To celebrate and spotlight some of the field’s top artists and emerging singers, OPERA America recently asked company leadership to nominate the singers and production artists who have caught their ears and eyes.

For mezzo-soprano Veena Akama-Makia, opera is a gift.

The seeds of Akama-Makia’s opera career were planted when she was still in high school in Little Rock, Arkansas, singing in choir at Pulaski Heights Meth­odist Church. It was there that she met her first voice teacher, Mary Winston Smith, who upon hearing Akama-Makia’s musi­cal potential introduced her to recordings of operatic greats like Jessye Norman, Leontyne Price, and Marian Anderson.

Their voices sparked something in Akama-Makia — especially a YouTube video of Norman sing­ing Purcell’s “Thy Hand, Belinda” while wearing a regal, fanned headdress — and she began to pur­sue opera more seriously, earning degrees in music from the Uni­versity of Central Arkansas and the Eastman School of Music. Through opera, she “found a dif­ferent way to release the sound that just felt freer,” she says.

She has since earned numer­ous accolades in competition and attended several prestigious young artist programs, includ­ing the Chicago Opera Theater Young Artist Program, where Music Director Lidiya Yankovskaya praised her “superb talent, quickly growing in every way” and noted that Akama-Makia is “making her name on the other side of the Atlantic as well as here.” Indeed, Akama-Makia spent her 2024–2025 season at the Royal Opera House as a young artist, sing­ing in productions of Il trovatore, La traviata, Carmen, and more.

She is also a board member for the organization What Is Opera, Anyway?, a nonprofit seeking to foster an intergenerational love of opera. “I’m trying to make sure people can have access [to opera] because I know that access changed my trajectory,” she says.

Veena Akama-Makia is one of four In the Wings profiles featured in our summer 2025 magazine. You can read all the profiles here.

In the Wings is underwritten by generous support from Laurie E. Nelson Randlett, trustee of the Sacramento Philharmonic & Opera.