Professor Indre Viskontas
Indre is Associate Professor at the University of San Francisco College of Arts and Sciences. She’s a neuroscientist and opera singer, specialising in how music affects the brain.
About Indre Viskontas
Professor Viskontas is an opera singer-turned-director. She’s always been fascinated by both art and science and has found ways to integrate the two in her work. She finished a Masters of Music degree in Voice Performance and a Ph.D. in Cognitive Neuroscience and currently enjoys faculty positions at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and the University of San Francisco. She’s passionate about communicating ideas to the public, by directing operas that illustrate the richness of the human experience, creating compelling lectures and podcasts about the brain, and conducting research on the neuroscience of creativity.
Combining a passion for music with scientific curiosity, she’s affectionately known as Dr. Dre by students at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where she pioneered the application of neuroscience to musical training, and at the University of San Francisco, where she is an Assistant Professor of Psychology, and now directs The Creative Brain Lab. She has a BSc is in psychology and French literature from the University of Toronto, a MM degree in vocal performance from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience from UCLA.
Indre mostly sings opera with a lyric coloratura sound. She loves Mozart, Donizetti, Verdi and Puccini, and she’s especially committed to singing contemporary opera - music written by composers who were or are alive during her own lifetime. She’s also the Creative Director of Pasadena Opera, and her focus in opera has shifted from singing to directing.
