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Plenary Sessions
Featuring the conference’s primary guest artists and presenters. Included with registration.
Saturday, July 4, 2026
Opening Ceremony: Our Mosaic of Music
9-11 a.m. | SALON I
Featuring Rafael Moras, Alamo City Street Choir, San Antonio Chamber Choir, Wonder Theatre, Children’s Chorus of San Antonio, and Mariachi Las Alteñas!
Presiding: Alexis Davis-Hazell, NATS President
The 59th NATS National Conference opens with a vibrant celebration of singing, community, and cultural heritage in the heart of San Antonio. In honor of the 250th anniversary of the United States, this inspiring program reflects the rich mosaic of traditions that shape both the nation and this historic city.
The opening ceremony features a dynamic lineup of regional artists known for artistic excellence and community engagement, including acclaimed artist Rafael Moras; the Children’s Chorus of San Antonio; a specially curated theatrical vignette by Wonder Theatre; select singers from the San Antonio Chamber Choir in collaboration with the Alamo City Street Singers, plus a local mariachi ensemble and more! Together, these artists offer a moving and festive beginning to the conference as we celebrate our shared musical diversity, professional connection and collaboration, and the transformative power of singing.
The Alamo City Street Singers’ performance is made possible through the generous support of the Texoma Region BOC.
The Vulnerable Mosaic: Sustaining the Voices That Carry Our Musical Traditions
12:30-2 p.m. | SALON I
Featuring Kourtney Strade Austin, Margaret Baroody, Elizabeth Benson, and Lesley Childs
Singers hold a unique place in our musical ecosystem — their instruments are internal, expressive, and deeply tied to identity. This cross-disciplinary plenary session examines why supporting vocal health is both an artistic and cultural imperative. Singers face distinct challenges in academic and professional contexts. These challenges often intersect with issues of workload, training environments, access to care, and persistent misconceptions about voice function and fatigue.
Bridging research and clinical practice, panelists will offer holistic, actionable strategies for fostering voice wellness across academic, studio, and professional settings. They will outline emerging trends in performing arts health and address the systemic factors that shape how we understand and support the vocal demands of singers.
This session will introduce a landmark position paper on voice health, authored by a multidisciplinary convergence group and debuted at the 2025 Global Summit on Occupational Health in Music. Developed in partnership with the Oxford Handbook of Musician Health Advocacy, the paper outlines evidence-informed priorities for strengthening voice wellness across training and performance settings.
This initiative calls the NATS community to action: to protect, sustain, and uplift the voices at the heart of our musical heritage, ensuring healthy performance practices for generations to come.
Sunday, July 5, 2026
Building Community Through Small Actions: How Voice Professionals Create Systemic Change
9-10:15 a.m. | Salon I
Featuring Michelle Markwart Deveaux
Voice professionals have more collective power than we realize! Understanding how that power works changes everything. This session celebrates what becomes possible when we move from working in isolation to coordinating our strengths across the entire voice industry.
You'll discover research-backed insights that explain why people naturally divide, how understanding different business models builds respect across contexts, and what small coordinated actions can accomplish when groups of any size make them together.
Drawing on systems theory, group psychology, and organizational behavior, you'll gain practical frameworks you can use immediately in your studio, department, or professional relationships. It’s incredible what becomes possible when we understand how communities create change together. You'll leave feeling empowered by your role in your connected professional ecosystems, equipped with actionable strategies for building collaboration, and hopeful about what we can accomplish when we recognize our collective strength.
This is an invitation to see ourselves as the connected community that makes beautiful musical moments possible. Together, we're exactly the right size to create the future we want to see.
Monday, July 6, 2026
Bridging Bel Canto and Billboard: Integrating Classical Craft and Popular Music Practice
9:30-11 a.m. | SALON I
Featuring Lyndia Johnson
In this academically grounded, industry infused Plenary Session, Lyndia Johnson, also known as “MzLyndia” — a conservatory trained opera singer turned global vocal coach and vocal producer — reveals the pedagogical divide between classical training and the contemporary music industry. Drawing on 25 years in major label studios, world tour rehearsals, and artist development rooms, she demonstrates how popular voice pedagogy requires distinct physiological, stylistic, cultural, and technological fluencies that extend beyond traditional Bel Canto frameworks. Through live coaching of classical and contemporary volunteers, participants will experience how studio ready vocals emerge from microphone artistry, session workflow, stylistic authenticity, and identity driven artistic choices. Featuring music from emerging artists and insights from Grammy Award-winning collaborators, MzLyndia also explores the expanded role of the modern voice expert — part pedagogue, part producer, part creative strategist. This session invites educators to reconsider long held assumptions and embrace the evolving realities of the artists they serve, offering a rigorous and forward thinking model for contemporary voice training.
Closing Ceremony: A Musical Mosaic
4-6 p.m. | SALON I
Featuring 2026 NATS Artist Award Winner Josefina Maldonado, 2026 National Musical Theatre Competition Winner Olivia Hellman, and a collaborative performance of Bernstein's Songfest
The conference concludes with an afternoon of music celebrating the transformative power of singing! Featured artists include 2026 NATS Artist Award winner Josefina Maldonado and 2026 National Musical Theatre Competition winner Olivia Hellmann, plus a collaborative performance from our very own NATS members. The program will culminate with selections from Bernstein’s Songfest, a 12-movement work commissioned for America’s Bicentennial. It presents a kaleidoscope of American poetry — from the early Puritan voice of Anne Bradstreet to contemporary writers like June Jordan and Lawrence Ferlinghetti — exploring themes of love, loss, identity, and artistic truth. Bernstein’s music mirrors these tensions: celebratory yet questioning, personal yet collective. Don’t miss this fitting and powerful ending as we reflect on our time together and look toward the future.
