ORIGINAL VISION V: MENAGERIE
MEET THE TEAM!
Original Vision is Overtone Industries’ annual incubator program dedicated to developing and presenting original stories of mythic proportion through new and innovative opera-theater.
CAST
Kevin Darnell Allen
Kevin Darnell Allen is a fusion artist - combining a classical music education with his contemporary background. As a graduate of USC’s Thornton School of Music, he’s known for his baritone vocals and deep understanding of the voice shown in his arrangements for contemporary a cappella and jazz groups. Allen has contributed his vocals to projects like Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, CREED III, and Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, and has collaborated with artists like Rihanna, Hozier, Jennifer Hudson, and Pentatonix.
As a composer and songwriter, Allen creates romantic soundscapes with therapeutic lyrics. These skills are showcased in his music under the artist name DARNELL with releases like “Letter From Your Future Self” which is currently an entry in NPR’s Tiny Desk Contest. He has also thrived in the classical realm both as a soloist and choral artist, having performed at Chicago Symphony, Disney Hall, the Hollywood Bowl, and across Italy and Ireland.
Nelle June Anderson
Nelle June Anderson happens opera, experimental music, singer-songwriting, energy work, and performance art. She made our operatic debut with the American Symphony Orchestra and has sung with Juno Award-winning baroque orchestra Ensemble Caprice (Ramiro, Motezuma North American tour) and Grammy Award-winning PARTCH Ensemble as Marilyn Monroe/S in LSD—Huxley’s Last Trip (LeBaron), for which we “stunned with her buttery tone” (San Francisco Classical Voice). Her compositions has been performed at REDCAT, Center for the Performing Arts Minneapolis, and in streets, praised for their “production trickery” and “graceful experimentation” (Recording Artists Guild). She happened in Oracle Egg BROILER Residency; HERE BE SIRENS, The Seven Deadly Sins (CalArts); dancer-vocalist (Neoma Butoh, Electric Lodge Daredevil Festival, Philosophical Research Society); improvising saxophonist (soundpedro Season Opening 2025); durational performance art (Torrance Art Museum, NOMAD IV/TRYST 2025); Kurt Cobain’s screaming ghost (Reisig and Taylor Contemporary, Matthew McGaughey, Staged.). We/she/from/inside Minneapolis, Bard College, CalArts, Los Angeles, Ann Arbor. www.nellejanderson.com
COMPOSERS & LIBRETTISTS
Liz Eldridge
Liz Eldridge is an actor, writer, musician, and stand-up from LA. Television and film work includes “I’m Dying Up Here,” “Spit Me Out,” “Queenpins,” “The Affair,” “Devs,” “Rutherford Falls,” “The Middle,” “Silicon Valley,” “In Order To Be Here,” “Hannah Montana,” and many others; she has worked as an actor and composer with LA theaters from Musical Theatre West to the Getty Villa; from the Walt Disney Concert Hall to the top of Mt. Wilson to the Smell, and everywhere in between. Her most recent musical, “Space Rock Opera,” was the winner of the Loud Artist and Encore Awards from Cat’s Crawl and was nominated for the Best Musical and Playwright’s Promise awards at Hollywood Fringe 2025—look out for the soundtrack on vinyl this Summer. She won the 2025 Stage Raw Award for Best Original Music for her songs and score of “The Unraveling” by Katherine Noon. Her next play with music, “Larger Language Mycelium Model” will be developed with the Ghost Road Company in 2026. www.lizeldridge.com
Kion Heidari
Kion Heidari is a Los Angeles-based vocal artist, composer, musician, and actor. Kion loves to bring detail, subtlety, and depth to his artistry both in performance and creation. He performs in new opera and musical theatre productions and specializes in contemporary, folk, and classical styles.
Past credits include The Joining (Synchromy, 2025), At War With Ourselves (2025, as a soloist with Kronos Quartet), Bending the River (Overtone Industries, 2025), Randy Newman’s ‘Faust’ at the Soraya (2024, as a featured soloist), Songs and Dances of Imaginary Lands (Overtone Industries, 2024), and The Conference of the Birds (Resonance Collective, 2022). Ensembles he sings with include HEX, Tonality, and the Los Angeles Master Chorale. Kion is also a voice actor for games and animation, film actor, and puppeteer.
