About

Thriving in her thirties, Marie Engle is a performer, educator and creative pursuing opera, improv comedy and experimental combinations of the two to make you laugh, cry, and think. Hopefully.

In the realm of classical music, Marie has performed opera, art song, improvisation, and chamber music, as well as producing concerts and teaching. She has always been loud, so she found a good outlet for that with opera. She made a smash debut as Dorabella with OperaDelaware in 2022, where she was lauded for “excellent mugging.” She also graced the stage as Donna Elvira with Wichita Grand Opera, Ramiro in La finta giardiniera with Juilliard Opera, and Romeo in I Capuleti e i Montecchi at the Chautauqua Institution. She spent two summers at the Marlboro Music Festival and School being very silly, cleaning toilets and also performing Hindemith, Loeffler, Schumann, Reger, and Brahms classics in the Potash Hill Concert Hall. No cigarettes or potato hashes were harmed or involved. In 2018, she sang her first Pierrot Lunaire at Juilliard’s Chamberfest and dazzled Halifax audiences in 2023 with the same piece with Inner Space Concerts.

Marie uses narrative, comedy and improvisation to elaborate the classical repertoire in home, church, and concert hall spaces. Sheloves an inexpensively producilbe project that is also fun and good. Some projects have included From a Bulb: Regrowth After Loss, an autobiographical concert project performed outdoors in 2021, and La voix humaine: Experimenting with Improvised Monologue, an operatic performance for an American audience without translations provided in 2025. Both of those shows were pretty intense and sad, so Marie is currently working on a comedy show and other projects that combine improvisatory comedy forms with classical music to enhance musical story-telling in a contemporary context. On top of needing lots of attention as a performer, Marie is also a nerd who needs lots of attention.

Marie has a Bachelor of Music from Northwestern University, a Master of Music from the Juilliard School with Marlena Malas, and is currently pursuing a Doctorate of Musical Arts back at Northwestern with W. Stephen Smith. She spent two years working in Vienna, a year studying in Paris, and a summer teaching in Florence. She looks forward to having a real job some day. Marie also completed the first year sequence of improv comedy training at the notorious Second City Training Center (in both Brooklyn and Chicago). 

Marie teaches singing to a diverse body of students, focusing on everything from classical choral repertoire to Japanese Pop to Greek Orthodox church music. In 2021, Marie’s students, sibling trio Girl Named Tom, won NBC’s reality singing competition The Voice. Not to be confused with her project La voix humane. They are not the same thing.

In her free time, Marie loves to cook, go thrift-shopping, and drink fancy Japanese tea.