Faculty Bio: Laura Enslin

Soprano, Laura Enslin, performs with orchestras and opera companies and is an ardent champion of new music. Keeping her commitment to working with singers of all ages and backgrounds she founded her private studio, CNY Singing Garden (singinggarden.org). She loves serving her Syracuse community through her teaching at Onondaga Community College. Interested in the mind/body connection, she draws on her background bel canto training, yoga (200 hour certified instructor), sound healing (VAH certification, Globe Institute training), and music improvisation (work with Music for People) to help singers find their own unique voice. “Creativity is not an exclusive club,” says Laura, who teaches all styles of singing. “Music is one way to reach our fullest potential while making a vibrational difference in the lives of each other.” 

Emerging from the pandemic, she was blessed to perform Mary in the opera “Home Burial” with SNM, a lead in “The School Board” a musical, and new chamber music with Quarantet Percussion ensemble.  This year she looks forward to singing music by  Woman Composers throughout NY state and for the many Messiahs she will sing in December! She has elicited praise from The Post-Standard (Syracuse), as “superb,” “lovely.” Laura has also been singled out by The Buffalo News, as a “perfect vessel of beautiful singing,” and The Democrat and Chronicle (Rochester, N.Y.), which cites her “plush, velvety voice and unfailing sensitivity.”

Laura’s solo engagements have included Symphoria and its predecessor, the Syracuse Symphony; Buffalo Philharmonic; Syracuse Opera; Syracuse Friends of Chamber Music; Society for New Music; Springfield (Mo.) Symphony; Lake Placid Sinfonietta; Cayuga Chamber Orchestra; Onondaga Civic Symphony; Syracuse University Brass Ensemble; and Syracuse University Oratorio Society, to name a few.

Additional teaching experience includes a 14-year stint at Syracuse University—first, in the Musical Theater Program and then the Jazz and Commercial Music applied study track. She also has taught at Nazareth College and the Eastman School of Music. Steeped in the bel canto singing tradition, Laura has studied with such luminaries as Mary Saunders Barton, Jeanne-Michèle Charbonnet, Carolyn Webber, Shirlee Emmons and Barbara Doscher.

She earned master’s and bachelor’s degrees in voice from the Eastman School and the University of Colorado Boulder, respectively.