Soprano Stephanie Chee enjoys engaging audiences with performances of repertoire ranging from early baroque to the 21st century. She has a keen interest in revitalizing classical singing for the modern age. A regular recitalist, Stephanie is most artistically fulfilled when she can truly engage and connect with an audience.

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Stephanie is overjoyed to join Utah Opera as a Resident Artist in 2024-2025. This season, she covers Gretel in Hansel and Gretel and performs the Soprano solos in Handel’s Messiah with the Utah Symphony.

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Last season, Stephanie sang Lucia in The Rape of Lucretia with the Shepherd School of Music, covered Blonde in Die Entführung aus dem Serail as a Vocal Fellow at the Manetti-Shrem Opera Program, and reprised Rabbit/Horse in the orchestral workshop for Meilina Tsui's The Big Swim with the Houston Grand Opera Community and Learning Initiatives. In the 2022-2023 season, she was seen as Valletto in L'incoronazione di Poppea, Grace Davis in Street Scene with the Shepherd School of Music, and Rabbit/Horse in the piano/vocal workshop for The Big Swim with the Houston Grand Opera. During COVID-19, Stephanie performed in a virtual production of Hansel and Gretel as Gretel with Opera Projects for University Singers (OPUS). As a sophomore, Stephanie sang La Ninfa in L’Orfeo and Ida in Die Fledermaus, both with Northwestern Opera Theatre, as well as Aline in Honneger’s Les Aventures du Roi Pausole (OPUS). She was seen as Phènice and L’Amante Fortune in Lully’s Armide as a Studio Artist with the Miami Music Festival in July of 2019. 

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Extremely passionate about art song and chamber music, Stephanie loves going on repertoire deep dives, discovering underperformed works, and featuring them in her carefully curated thematic recitals. Most recently, she curated and sang a recital for the Musicians Club of Women Artists-in-Recital series in Chicago, IL. For her first-year masters recital, she performed Lili Boulanger's "Clairières dans le ciel," a piece rarely performed in its entirety. She programmed and sang three recitals, all offering powerful emotional content: Reflections (2023), und Morgen... (2022), and From the Outside looking in (2021). She attended Songfest as a Professional Fellow in 2023.

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Stephanie’s passion for recitals first ignited at age 12 when she began volunteering at a local retirement home in Sunnyvale, CA. Once a month, she would program and sing concerts for the residents, occasionally inviting her friends to join her. Intertwining Gershwin tunes, classic musical theater, and art songs, Stephanie captivated the seniors at Belmont Retirement Village, who would return month after month to listen to her sing. She continued to sing at Belmont until she graduated from high school, and then took her talents to the Songs by Heart Foundation in Chicago, where she was able to connect with residents in memory care units. Although the pandemic ended her time with Songs by Heart, Stephanie is hopeful to return to giving back soon.

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Furthermore, Stephanie loves singing both early music and modern music. In 2022, she performed Handel’s cantata “Armida abbandonata” with baroque string quartet and harpsichord and was the soprano soloist in Northwestern Summer Chorus’ performance of Mozart’s Requiem in Evanston, IL, both under the baton of Dr. Stephen Alltop. A few months after relocating to Houston, she sang Heinrich Schütz’ Exequies for 6–8 voices with Harmonia Stellarum, under the baton of Mario Aschauer. In 2021, she premiered "When Philomel doth her voice raise" by fellow Northwestern composer, Leo Discenza. In a recital of graduating Northwestern composers, she sang in the first live performances of choral works by Kate Li and Discenza. She is excited to continue to collaborate with Discenza and other composers.

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An accomplished soloist, Stephanie was recently awarded an Encouragement Award in the 2023 San Francisco District Laffont Competition, an Emerging Talent Award in the 2023 Lotte Lenya competition, first place in the 2022 Fox Valley Collegiate Voice Competition and second place in the 2022 Upper College Treble Voices Division of the National Student Auditions. Additionally, she was honored with the Farwell Trust Award in the 2022 Musicians Club of Women Voice Competition in the Junior Division. Further accomplishments include first place in the 2021 and 2020 Central Region NATS Vocal Competitions, 2019 Chicago Chapter NATS Vocal Competition, 2018 Schmidt Vocal Competition, and 2018 Burlingame Music Competition. 

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In addition to singing, Stephanie has an active interest in languages, having spent the summer of 2021 at Middlebury’s German for Singers program, the summer of 2020 in a virtual Scandinavian Song Seminar with Colin Levin, and completed an independent study last year on the variations in style and approach when dealing with different languages in music under the tutelage of Professor Richard Boldrey. She currently speaks German, Italian, and Cantonese, and is working towards proficiency in French. 

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Stephanie is a recent graduate of the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University, having received her Master of Music in Vocal Performance in 2024 under the tutelage of Nova Thomas. She received her Bachelor of Music in Voice and Opera and Operatic Languages from the Bienen School of Music at Northwestern University in 2022.