Soprano Faylotte Joy Crayton has performed at such festivals as the Marlboro Music Festival, Bard Music Festival, Bard Summerscape and Aspen Music Festival.  She played the role of Masha in the world premiere of Elana Langer’s Four Sisters, at the Richard B. Fisher Center and made her American Symphony Orchestra debut, singing the soprano solo in Brahms’ Ein deutsches Requiem, conducted by Leon Botstein. Faylotte has premiered many works including pieces by Yunzhuo Gan at Carnegie’s Weill Hall, and pieces by Conor Brown, John Boggs and Matthew Schickele, at The Morgan Library.  

With a strong sense of community activism and empowerment, since 2007 Faylotte has worked worldwide with the non-profit, Artists Striving to End Poverty.  She has taught music to underprivileged youth with the Ubuntu Education Fund in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, at the Shanti Bhavan School in Tamil Nadu, India, and with Teach for India, in Pune. As an artist activist, Faylotte produces and stars in productions focused on social justice. Upcoming productions include “Occupy Music: Power to the People,” a theatrical recital about human needs in times of revolution and “An Emigrant’s Daughter,” a piece about the female immigrant experience in America.

The granddaughter of both an award-winning Arkansan yodeler and a Filipina-Pacific Islander traditional singer, Faylotte has loved to sing since childhood. She began performing musical theater, at the age of five, as the Munchkin Mayor in The Wiz, and later played the title role in Kiss Me Kate.  At sixteen, she was awarded a Rotary Youth Exchange Scholarship to Geneva, Switzerland, where, with the false notion that opera was Europe’s musical theater, she attended her first opera. Upon recommendation by a school teacher, The Geneva Rotary Club funded her lessons in classical voice and Swiss yodeling. She returned from Switzerland with a strong interest in European languages, history, classical and folk music, and humanitarianism. At the University of California, Santa Barbara she dedicated herself to studying classical singing and found that this was a way her interests could be united. She then transferred to The Juilliard School, where she subsequently received her Bachelor of Music degree. At Juilliard, Faylotte performed the role of Tytania in Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Lucia II in Hindemith’s A Long Christmas Dinner. She also studied international song literature under the guidance of such coaches as Margo Garrett and J.J. Penna.  

Faylotte completed the Graduate Vocal Arts Program at the Bard College Conservatory of Music. Under the tutelage of Dawn Upshaw and Kayo Iwama, she more closely explored song repertoire, including the folk traditions she has long loved, and contemporary music. She is currently completing a Doctorate of Musical Arts at Stony Brook University where she is specializing in AAPI vocal repertoire.