Featured Artist

Nicole Paiement

Nicole Paiement (Opera Parallèle Artistic Director, Conductor, Founder) has gained an international reputation as a conductor of opera and contemporary music.  Her numerous recordings include many world premiere works. Her 2012 Dallas Opera debut conducting Peter Maxwell Davies’ 1979 thriller, The Lighthouse earned rave reviews. Subsequently, Paiement was appointed Principal Guest Conductor at The Dallas Opera. Paiement has since returned to Dallas to conduct performances of Tod Machover’s Death and the Powers, as well as the critically acclaimed and highly anticipated world premiere of Joby Talbot’s opera Everest, Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw and Douglas Cuomo’s Arjuna’s Dilemma.

Featured Artist

Paolo Ventura

Internationally acclaimed artist Paolo Ventura (b. 1968) is a master of the staged narrative, bringing the great theatrics and drama of the world to light in his moody photographic tableaux. Although the final product of his complex, multi-disciplinary practice is always a photograph—a dreamy, surreal hybrid between fact and fiction, the present day and the past—his process features many steps, and his realization of any given idea involves various stages of development and progression. He always begins, however, by imagining a story, which he illustrates through water-color drawings. He then draws the narrative into three dimensions by building a set—initially