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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, and more!
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 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
We are the System: Reclaiming Our Industry from Within
9-10:15 a.m. | Salon AB
Featuring Michelle Markwart Deveaux
We who work with the voice hold together the entire musical ecosystem. Yet we’ve been taught to measure our worth by individual visibility and prestige, a lie that fractures our collective power and fails the singers we serve.
What if the system changes when we practice integrity as fiercely as we defend our legitimacy?
This session challenges voice professionals to examine how, despite our good intentions, we perpetuate the system and problems we claim to oppose. Through facilitated dialogue and reflective practice, we will move from competition to connection, from waiting for permission to claiming our power, and from individual achievement to collective transformation.
You will leave with practical strategies for immediate action, clarity about where your power lies, and an understanding of why we are the ones who must remake this industry from within. Not a distant institution. Us. This is the conversation only we can have, and it begins here.
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.
