Susan Williams Soprano

Susan Williams, soprano, has performed nationally and internationally in a wide range of leading opera roles and as a vocal soloist.  In Brasilia, Brazil, she performed at Casa Thomas Jefferson, the French Embassy to Brazil, and performed and gave masterclasses at the Universidade de Brasilia, and Escola de Música. In 2024 she performed and taught at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. In 2019, she performed with the President’s Orchestra of Tajikistan through the Pitch Pipe Foundation and traveled to Kathmandu, Nepal at the invitation of the U.S. Embassy to teach masterclasses and participate in panel discussions at various academic and cultural institutions in the city. She has made three trips to Havana, Cuba where she performed at the Sala de conciertos Ignacio Cervantes, lectured, and taught master classes with students at the Instituto Superior de Arte and researched Cuban Art Song. Twice she has toured in Kolkata, India as part of a series of concerts sponsored by Kolkata Classics. During a sabbatical research trip in 2022, she guest lectured at The Royal Irish Academy of Music and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.

In 2018, she performed with Mississippi Opera in their review of the music of Gilbert & Sullivan. With the Duke Symphony Orchestra, she has sung Despina in Così fan tutte, Gretel in Hansel and Gretel, Barbarina in Le nozze di Figaro, and Sophie in excerpts from Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier. For Opera Birmingham, she sang the Erste Knabe in Die Zauberflöte and the title role in over 30 performances of Barab’s Little Red Riding Hood. She toured northeast Ohio with Lyric Opera Cleveland’s Overturesand with Cleveland Opera as Adina in The Elixir of Love. In Florida, she was soprano soloist in Mozart’s Requiem with the Master Chorale of South Florida, Mahler’s Fourth Symphony with the Frost Symphony Orchestra, and Brahms’s Liebeslieder Waltzes for Miami’s Mainly Mozart Festival.

Under the baton of Franz Welser-Möst, she performed in The Cleveland Orchestra’s production of Le nozze di Figaro. As a soloist with the Tuscaloosa Symphony, she has performed Bach’s Cantata Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen, BWV 51, the Schubert Mass in G, and Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She has also been a soloist with the Newport Symphony, Akron Symphony, the Cleveland Pops Orchestra, the Cleveland Bach Consort, the Huxford Symphony, and the Johnson City Symphony. In Graz, Austria, she sang the soprano solos in Mozart’s Coronation Mass and was a finalist in the Meistersinger Competition at the American Institute of Musical Studies.

A graduate of Birmingham-Southern College, she earned a master’s degree at the University of Akron, and her Doctor of Musical Arts degree at the Cleveland Institute of Music under the guidance of Mary Schiller. At Vanderbilt University, she was a member of the prestigious National Association of Teachers of Singing internship program where she worked under master teacher Kenneth Bozeman. Dr. Williams joined the University of Alabama faculty in 2012 and received tenure and promotion to Associate Professor in 2019. Prior to her position at the University of Alabama, Dr. Williams was a member of the voice faculty at the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music. She has also been a faculty artist for the Bassi Brugnatelli International Conducting and Singing Symposium in Robbiate, Italy.  She is active in the Alabama and Southeastern Regional Chapters of the National Association of Teachers of Singing and The National Opera Association. In addition to teaching voice at UA, she teaches the voice pedagogy courses, oversees the UA Voice Lab, and is co-Coordinator of the voice area. 

She is a 2023-2025 fellow with UA’s Collaborative Arts Research Initiative (CARI). Her scholarly interests include using body movement systems and integrating virtual anatomy technologies to enhance student learning in the studio. Her articles can be found in The Journal of Singing and Voice Prints: Journal of the New York Singing Teacher’s Association (NYSTA). Dr. Williams earned her 200-hour Registered Yoga Teacher certification at Samahita Retreat, Koh Samui, Thailand. With a teacher enrichment grant from Music Teacher’s National Association, she completed a 100-hour pranayama course, a yogic system of breathwork.