Nicole Kenley-Miller is known for her colorful and embodied productions of opera and music theatre, both on stage and film. Her work was most recently featured off-Broadway at Nancy Manocherian's the cell and on The Kennedy Center’s Arts Across America Series. She is very much at home both on and off the stage as a director, producer, singer, and creative artist. As Co-Founder and Artistic Director of Sugar Land Opera, she helped establish the former Imperial Theatre, the first professional theatre space in Fort Bend County. 

 

Nicole’s credits as stage director include The Magic Flute with Painted Sky Opera (Oklahoma City), La Bohème and Amahl and the Night Visitors with Opera in the Heights (Houston), The Pirates of Penzance with the Houston Gilbert & Sullivan Society, Le gare generose and Il filosofo di campagna with the Fondazione Pergolesi Spontini and FIO-Italia (Italy), Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, L'heure espagnole / Rita, The Merry Widow and Orfeo ed Euridice with The University of Oklahoma, Sondheim on Sondheim, The Bartered Bride, Albert Herring, La Rondine, The Secret Marriage, and Gianni Schicchi with the Moores Opera Center at The University of Houston; Hansel and Gretel, The Impresario, and the US premiere of Howard Blake's The Station for Sugar Land Opera; and the Texas premiere of Alice Parker's choral opera, Family Reunion, for Houston Baptist University. For the screen, she created opera films of Trouble in Tahiti and A Hand of Bridge. Her direction and design concepts for both stage and film have garnered multiple awards from national and international competitions and won top honors from the The American Prize and the National Opera Association Opera Production and Scenes Competitions.

 

Throughout her career, she has worked fluidly between the opera and music theatre genres. She directed the first musical produced by the College of the Arts at University of Houston, a collaborative production of Little Shop of Horrors between the Schools of Music and Theatre and Dance. Previously her work in music theatre has included Camelot, and revues of the music of Rodgers and Hammerstein and Leonard Bernstein.
 

Following a Master's degree from Eastman School of Music, she received her DMA from University of Houston with a concentration in opera directing. Nicole is currently the Assistant Professor and Opera Stage Director at The University of Oklahoma.

 

Her most groundbreaking work was the development of a new theatrical music work, The Women Have Something to Say, which celebrates women’s voices through monologues and songs written by the performers themselves. The show was featured on the Kennedy Center's online pandemic series "Arts Across America" and premiered in Houston in 2021. A revised version opened off-Broadway in collaboration with The Why Collective at Nancy Manocherian's the cell in New York in May 2023.