Soprano Nia Spaulding is a 2025/26 Metropolitan Opera Laffont Competition Encouragement Award winner (Indiana District) and most recently was a 2026 Resident Artist at the Glimmerglass Festival where she covered the role of Lucy in Gregory Spears’ Fellow Travelers. There she was also a part of the choruses of Madame Butterfly and the English adaptation of Così by Kelley Rourke. In 2025 Nia sang the step-sister Noémie in Massenet’s Cendrillon at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music (CCM) in which she “provided delightful comic relief as the stepsisters with bright clear voices and impish charm” (Cincinnati Concert Reviews) and was the soprano soloist in Brahms’ Ein Deutsches Requiem with CCM’s Choirs and Orchestra. Nia sang the role of Arminda in Mozart’s La finta Giardiniera at CCM and during her undergraduate years with CCM’s Opera d’arte, Nia has sung numerous roles including Contessa from Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro, Zita in Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi, 2nd Witch in Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, and Public Opinion in Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld.
Passionate about new opera and highlighting underrepresented voices in the operatic canon. She has worked with Cincinnati Opera’s Opera Fusion New Works (OF:NW) in both In The Rush, commissioned with the Metropolitan Opera and workshopped the role of Niamara in Lalovavi which premiered at Cincinnati Opera in 2026. Nia has worked with Cincinnati Opera for two seasons 2024-2025, participating in opera ensembles of La Traviata, Tosca, Fiddler on the Roof, and Liverpool Oratorio.
In 2023 Nia was a fellow at the Lehrer Vocal Institute at the Music Academy of the West. Previously she was a participant at the International Summer Opera Festival (Morelia) where she performed the role of La Zia Principessa in Puccini’s Suor Angelica and was a part of Academia Vocale Lorenzo Malfatti, in Lucca, Italy, diving into Italian art song and language that same year.
Nia is a graduate from University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music for both her Bachelors of Music and Masters in Music in Voice Performance.