daughter winning the Music Center Spotlight Award from LA County – as my first vocal competition win was from the LA County’s Department of Arts and Culture’s “Young Artist of the Future”. In 2025, I was inducted into the San Marino Hall of Fame for distinction in the Arts. To be recognized by the community and schools that helped launch my artistic journey was another unexpected full-circle moment.
There is something profoundly meaningful about returning to organizations that once opened doors for me and now having the opportunity to hold those doors open for the artists coming behind me.

Before we let you go, we’ve got to ask if you have any advice for those who are just starting out?
Enjoy the Voyage
If I could give one piece of advice to someone beginning a life in the arts—or really, beginning any ambitious journey—it would be this: Enjoy the voyage.
Training to become an opera singer takes years of discipline and study. It is very easy to live toward the next goal: the next degree, audition, role, job, award, or opportunity. But we are also living, singing, learning, and creating along the way. You may never feel completely “ready.” Share your unique voice and perspective anyway. Celebrate where you are now. Be curious. Be open to possibilities you cannot yet see. Allow your passions to evolve. And have the courage to advocate for your own ideas.
In this latest chapter of my life, I find myself inspired by the Japanese art of Kintsugi. Broken pottery is repaired with gold rather than disguising the cracks. The history of the object isn’t erased—it becomes part of what makes the finished piece beautiful and unique.
I think an artistic life can be like that.
Our experiences, detours, disappointments, successes, changes, and even our cracks become part of our story. Instead of trying to recreate who we once were, we can use all of it to create something new. Every human voice has its own unique soundprint. Our ideas, experiences, and perspectives channeled through our art are equally unique.
I began as a little girl in Los Angeles dreaming of becoming a doctor who would sing to her patients. There were many obstacles along the way, including my parents resisting my insistence to major in music in college and pursue a career in music. But I would not and could not accept that! They, and I, could never have imagined the voyage that would follow—or that one day I would find myself back in Los Angeles, a singer with a doctorate, doing something remarkably close to that childhood dream.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.michelepatzakis.com
• Instagram: VoiceFanatic
• Facebook: Michele Patzakis
• Other: https://www.laopera.org/community-learning