Are you girls new in town?

Both director Rae Robison and music director Elisabeth Harrington are in their second year of residence on the North Coast, and of teaching at HSU.

They’ve already been on North Coast stages: Rae Robison acted in the Shake the Bard production of Twelfth Night at the Arcata Playhouse this summer, and in last season’s HSU production of The School for Scandal, for which she also designed the costumes. In addition to two solo recitals at HSU, Elisabeth Harrington was seen and heard in the most recent Humboldt County Light Opera production, Titanic: The Musical.

Before joining the HSU Department of Theatre, Film & Dance, Rae Robison was a designer, director, actor and filmmaker as well as a teacher. She has been a part of over 150 stage productions in the U.S. and Europe, seven feature films and several television pilots. Two of her short films have gone to the Sundance Film festival, and one received awards at the Toronto Film Festival.

Her costume work with Walt Disney’s Imagineering can be seen at EuroDisney. She’s received numerous Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival recognitions for her work on seven productions at Central Missouri State University.

As a performer, soprano Elisabeth Harrington sang opera with the Aspen Music Festival Opera, the Sarasota Opera and other companies. In 1996 she was the North Carolina district winner for the Metropolitan Opera National Council auditions. But she also appeared in musical theatre, and for five years she sang and played flute in a blues and bluegrass band. Her musical interests include global music, which she first heard in college, when she earned her B.A. in music and anthropology.

As a teacher, she maintained a private voice studio and taught voice at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill for eight years. She earned her degrees in Voice Performance at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, and in Voice Performance and Pedagogy from the University of Colorado-Boulder. Now a member of the HSU Department of Music, she teaches voice and directs the Opera Workshop.