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Beth Morrison has always been driven. A proud theater kid raised in a creative family from Auburn, Maine, Beth Morrison first gravitated towards singing, taking vocal lessons as early as ten years old. After earning a degree in vocal performance from Boston University, and becoming director of the Tanglewood Institute, a musical training program, Morrison ultimately found her calling backstage.

“I think the performer thing wasn’t right, because it was all about me, all about me, all about me,” she told the in 2014. “The minute that it could be not about me at all, and about everything else, then I relaxed and became very excited and passionate.”

But it was more than passion that drove Morrison to found Beth Morrison Projects (BMP) in 2006. After being immersed in Boston’s experimental theater scene, Morrison developed an interest in contemporary music and a hunger to facilitate the work of innovative operatic performers. For training in theatrical staging and production, Morrison enrolled at the Yale School of Drama – home of Broadway legends like Benjamin Mordecai, who later became Morrison’s mentor.

Thanks to the fruitful connections she built through Mordecai and others, Morrison saw an opportunity to create a company dedicated to supporting living composers. Reflecting on her challenges as a founder, Morrison told in 2020, “I don’t come from a family which has money, so I was starting from ground zero.”

Morrison grew the non-profit organization into a team of eight staff, all committed to her mission of identifying and supporting the work of emerging and established composers and their collaborators through the commissioning, development, production and touring of their works.

Beth Morrison Projects quickly became an n the world of opera, commissioning new works that push the bounds of conventional opera.

Such acclaimed works include, the Pulitzer Prize-winning operas “Angel’s Bone”, by composer Du Yun and Ellen Reid's “p r i s m,” as well as the Music Critics Association of North America Award-winner “Breaking the Waves,” written by Missy Mazzoli.

This drive to transform musical theater led Morrison to co-found the Prototype Festival, an annual festival showcasing groundbreaking new operatic and musical theater works from a diverse group of composers, librettists, performers and musicians.

“I’m somebody who doesn’t take no for an answer, so if I set a goal for myself or my company, failure is not an option,” Morrison told last year. “Many, many times over the course of my career, it probably would have been easier for me to give up. But I just don’t have it in me.”