Barbara Conrad is esteemed for both her impressive operatic career and her inspiring personal story as an emissary of the civil rights movement. Her performing career has spanned five decades and four continents, bridging musical genres from the moving spirituals of Hall Johnson to the epic operas of Verdi and Wagner.
The historic launch to Conrad’s career came at The University of Texas at Austin, where her dismissal from a bi-racial opera production during the school’s first year as an integrated institution sparked a statewide controversy and a national call for civil rights. A 2010 award-winning PBS documentary, When I Rise, captures this momentous incident and chronicles Conrad’s life story. She did go on to graduate from UT Austin, and continued her studies in New York, sponsored by artist and activist Harry Belafonte and with support from former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.
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