Zoë Chessa is an American soprano, researcher, and voice teacher based in Baltimore, MD. She is an enthusiastic performer of opera, oratorio, and art song repertoire with a specialization in early music spanning from the Medieval Mediterranean to the European Baroque. Seeking to breathe new life into melodies of the past, Zoë approaches historical music with a fresh perspective of continual wonder in the 21st century. 

Currently on her journey to becoming ordained as a Jewish cantor, Ms. Chessa produces stirring, thoughtful, and creative work on the Jewish tradition of Hebrew chant. A recipient of the Kate Neal McKinley Fellowship, Zoë is pursuing research on Hebrew poetry and psalmody from the Cairo Genizah, a source containing over 400,000 documents from the medieval Jewish world. Ms. Chessa sets out to bring these melodies new life through producing academic writings, recordings, and transcriptions into modern notation. A student and scholar of linguistics, she has produced research on the acoustics of singing, as well as studied several languages including Italian, German, French, Hebrew, and Russian. She is a 3x recipient of the Max Kade scholarship, which has funded her German language studies abroad in Freiburg and Berlin. 

Zoë is a Pi Kappa Lambda Music Honor Society Member in the Theta Xi Division. She is a McKinley Fellow as well as a Derdeyn Scholarship in Voice recipient. She received 2nd Place in the undergraduate category of the 2023 CMU Philharmonic Soloist Competition and is a recipient of the Harry G. Archer Philharmonic Soloist Award as the Highest Scoring Junior. 

An avid performer, Zoë regularly sings in ensemble, solo, and operatic contexts. Recent roles at Carnegie Mellon University School of Music include Miss Sweetsong/The Impresario by Mozart (2023), Cleonilla/Ottone in Villa by Vivaldi (2024) and The Maiden/Der Kaiser von Atlantis (2023), for which she also served as assistant director. Zoë first made her professional debut with Pittsburgh Opera as the First Spirit/The Magic Flute in 2021. Other roles include Clarice/Die Welt auf dem Monde (2022) with the Middlebury College German for Singers program and Lepido/Silla at Chicago Summer Opera (2021). She will be singing the role of Satirino in Peabody Opera Theatre’s upcoming production of La Calisto by Cavalli. Also at Peabody, Zoë performs with the Renaissance and Baroque Ensembles, collaborating with Blue Heron and the Lorelei Ensemble.

Zoë is currently pursuing her M.M. of Historical Performance in Voice under the tutelage of Randall Scarlata. She is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University, where she studied in the studio of Sari Gruber, majoring in vocal performance with minors in German and Linguistics. She is originally from El Paso, Texas.