Penny Orloff, Executive & Artistic Director

Penny Orloff was a working actress in her native Los Angeles when a Juilliard Opera Scholarship took her to New York. She had featured parts in several Broadway plays, working for such directors as Harold Prince and Joseph Papp, after seven seasons and more than twenty Principal Soprano roles with New York City Opera.

Symphony, recital, theater and opera engagements have taken her all over the U. S., Europe, and the former Soviet Union. Her one-woman show, "Jewish Thighs on Broadway," played in thirty-one cities to standing ovations and rave reviews. She has recorded for Vox-Turnabout, Warner-Nonesuch, Protone and Original Cast Records. Three of her stage performances are part of the video collection at New York City's Lincoln Center Library of the Performing Arts.

She has written and produced two plays and three children's operas; and supplied new librettos for an Old West version of Mozart's Così Fan Tutte, a "Gone With the Wind" version of The Marriage of Figaro, and several other operas. Jewish Thighs on Broadway is her first novel.

Ms. Orloff continues performing and directing from a suburb of Seattle, where she is Executive Director of Chaspen Foundation for the Arts. For the past five years she has taught Piano, Music History, and History of the American Musical Theater at Bellevue Community College; and conducted her "Art as Lifework, Life as Artwork" seminars.