Everyone knows the story of Rosa Parks, one of the great American heroes of the Civil Rights Movement. But what about some of the other characters from that famous, 52,000-person Montgomery bus boycott? To spotlight some of the particulars of this historic moment, Dallas-based composer Jasmine Arielle Barnes and librettist Deborah D.E.E.P Mouton are developing a new opera, She Who Dared, a two-hour, sometimes funny drama about the Montgomery movement, with a score that leans into Southern gospel and a swooning 1950s orchestral style.

"I’m referencing popular music that you’d hear in a drug store and a little contemporary classical as well," Barnes says.

The new opera premieres in June at Chicago Opera Theater with support from a Commissioning Grant from OPERA America’s Opera Grants for Women Composers program, which in 2024 awarded a total of $100,000 to five different companies developing works by women composers. The program involves two elements: Discovery Grants awarded directly to women composers and Commissioning Grants awarded to opera companies for commissioning women composers.

“It’s funny, people only think of Rosa Parks when they think of the boycott, but Jo Ann Robinson actually organized and led the boycott,” Barnes says, noting that the opera is packed with carefully researched historical detail.

She and Mouton aren’t the only ones looking to America’s fraught racial history for inspiration. Composer Paola Prestini and librettist Robin Coste Lewis are currently developing a new work to premiere at Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston in 2026 as a co-production with Prestini’s own company, VisionIntoArt. The opera will be about the historical impact of a formerly enslaved community leader in Charleston.

“This is an examination of the colonization of violence and an investigation into the perplexing privilege of violence,” Prestini says. She adds that the community will be involved in the work’s creation to “create a sense of healing.”

Opera Grants for Women Composers is generously supported by the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation.