Team

JACOB ASHWORTH
Artistic DIRECTOR

jacob@heartbeatopera.org

In the summer of 2022, Jacob stepped into the role of Artistic Director for Heartbeat, after eight seasons as Co-Music Director. A conductor and violinist, Jacob has also been the “impressive Artistic Director” (New York Times) of Heartbeat's sister company, the baroque and modern “crack ensemble” (New Yorker) Cantata Profana, which he founded in 2012 at the Yale School of Music. As an Artistic Director, Jacob has become increasingly well known as a curator, always telling a new story of the history of music and opera; his vision for crafting rarely-heard masterpieces into theatrical, genre-bending chamber music shows earned Cantata Profana the 2016 CMA/ASCAP National Award for Adventurous Programming. 

Jacob performs equally on modern and baroque violin, as a conductor, and occasionally on renaissance vielle. He has performed extensively on period instruments, including as concertmaster for Mark Morris Dance Group and Opera Lafayette, and with the American Bach Soloists, TENET, Trinity Baroque Orchestra, Helicon Ensemble, Juilliard415, Yale Baroque Ensemble, New York Baroque Inc., and the Chamber Music Society of Central Virginia. Jacob has been an artist at the Staunton Music Festival, Chamber Music Northwest, New Haven Festival of Arts and Ideas, Wellesley Composer’s Conference, France’s Festival Daniou, Lake George Music Festival, and Music Mountain. In contemporary music, he has premiered works with New York New Music Ensemble, Princeton Sound Kitchen, MATA Festival, Locrian Chamber Players, The Stone, NOVUS NY, The Cecilia Series of Kansas City, and at the Museo National de Arte in Mexico City. 

Jacob has been called a “lithe and nimble” (NYTimes) baroque violinist, an “exacting and sensitive” (Boston Globe) new music player, a “richly detailed” (NYTimes) conductor, and “a flat-out triumph” (Opera News) onstage. With Heartbeat, Jacob has championed the unique practice of leading operas from the violin, "doing powerful work from the music stand” (Opernwelt). His album, “Hermestänze,” on MSR Records, features cycles for solo violin by Susan Kander, played “expressively and knowingly throughout” (Gramophone).

jacobashworth.com
 

Christian De Gré Cárdenas
Executive Director

christian@heartbeatopera.org

Mexican artist, producer and arts executive Christian De Gré Cárdenas has overseen the opening of over 1,000 new theatrical productions in New York City.

Prior to joining Heartbeat Opera he served as Director of The National Opera Center and led OPERA America through the pandemic as its Chief Operating Officer. He served for 15 years as Artistic Director and Chief Executive Officer of the critically acclaimed Mind The Art Entertainment and was the General Manager of The New York International Fringe Festival, the largest multi-arts festival in North America.  He is the co-creator of 30 award-winning multi-disciplinary works in partnership with The Public Theater, HERE Arts, La Mama Experimental Theater Club, The Brick, The Discovery Channel, The Armory, Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, The Drama Desk Awards, Maryland Opera Studio and The Mexican Cultural Institute of New York.  He is a Yaddo Colony fellow and a SPACE on Ryder fellow and is the creator of the popular musical series “Twisted Operettas” and "A Drink with Death" at Joe’s Pub at The Public Theater and Broadway’s 54 Below. A former activist and theatermaker in Eastern Europe, Northern Africa and the Americas, he served as the Global Outreach Partner for Theater for Social Change with the United Nations Y-Peer Network. He is an alumnus of The American Academy of Dramatic Arts and The Broadway League’s Commercial Theater Institute and is an advanced member of the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop. De Gré Cárdenas is a two-time New York Innovative Theater Award nominee, a National Alliance of Musical Theater semi-finalist and is the recipient of numerous awards in creative excellence from FRIGID New York, FringeNYC, The Lark Play Development Center, Fringe ENCORES, The Cayman Islands Chamber of Commerce, The Mexico International Film Festival, The Latiné Musical Theater Lab and The New York Musical Festival, among others.

