Marianna Mott Newirth is a New York based opera librettist and creative producer. Having spent well over a decade honing her craft writing pieces that were workshopped from Toronto to Munich, Marianna is immensely pleased to premiere two new mainstage American operas in 2024: TOUCH with composer/co-librettist Carla Lucero at Opera Birmingham and Mechanisms with composer J.E. Hernández at Opera Theatre of St Louis as part of the second cohort of the New Works Collective.

She’s an active member of PAGES playwrights in New York City and currently serves as president of the New York Opera Alliance (NYOA) as an advocate for strengthening performing arts, post-pandemic. She’s curated white papers, written articles for HowlRound Theatre Commons and was in the inaugural cohort of the BMP Producer’s Academy in 2020. Later, Marianna studied puppetry with Sandglass Theater, held a libretto fellowship with Really Spicy Opera and studied libretti with Guerilla Opera. In 2022, she co-founded NYC’s first disability-affirmative opera company, Opera Praktikos (OPrak) and mounted a production of Handel’s Orlando in a community garden on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. OPrak was recently nominated for an OPERA America DEiO award for the filmed version of that production.

For more information, visit 17tothe6.com/marianna-mott-newirth and www.wordperson.art.