O-Lan Jones
O-Lan Jones (performer, composer, stage director) is an award-winning composer, sound designer, writer, actress and theater visionary who has been experimenting in the performing arts her entire life. The press has called her an, “uncategorizable legend.” She founded Overtone Industries in 1980 to develop and produce new and original opera-theater works. Her early achievements forged the path for modern, experimental opera companies to continue challenging the antiquated perceptions of the art form.
As founder and Artistic Director of Overtone, she leads the vision for new works and is focused on fostering a collaborative environment where she and other artists work together to give voice to their authentic stories. She is dedicated to mentoring and supporting fellow creatives, who also refuse to be confined to boundaries, through Overtone’s Original Vision Project. She is also the Choir Director of Lauren Bon’s Metabolic Studio Community Choir. www.o-lanjones.com
Elliot Menard
Elliot Menard (performer, producer) is a performer-composer and opera-maker. She creates, composes, and performs in interdisciplinary opera-theater projects that experiment with narrative and musical form. In her compositional practice, she explores how text allows music to emerge, the expressive range of the voice, and the latent music within Latin poetry. Drawing from her background in classical philology (B.A. Classics, Reed College) and classical voice (M.F.A. Voice Arts, CalArts), this “archaeological excavation” of sound is an abstract form of translation, focusing on the spaces between words and the multiplicity of interpretation. In her original work, she aims to strike the right balance between clarity and abstraction, intention and intuition, statements and questions.
Next up: Sulpicia Songs, May 9, 8pm, Oracle Egg — an opera-theater fever dream about being caught between an ancient and future self in the endless process of “coming of age.” umbraopera.com
George Landau-Pincus
George Landau-Pincus (librettist) is a multidisciplinary artist and archivist based in Brooklyn. His art practice includes poetry, collage, comics, crafting, puppet design, music, and visual art. He is interested in the interplay of analog and digital mediums, treating “lowbrow” art as both inspiration and interlocutor, and work that engages seriously with archival primary sources.
His most recent archival work explores ideas of archival and curatorial alienation, specifically in performing arts archives, diving into the Brechtian murkiness that separates a performance from its recorded memory.
Samara Rice
Samara Rice (composer) is an award-winning contemporary classical composer, pianist, toy pianist, and educator known for her inventive, textural sound world. Her music has been performed throughout the United States, Europe, and Australia by leading ensembles and GRAMMY® Award–winning artists, and at numerous new music festivals. She creates immersive works that blend unconventional instruments, technology, and audience participation, and is co-founder of the SonicMvmtScapes GPS-triggered sound walk series. Samara mentors young musicians through community organizations and her private lesson studio.
In addition to her creative work, she has held production roles with the Ojai Music Festival and the Grand Teton Music Festival, and served on the board of directors of the American Composers Forum–Los Angeles. When not composing, she enjoys reading, thrifting, and practicing yoga.
Murphy Severtson
Murphy Severtson (composer) is a performance artist, composer, and teaching artist whose work is inspired by queer and trans joy and despair, climate change, Florida, crustaceans, breath, and repetition. As part of the first cohort of the Trans History Project, Baltimore Center Stage and Breaking the Binary Theatre, Murphy is devising and creating music with Mirage Auto Depot on LES BI(T)CHES, a trans-historical experiment spiraling around gender-nonconforming lesbian artists Claude Cahun and Romaine Brooks. As an assistant, Murphy works for Kristin Marting’s Torches Project, a series of 36+ interviews that are part memoir, part oral history, and part cultural inquiry.
Other recent projects include performing at The Brick Aux in Mack Lawrence’s DINNER, and production assistant for Paul Pinto’s Mano a Mano at La MaMa. An avid and passionate educator, they work as a teaching artist at the New York Philharmonic’s Very Young Composers Program, Little Orchestra, and Opera on Tap. murphysevertson.com
Brian Sonia-Wallace
Brian Sonia-Wallace (librettist) is frequently late and always eulogizing the dead. He has spent the last decade writing poems for people who need them. This is his second libretto for opera, in memoriam of his friend Robbie Cunningham, who, before he died said, “I want to declare war on time. You’re a poet, you should be able to help.”