Represented by UIA Talent Agency.
www.degrereese.com

DAN SCHLOSBERG
MUSIC DIRECTOR

daniel@heartbeatopera.org

The music of Brooklyn-based composer-pianist Dan Schlosberg has been performed by the Dover Quartet, Minnesota Orchestra, Nashville Symphony, Albany Symphony, Buffalo Philharmonic, Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, Lorelei Ensemble, Aspen Contemporary Ensemble, Amphion Quartet, Antico Moderno, New Morse Code, and counter)induction, at venues including Carnegie Hall, National Sawdust, (le) poisson rouge, Royal Albert Hall, Detroit Institute of Arts, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Beijing Modern Music Festival, and David Lynch’s Festival of Disruption. Dan is a 2014 recipient of the Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has been awarded two ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Awards, most recently in 2014. His work has been described as “richly detailed yet delicate” by the New York Times and “witty” and “ingenious” by the Wall Street Journal.

Dan is currently writing The Extinctionist, a new opera commissioned by Heartbeat Opera, as well as music for A Boy’s Company Presents, a new play by Jeremy O. Harris premiering at Playwrights Horizons in 2021. Recent commissions include a new Diabelli variation for pianist Melvin Chen, Feed the Snakes, a drag-inspired Medusa aria with librettist Royce Vavrek for Heartbeat Opera’s Dragus Maximus, a 30-minute work for the Albany Symphony’s Water Music NY project commemorating the bicentennial of the Erie Canal, in collaboration with artists from Albany and Saratoga Springs, and music for Shaunette Renée Wilson’s short film Foxx n Wolfe. His piece A Twin Peaks Fantasy, written for the Dover Quartet based on music from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks and premiered in July 2017 at Chamber Music Northwest, was featured in the New York Times and WNYC’s Soundcheck. Dan’s A Demonstration was released on the album Dissections on New Amsterdam Records in March 2018. 

Dan performs regularly and remains dedicated to playing works of his contemporaries, and has collaborated with such luminaries as the Imani Winds, David Shifrin, Peter Wiley, and Ani Kavafian. Dan is pianist/harpsichordist and core member of the New York-based chamber ensemble Cantata Profana, and also also serves as rotating principal pianist of NOVUS NY, Trinity Wall Street’s contemporary focused orchestra.

Theatricality remains integral to Dan’s work. His opera and musical theater compositions include Once Five Years Pass, based on the play by Federico García Lorca and written for the Williamstown Theatre’s Fellowship Program, and Awful Event! Or the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln as Interpreted by the Internal Organs of His Wife, Mary Todd, workshopped at the Baryshnikov Arts Center through a Princess Grace Fellowship. In 2019, he was the pianist for Steven Spielberg’s upcoming film West Side Story. In April 2015, he music-directed and performed onstage in Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle at Yale Repertory Theatre, premiering a score by David Lang. Dan has a B.A. from Yale University and an M.M. and D.M.A. from the Yale School of Music, where he wrote his doctoral thesis on the music of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. Primary teachers have included Martin Bresnick, David Lang, Aaron Jay Kernis, and Christopher Theofanidis.

danschlosberg.com

Nicole cantos
Communications & development ASSOCIATE

nicole@heartbeatopera.org

Nicole brings a diverse skill set to the table. With a background in communications and marketing and a flair for creativity, she has successfully collaborated in impactful online campaigns while working at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and Women’s Community Justice Association. Leveraging the power of social media, engaging content, and innovative digital strategies, Nicole hopes to play a pivotal role in expanding Heartbeat Opera’s online presence.

Nikki Vera
arts Marketing specialist

marketing@heartbeatopera.org

Nikki Vera is a marketing strategist whose credits also include theatre creator, producer, community engager, and diversifier. She is a graduate of NYU Tisch Dramatic Writing program and holds a Master of Science in Direct and Interactive Marketing from Mercy College, which culminated in her thesis, A Millennial Broadway: How the Cultivation of Direct and Interactive Marketing techniques can optimize theatre revenue and increase audience attendance. She is a founding producer of Interfest, a three-day Arts and Ideas festival, co-creator of BLKSPACE, a residency of rest for Black artists, and has worked with MCC Theater, New York Theatre Workshop, LCT3, The Vineyard Theatre, Ars Nova, The Billie Holiday Theatre, HERE Arts, to name a few.

