Photo credit: Dani Werner
Jill Anna Ponasik, Producing Artistic Director at Milwaukee Opera Theatre and Artistic Associate at Skylight Music Theatre
After raising the profile of the long-running Milwaukee Opera Theatre (MOT), transforming it into an entertaining venue for unveiling new work and finding new threads of meaning in classics, Jill Anna Ponasik was invited to join the staff of one of the city’s venerable performing arts groups, the Skylight Music Theatre. She looks comfortable wearing multiple hats.
“I was an arts obsessed kid,” she says, but eventually settled on music in college (while sneaking in some dance and theater classes). She describes MOT as “Milwaukee’s micro-brewery for opera, proudly producing small batches of high quality, local lyric theater. We tell stories through music, unconventionally.”
Ponasik laughs when asked about the obstacles she faced as a woman. “Of course I’ve faced obstacles,” she says. “Look at the repertoire itself. La Traviata and La Boheme are two of the most performed operas in the world. La Traviata has three roles for women and six for men. La Boheme has two roles for women and eight for men. To make matters more confounding, female singers vastly outnumber their male peers. To get into a school, or a young artist program, or an opera, a female singer has to survive a much more competitive field than her male counterpart.”
Things are changing, but slowly. “When one looks at small organizations across the country, there is almost gender parity in leadership,” Ponasik says, “but as one ascends to mid-size and large organizations, the numbers change dramatically. Only 8% of the largest opera companies have women at the helm.”
Editor's Note: This article is part of our annual Fall Arts Guide. For the 2018 Fall Arts Guide, we interviewed six women that have founded or taken a leading role within arts institutions in the Milwaukee area to learn about their experiences. Read more of the Fall Arts Guide here.