This work follows a decade of collaboration with composer Saunder Choi of choral songs about ecology, resistance, and reinvention, which have premiered nationally at the Kennedy Center, Walt Disney Concert Hall, and other fancy places. Brian is so fancy, he was the Poet Laureate of West Hollywood. He is the author of The Poetry of Strangers and most recently Maze Mouth. People think he’s great. He is gay and tired.
CREATIVE TEAM
Ella Fornoff
Livia Reiner
Livia Reiner (stage director) is a director, dramaturge, and performer based in Los Angeles. She grew up working with O-Lan Jones and Overtone Industries on pieces including Songs and Dances of Imaginary Lands, The Woman in the Wall, and Cynosemma. Recently she assistant directed the world premiere of Overtone’s ICELAND at La Mama’s Ellen Stewart Theater. She has also been an assistant to MacArthur Fellow Annie Dorsen for workshops of Prometheus Firebringer, and her voice was featured in its off-Broadway run at Theater for a New Audience. Composition credits include original music in The Measures Taken (Exponential Festival 2022); recent performance credits include [orpheus] (Highways 2025).
She also writes original songs and plays with her sister Rose Reiner and her band M0NOGAMY. She’s a graduate of the University of Chicago.
Fahad Siadat
Fahad Siadat is a “fanciful and downright utopian artist and thinker” (LA Times), Fahad Siadat explores sound as spiritual practice, creating interdisciplinary pieces as a vehicle for unveiling the mystery of our interconnected world. His music is described as “evoking wonder, desire, and terror” (Off Broadway) with narratives that “border on being a spiritual journey” (LA Dance Chronicle). and has been presented by the L.A. County Museum of Art, Broadstage, and Museum of Contemporary Art.
Working as a performer, composer, conductor, and curator, Fahad is the director of the Resonance Collective and the award-winning vocal ensemble HEX. His music has been performed in Europe, China, and across the United States.
(lighting designer) bio coming soon
Danica Martino
Danica Martino (costume designer) Recent design credits include: The Little Mermaid (Playhouse Stage Co.) Angel in the Ashes (La Mama) Much Ado About Nothing (Sun Valley Shakespeare Festival), Mikvah Girls (Hollywood Fringe), Wheels on the Bus (Pasadena Playhouse), Grumpy Monkey (Pasadena Playhouse), Film: Dead Man (Music Video for Alessia Cara), True Heiress Vs. Fake Queen Bee (Reelshort), Bound by Honor (Reelshort) I Watched You Become Death (Feature Film), A Place Where Horses Die (Feature Film). She received her MFA from CalArts. www.danicamartino.com
W. Alejandro Melendez
Alejandro Melendez (Lighting Designer) is a first-generation Latiné designer working in theatre, opera, and live events. Recent credits include a disability-affirmative production of A Midsummer Night's Dream for Phamaly Theatre Company at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts and the West Coast premiere of Dutch Masters at the Odyssey Theatre. He is a 2024 USITT Emerging Creative, a 2023 ETC Fred Foster Mentee, and was selected to take part in the 2023 Latinx Theatre Commons Colaboratorio. Alejandro holds an MFA in Experience Design & Production from CalArts and a BA in Theatre from MSU Denver.
Jan Munroe
(SCENIC DESIGNER/BUILDER) has been involved with the creation and performance of new work wearing many hats since early studies with Marcel Marceau and Etienne Decroux. A founding member of THE MYSTIC KNIGHTS OF THE OINGO-BOINGO, he is a recipient of eleven L.A. Weekly and Drama-Logue awards, an Ovation award, two NEA Theatre fellowships, a CAC "New Genre" fellowship and a Rockefeller Playwright's fellowship. As an actor, he has appeared on TV (This Is Us, Criminal Minds, Brooklyn 99, etc.), in movies (A Few Good Men, Catch Me If You Can, Ford V Ferrari) and in many stage projects. OTHER DESIGNS: John O'Keefe's ALL NIGHT LONG and DON'T YOU EVER CALL ME ANYTHING BUT MOTHER (also directed), THE VIBRATOR PLAY, MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM, TO THE BONE and most recently BROWNSTONE (all for OPEN FIST), Playwrights’ Arena’s A HIT DOG WILL HOLLER, Ron Sossi's ELEPHANT SHAVINGS at the Odyssey and A GOOD GUY at Rogue Machine.