Monday- Friday 9 a.m.- 5 p.m.
Room: M-Building, M-204
Phone: (718) 482-5940
naturalsci@lagcc.cuny.edu
Monday- Thursday 9 a.m.- 5 p.m.
C-Building, C-745-W
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Professor Lisa DeSpain is an internationally recognized composer and arranger specializing in musical theatre, opera, and jazz.
She is the recipient of an OPERA America Discovery Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Challenge America Award and the Rhinebeck Writers Retreat for That Hellbound Train, her “deal with the devil” opera with libretto by David Simpatico (High School the Musical). She is the winner of the 2020 Zepick Modern Opera Commission (Opera Kansas) for Staggerwing, a chamber opera highlighting the historic win of female pilots in the 1936 Bendix Trophy Air Race, libretto by Rachel J. Peters. She is a nominee for the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Music Composition (2025.)
Professor DeSpain is the go-to arranger of Broadway hits like Hamilton, In the Heights, Spring Awakening, Green Day/American Idiot, for the choral market (Alfred Music Publications.)
Her additional opera works include: Song of the Nightingale, based on the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale, The Nightingale (On Site Opera,) No Ladies in the Lady’s Book (Utah Opera) highlighting the lost stories of women who built the Transcontinental Railroad, and Men I’m Not Married To (Cleveland Opera Theatre) based on a short story by Dorothy Parker. Her opera works are published by ECS Publishing.
Professor DeSpain’s concert works (selected) include the oratorio, American Nativity (New Haven Symphony Orchestra,) Symphonic Jazz Etudes for Piano (Barlow Award) String Quartet No. 1, Rise & Fall (Barlow Award, Cassatt String Quartet), The Bicycle Shoppe (US Air Force Band of Flight, honoring the Wright Brothers Centennial.) Professor DeSpain’s concert works are available through Murphy Music Press.
Additional honors include the ASCAP Commission Honoring the Duke Ellington Centennial, an Aaron Copland Residency, and a Dramatists Guild Foundation Fellow.
Along with being a passionate educator, empowering the voices of the next generation of musicians, Professor DeSpain is a prodigious coffee drinker and CrossFit Masters athlete who can deadlift 210 lbs. She also ran away with the circus — twice.
Select works by Professor DeSpain include:
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