Mr. Wolfe-Hughes comes to Birmingham after fourteen seasons with Fort Worth Opera, first as Managing Director since 2001 then as Executive Director as of March 2014. He also served as the former Artistic Director of the Fort Worth Men’s Chorus, and was appointed as Interim Director of the Opera Studio at Texas Christian University. During his tenure at Fort Worth Opera, Mr. Wolfe-Hughes developed a number of expanded training programs for area young artists, including the development of the Fort Worth Opera Studio and formulated “The Ten Commandments of Auditions” with General Director Darren K. Woods, which was featured in Classical Singer magazine. Recent programming included strategic planning for singers in master classes and seminars, and served as a panelist for Opera America, presenting both the strategic planning process as well as how technology can be used to streamline the artistic process.

Previously, Mr. Wolfe-Hughes served for seven years as the General Manager of the Seagle Music Colony in upstate New York, the oldest young artist training program in the United States, where he returned to conduct Mark Adamo’s Lysistrata, and workshops of Jorge Martín’s Before Night Falls and Joe Illick’s Bliss. Mr. Wolfe-Hughes holds both bachelors and masters degrees in education and opera. Prior to moving into arts administration, he performed with the Virginia Opera, the Washington Opera, the Virginia Symphony, the Shreveport Symphony, and the Virginia Pro Musica. Among his roles, favorites include Tamino in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, Nemorino in Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore, and Nanki-poo in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado. Mr. Wolfe-Hughes was identified as the result of a national search conducted by Margaret Genovese of Genovese Vanderhoof and Associates of Toronto, the continent’s leading search firm in the field of opera.