Maria João Sousa

MARIA JOÃO SOUSA is a Master in Music Teaching (Instituto de Estudos Interculturais e Transdisciplinares de Almada), with an internship at Escola de Música do Conservatório Nacional. She’s a bachelor in Singing (Academia Nacional Superior de Orquestra, having studied with Liliana Bizineche), and in Musical Sciences (Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities of NOVA, where she also attended Philosophy classes). She began her musical studies at five years old at Fundação Musical dos Amigos das Crianças (AMAC nowadays), where she learnt to play the violin and, at eighteen years old, began studying singing with Liliana Bizineche. Therefore, she studied singing with the baritone Marcel Boone in Switzerland and participated in improvement courses regarding the violin, the voice (Graham Johnson, Ileana Cotrubas, Lella Cuberli, Olga Makarina, Sarah Walker, Teresa Berganza, Yvonne Minton, Loh Sew-Tuan, among others) and pedagogy (Ana Leonor Pereira, Beth Bolton, Helena Rodrigues, Paulo Maria Rodrigues, among others). As a grantee from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation project ENOA, she participated in the “Outreach skills workshop for singers” for singers in the pedagogical context, as a part of a festival in Aix-en-Provence (2017). Professionally, opera and oratorio productions and voice recitals (from baroque to contemporary music, in several ensembles, stages and festivals) cross with teaching singing. She sang in concerts broadcasted live by radio station Antena 2 and performed in Norway with the Kristiansand Symphony Orchestra and made recitals in England. She has led vocal technique and music for early childhood workshops and participates in Musicology and Pedagogy Meetings with presentations and conferences. She has been a collaborator at the CESEM research center in FCSH/NOVA since 2019. She is a singing teacher at Academia de Amadores de Música and she has been collaborating with the Gulbenkian Choir since 2022.