ABOUT

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Katrina Waters makes art, communicates art, and thinks deeply about it.

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A multi-hyphenate creative at the intersection of performance, scholarship and broadcasting, Katrina has recently relocated to Sydney, bringing to the harbour city a career spanning opera houses, radio studios, university research centres and recording studios across Australia, the UK and Europe.

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A true Zwischenfach* voice, Katrina has performed with Opera Australia, English National Opera, and at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, Royal Festival Hall London, and the Britten-Pears Festival — moving between lyric mezzo roles and dramatic spinto soprano territory with equal authority. Recent performances include Tannhäuser and Mefistofele with Opera Australia, Brahms' Alto Rhapsody, Waltraute in Die Walküre and Dritte Magd in Elektra for the Dramatic Voices Program, Berlin. 

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A winner of the 2023 ABC Top 5 Arts Media Residency, Katrina is the creator and host of Art to Arias — a podcast and radio series exploring the creative lives of artists - and the force behind Songs for Loud Women, a project platforming new Australian works for bold, uncompromising voices.

 

In 2025, Songs for Loud Women was recorded with pianist Sally Whitwell — a feminist retelling of the Brünnhilde myth through the words of the women who sing her, weaving together original research, newly commissioned works by Katy Abbott, Anne Cawrse, Melody Eötvös, Roya Safaei and Sally Whitwell, and Katrina's own performance practice. The project's viral reception — over 20,000 views in 30 days — speaks to a hungry audience for new music that tells different stories. 

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Katrina has submitted her PhD in Creative Practice at the ANU, researching women with large, loud and unladylike voices — Building Brünnhilde. Her research into the impacts of hormonal change on the dramatic soprano voice has been published in Australian Voice (Vol. 24), presented at Cambridge University, and shared with national audiences on ABC RN's The Stage Show with Michael Cathcart.

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As a producer, curator and advocate for gender equity in classical music, Katrina's three years as President of the Peninsula Chamber Musicians saw grant funding triple and generated national attention — driven by a deliberate programming strategy amplifying living Australian composers, with particular focus on First Nations and women composers.

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Her new initiative #HerMusic is building a grassroots community of musicians and performers committed to programming and performing music by women. Rather than waiting for large organisations to change, #HerMusic demonstrates that agency is available to every performer — right now, through the work they choose to platform and perform.

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She is currently based on Gadigal Country.

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*Zwischenfach is a term from the German Fach system which categorises operatic voices, basically putting them into a box, A Zwishchenfach voice is not easily categorised often displaying the warmth of the lower Fach and the range of the high Fach. The word can be literally translated as a "cross-border-disciplinary-hopper", which seems an apt discription for the portfolio career of a working creative in the contemporary Australian arts scene.