Aleba Gartner // Press Representative

Aleba & Co. is a New York City-based boutique public relations firm that specializes in adventurous arts and music programming. Since 1997 we have represented the full spectrum of classical, world and new music—artists, institutions and curators who both define and defy their categories.

Ethan Heard
Co-Founder & Former Artistic Director

Ethan Heard is a director, producer, and teacher who makes theater to build community and foster love. He co-founded Heartbeat Opera with Louisa Proske in 2014 and led the company for its first eight seasons, growing it into “an enterprise that, while small and still young, has already contributed more to opera’s vitality than most major American companies" (NYTimes). He recently became the Associate Artistic Director of Signature Theatre in Arlington, VA. With Heartbeat, his radical adaptation of Beethoven’s Fidelio (NYTimes Critic’s Pick), reenvisioned through the lens of Black Lives Matter, featured more than 100 incarcerated singers from six prison choirs and was profiled on NPR. Confronting other urgent issues such as Asian erasure (Butterfly) and climate collapse (Hot Mama: Singing Gays Saving Gaia), his operatic work is “incisive and inspired” (Opera News) and has been presented at BAM, The Met Museum, The Kennedy Center, The Broad Stage, and on NYC’s High Line. Other Heartbeat productions include: Breathing Free, Lady M, La Susanna, Dido & Aeneas, Kafka-Fragments, and seven drag extravaganzas. Other opera includes Truth & Reconciliation (Opera America), Desire|Divinity (Judson), Empty the House (Curtis), Sisyphus (Experiments in Opera), L’Orfeo (Yale), and Poppea (Princeton). He has also reimagined classic musicals and plays, casting Little Shop of Horrors’ Audrey II as a lip-syncing drag queen and Julius Caesar’s mob as social media users caught in a dangerous echo chamber. His interpretation of Sondheim (A Little Night Music, Into the Woods, Merrily We Roll Along, and Sunday in the Park with George) has been praised for its “emotional eloquence” (Boston Globe), and he has shepherded new works by Marisa Michelson, Mark Campbell, Rene Orth, Mel Marvin, Jonathan Levi, and Dan Schlosberg that explode traditional ideas of genre. Ethan is Co-Founder & Creative Director of Mind’s Eye Producing, and taught acting and directing at Yale for six years, where he earned his BA and MFA and began the beloved tradition of Yale School of Drag. ethanheard.com.

LOUISA PROSKE
CO-founder & Former Co-Artistic director

Louisa Proske brings her talent for creating vivid theatrical worlds, her raw passion and attention to detail to productions in opera, classical theatre and contemporary drama. She is a Princess Grace Award winner, a Musical America New Artist of the Month, the subject of a recent feature in Opernwelt, and the proud Founding Co-Artistic Director of Heartbeat Opera. 

Opera productions include The Mother of Us All (a historic collaboration between New York Philharmonic, Juilliard, Metropolitan Museum), Agrippina (Lincoln Center), La Bohème (Pittsburgh Festival Opera), Così fan tutte (LoftOpera), Rinaldo (Glimmerglass Festival Debut, postponed due to COVID-19) and many productions with Heartbeat: Der Freischütz (NYTimes Critic’s Pick), Don Giovanni, Carmen (featured in NYTimes ‘That Decisive Moment’), Lucia di Lammermoor, Daphnis & Chloé.

Theatre productions include The White Devil (Red Bull Theater - NYTimes Critic’s Pick), peerless (nominated for a Berkshire Theatre Award for Outstanding Direction), Gaslight, Engagements (Barrington Stage Company). 

Upcoming projects: The Extinctionist (Heartbeat Opera), Rigoletto (Oper Halle, Germany)

louisaproske.com