BIOGRAPHY

Erin Schwab is an American Soprano and Arts Administrator based in New Jersey. She is an experienced performer, arts administrator, and teaching artist with special interest in the intersection of the arts, social action, and interdisciplinary collaboration.

She holds a Bachelor’s and Master’s Degree in Music from Rutgers’ Mason Gross School of the Arts, where she studied Vocal Performance with Judith Nicosia and was the recipient of the Michael Fardink award for “Outstanding Vocalist” as well as the Olga Marsano Burian award for “Outstanding Achievement in Music”. She received further vocal and stage training through scholarships at Lorin and Dietlinde Maazel’s Castleton Festival, The Chautauqua Institution’s Opera Conservatory, and an artist residency at The Crested Butte Music Festival.

She is adept at multiple styles of singing and performance practice, ranging from the Renaissance through the 21st century, and has mounted many operatic roles; Susanna (W.A. Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro), Venus (John Blow’s Venus & Adonis), Soeur Constance (Francis Poulenc’s Les Dialogues des Carmélites), La Princesse (Maurice Ravel’s L'enfant et les sortilèges), Zan (Marc Blitzstein’s Regina), Ginevra (G.F. Handel’s Ariodante), Nanetta (Giuseppe Verdi’s Falstaff), Lucia (Benjamin Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia), Noémie (Jules Massenet’s Cendrillon) Lucy Lockit (Benjamin Britten’s The Beggar's Opera), and First Lady (W.A. Mozart’s The Magic Flute)

In June 2025, at the Irondale in Brooklyn, she originated the role of Ma (Margaret White) in No Man’s Land, a new opera by composer Whitney George. The work tells the story of a series of Faustian bargains made by a striving family during the Great Depression in Oklahoma’s panhandle. It explores themes of desperation and resilience, set to song in high relief against Dust Bowl, the most devastating man-made climate disaster in American history. Before that, in February 2025, she portrayed the role of the Sandman in Bronx Opera’s production of Hansel & Gretel. In 2024, she participated in the premiere of a devised opera by Director Jennifer Williams called Dis/Inform, created through a collaborative compositional process with an ensemble of musicians and visual artists, and generating a final performance around structured improvisation. The inspiration for Dis/Inform originated from Williams’ time spent volunteering with United Vision Project, a nonprofit organization working to forge meaningful dialogue between strangers in a fraught socio-political climate. The work shines a light on the global disinformation crisis through an intimate, human perspective.

On top of being an opera singer, Erin is also a highly accomplished and sought after concert soloist and choral singer. In fact, choir is really what started it all! Her serious vocal training began at the age of 14 when she joined the Lakeland Regional High School’s Chorale, Chamber Singers, and Jazz Choir. It was there, under the tutelage of Edward J. Dalton Jr., a Westminster Choir College Alumni, that she was exposed to proper choral singing technique and subsequently began to blossom as a soloist, performing major works such as Felix Mendelssohn’s cantata, Hear My Prayer (O for the Wings of a Dove) on tour at venues near home and abroad; in the UK (Salisbury Cathedral, Bath Abbey, and Christ Church Cathedral in Oxford), Québec (Notre-Dame Basilique and Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré) and Boston (Old North Church). It is also with the Lakeland Chorale that she first began performing at Carnegie Hall as a regular special guest of conductor John Rutter and MidAmerica Productions. At the age of 16, she was inspired to begin voice lessons in the private voice studio of Karen Beardsley Peters.

Erin received the first ever Edward J. Dalton Memorial Scholarship at the end of her senior year of high school following his death, and carried her love for choral singing through her undergraduate studies at Rutgers. There, she began studying with Dr. Patrick Gardner through Kirkpatrick Choir (KC), the most advanced vocal ensemble at Mason Gross. She was featured regularly as a soloist in Haydn’s Heiligmesse and Lord Nelson Mass, Fauré’s Requiem, Steven Sametz’s Three Mystical Choruses, Arthur Honneger’s King David (The Death of David), and more. By the time she had finished her undergrad degree, she had multiple performances with KC at Lincoln Center and the New Jersey Performing Arts Center under her belt. After graduating, she was invited back many times by Dr. Gardner to perform alongside KC as an ensemble member and soloist, as well as with his group in NYC, the Riverside Choral Society (RCS). In recent years with RCS, she has performed the soprano solos in Fauré’s Requiem, Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms, and Britten’s Rejoice in the Lamb. In April 2024, she sang the soprano solo at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall for their performance of John Luther Adams’ Night Peace, and in December 2024, she was honored to sing one of solos in Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy on the eve of Dr. Gardner’s official retirement. In Fall 2025, she will be working as a Soprano Choral Scholar with the Ridgewood, NJ-based Ars Musica Chorale, where she has been involved since 2023. Since 2010, she has served as the primary soloist and Soprano section leader at the Community Presbyterian Church in Ringwood, NJ. She has also found a liturgical home at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Westfield, NJ where she frequently participates in Evensong and their Steeple Concerts masterwork series.

Erin’s profound passion for music has led her to pursue a career working in arts administration roles alongside her singing endeavors, encompassing aspects of marketing, development, event production, chorus management, and beyond. For Erin, working to sustain and promote the arts began with admin internships taken on during her graduate studies, first with Carl Fischer Music Publishing in NYC and then the Mayo Performing Arts Center in Morristown, NJ. Also around that same time, she became more active as a teaching artist and as an admin in an academic setting while teaching a vocal class for undergraduates at Rutgers New Brunswick and serving as a T.A. for the Rutgers University Choir. From 2015-2019, she returned to her roots to serve as Assistant Choral Director for the Lakeland Regional High School Chorale, joining them for tours to Canada, Maryland, and Carnegie Hall.

Today, Erin works as the Executive Director of Skylands Music Academy, a tuition-free after-school program offering vocal and handbell choirs for students grades 1 through 8, and soon expanding to include an adult community chorus. She also serves as a board member for the Ringwood Friends of Music, an organization that she’s performed and volunteered with since her teen years. Since 2023, she has chaired the Ringwood Friends of Music Youth Performance Festival, an annual opportunity for Northern New Jersey students to share their music in a non-competitive and supportive environment.

Erin is also the current Director of Design for PROTESTRA (protest + orchestra), a nonprofit organization with the mission of educating audiences about social justice issues through the context of classical music, all while raising important funds for the causes from which the concerts’ themes are based. From 2022–2025 she sang with and served as the Chorus Manager for Downtown Voices, a semiprofessional choir in NYC conducted by Stephen Sands, made up of volunteer singers and professional members of the Trinity Choir. During her time there, the group saw their Carnegie Hall premiere with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of JoAnn Falletta, and became GRAMMY-nominated in the category of Best Choral Performance for their work on the world premiere of Benedict Sheehan’s oratorio, Akathist.

She is the former Marketing & Communications Director for Music in the Somerset Hills, and the former Marketing Coordinator for The Art School at Old Church, two more local North Jersey nonprofit organizations that hold a very special place in her heart. Other organizations with which she has had the pleasure of working as an administrator and teaching artist include Curtain Up Studios, Aspire Performing Arts Company, and Sound Imagination.