Board of Directors
Thérèse Esperdy, Board Chair
Thérèse retired from a global investment banking career and now serves as an independent chairman and director on a number of corporate boards. Her many years in banking were counterbalanced by her passion and support for the arts. She is a member of the RSC (Royal Shakespeare Company) America board and was a board member of the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) from 2010-2020. She has loved opera since she was a child and was immediately smitten with Heartbeat’s vision, vibrancy and artistry.
Sonja BerggRen
Sonja Berggren is a theatre advocate, actor, director, and producer who lives in Long Beach, CA, and Cambridge, MA. She spent a year as a special research fellow in directing at the Yale School of Drama in 2012-13 and never really left. Sonja co-founded Panndora Productions in 2003, a company dedicated to supporting playwrights and encouraging the development of new plays. Panndora recently wrapped after 20 years, closing Panndora’s Box New Works Festival (for now). In addition to Heartbeat Opera, Sonja sits on the Board of Fringe Benefits (promoting theatre for social justice). She is a member of the Yale School of Drama Board of Advisors and Rattlestick Theatre’s Advisory Board. Sonja was the founding board president of Westerly School, the first independent K-8 school in Long Beach. Sonja and her husband Patrick Seaver have actively supported opera in Long Beach and Los Angeles. Born and raised in Ojai, CA, Sonja is a reformed lawyer and partner at Latham & Watkins, specializing in labor law. She is the proud mother of three grown children and a happy grandmother to four and more.
LIZ DIAMOND
Liz Diamond is the Chair of Directing at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University and Resident Director at Yale Repertory Theatre. Among many productions she has directed at Yale Rep and nationally are premieres by playwrights Nilo Cruz, Marcus Gardley, Suzan-Lori Parks, Anna Deavere Smith, and Octavio Solis, and productions of classical and modern works by Stravinsky, Shakespeare, Euripides, Sophocles, Shaw, Racine, Molière, Beckett, and Brecht. Her work has garnered OBIE awards and Connecticut Critics Circle Awards. Liz is honored to serve on the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers Executive Board, and on the Boards of Heartbeat Opera and the Krymov Lab NYC.
Stephen M. Foster
After international career stints in banking, law, publishing and the arts, I am now “in retreat,” as the French say, but still on the battlefield, pursuing a third, 18th century historic preservation project and supporting fantastic organizations like Heartbeat Opera. I was sold on Heartbeat thirty minutes into attending my first performance (Lucia, 2015). This is a spirited and immensely talented company with an inspired, singular vision for opera theatre in the 21st century. As a board member, I hope to help in a modest way to see that vision fully realized… in New York, across the USA, and beyond.
DEBRA VALENTINE
Debra Valentine recently served as the senior independent director and Chair of the Remuneration Committee at Lamprell plc. From 2008-2016 she was the first global General Counsel at Rio Tinto, a leading FTSE 100 company, and then its Group Executive, Legal & Regulatory Affairs. Earlier, Debra worked for over two decades in Washington DC, where she was a partner with the law firm O’Melveny & Myers and served as General Counsel at the Federal Trade Commission from 1997 to 2001.
She is the Chair of the Board of the Touchstones Discussion Project and a Trustee of the Glimmerglass Festival and was a board member of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative and on the North American Advisory Council for Chatham House. She has an AB magna cum laude from Princeton University, a JD from Yale Law School, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the American Law Institute.
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 is now the Associate Artistic Director of Signature Theatre in Arlington, VA, where he has directed Pacific Overtures, The Bridges of Madison County, and Which Way to the Stage. 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 Madame Butterfly (Opera Philadelphia), 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 has established herself as a versatile, visionary director and arts leader in the US and Europe. As a director, she brings her talent for creating vivid theatrical worlds, her raw passion and attention to detail to productions in opera, musical, classical theater and contemporary drama. Since the 2021/22 season, she is the Associate Artistic Director and Resident Director (stellvertretende Intendantin und Hausregisseurin) at Oper Halle, Germany. During her tenure there together with Intendant Walter Sutcliffe, the company has already won a prestigious DER FAUST Theaterpreis (Faust theater prize 2022), and the 2023 Handel Festival Halle, for which Louisa directed the opening production, has been nominated for an International Opera Award. Louisa is also the Co-Founder and former Co-Artistic Director of the critically acclaimed NYC-based Heartbeat Opera — “an enterprise that, while small and still young, has already contributed more to opera’s vitality than most major American companies,” according to The New York Times. She is the recipient of a 2018 Princess Grace Award, has been featured as the Musical America New Artist of the Month and was the subject of a portrait in Opernwelt.
For two years in a row, her productions (Serse, Amadigi di Gaula) have opened the International Händelfestpiele Halle. Other opera productions include Rusalka (Oper Regensburg), Rinaldo (Glimmerglass Festival), Le Roi Arthus (BARD SummerScape), The Mother of Us All (New York Times #1 Classical Music event of 2020 and a historic three way collaboration between Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Philharmonic, Juilliard Vocal Arts), Il Barbiere di Siviglia, Into the Woods and Rigoletto (all Oper Halle), Agrippina (Lincoln Center Debut - Carnegie Hall/ Juilliard Vocal Arts), Der Freischütz, Don Giovanni, Carmen and Lucia di Lammermoor (all Heartbeat Opera).
Upcoming projects: Gypsy (Oper Halle), Primero Sueño (world premiere by Paola Prestini and Magos Herrera at MetLiveArts New York City), Tosca (opening production of the Glimmerglass Festival 50th Anniversary season) as well as house debuts at Detroit Opera and Aalto Theater Essen.
Robert Fitzpatrick (Emeritus)
Robert Fitzpatrick, Heartbeat Opera’s first board chair, was a legendary figure. A dedicated mentor to Heartbeat’s leadership, Bob transformed our company early on through the sheer force of his belief that a small company like ours had the artistic ambition and integrity to be worthy of the support an attention that he had spent his life giving to some of the greatest artist of the 20th and 21st centuries. Bob believed in commitments of intensity not of duration and this was reflected in his multiple and sometimes dual careers: Dean of Students at Johns Hopkins University while serving as an elected Member of the Baltimore City Council, President of California Institute of the Arts and Director the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival, a 10-week international festival of performances preceding the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, and subsequently Director of the Los Angeles Festival in 1987. From 1987 he became CEO of Euro Disney Resort, overseeing the creation and opening of Paris Disneyland.
In 1995 he was named Dean of Columbia University’s School of the Arts. In 1998, he became Director and CEO of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. In 2008 he became an art consultant and also began mentoring pro bono individuals beginning their careers or changing careers. Bob changed our lives. He served fiercely on our board until his recent passing. We miss him dearly.