Lourdes Rodriguez from Hyattsville, Maryland, is a twenty-one-year-old coloratura soprano pursuing a career as a professional opera singer. She is in the final year of her Bachelor of Music degree in voice performance at Shenandoah Conservatory, where she will graduate this spring. In March 2023, she received third place in Friday Morning Music Club’s Sue Goetz Ross Competition in Bethesda, Maryland. In November 2022, Lourdes won first place in the undergraduate voice category of Shenandoah Conservatory’s Student Soloists Competition. She performed in the winner’s concert with the Shenandoah Conservatory Symphony Orchestra in February 2023. Lourdes’s most recent roles sung in her time at Shenandoah Conservatory include Titine in Germaine Tailleferre’s Le Pauvre Eugénie in Shenandoah Conservatory’s The New World of Opera, Nikki Giovanni in Hydrogen Jukebox, and most recently, Cobweb as well as covering Titania and Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Last summer at the Vienna Summer Music Festival in Vienna, Austria, Lourdes covered Zerlina in Mozart’s Don Giovanni and sang the roles of Venus in Pluto by Michael J. Polo and Bird Peddler in Mondo Novo by Paul Richards. In January 2023, she performed in concert as a recipient of the Wednesday Music Club Music Major scholarship in Charlottesville, Virginia. In Fall 2023, Lourdes will be joining the Maryland Opera Studio at The University of Maryland to fulfill her master’s degree in voice performance. She thanks her professors, friends and family for their support throughout the last four years!