Composer/librettist Rachel J. Peters (she/her, b. 1977) writes all manner of works for the stage. Her operas include Lesson Plan (On Site Opera/Caramoor), Companionship (Virginia Arts Festival, Fort Worth Opera), Rootabaga Country (Sarasota Opera, Seattle Opera), Sketchbook for Ollie (Lyric Opera of Kansas City);The Wild Beast of the Bungalow (Oberlin Conservatory) and Three Amputators with Royce Vavrek (Arctic Chamber Music Festival); No Ladies in the Lady’s Book (Utah Opera), Staggerwing (Opera Kansas), and Men I’m Not Married To (Cleveland Opera Theater) with Lisa DeSpain; Steve (Boston Opera Collaborative), Everything Comes to a Head with Margi Preus and Jean Sramek (Decameron Opera Coalition), Pie, Pith, and Palette with Marvin J. Carlton (The Atlanta Opera), and Welcome to the Madness (complete with live horses) with Leanna Kirchoff (Opera Steamboat). Operas written with Ms. DeSpain are published by E.C. Schirmer.

Rachel’s musicals include Only Children with Michael R. Jackson (NYU Tisch, Lincoln Center Directors Lab), Tiny Feats of Cowardice with Susan Bernfield (NYC Fringe Festival), Write Left with John Walch (Playwrights Horizons Theatre School), Tomato Red (UC Irvine), and Octopus Heart (NYU Steinhardt). Scores for plays include the critically acclaimed Stretch (a fantasia) (New Georges) and Tania in the Getaway Van (Flea Theater) by Susan Bernfield, Transatlantic by John Walch (Arkansas Rep), The Bacchae (Asolo Rep Conservatory), and several works by Stan Richardson. More are in development; at the Princeton Lewis Center for the Arts Atelier, she recently began The Year That Never Was: A Trash Day Special with Mr. Jackson.

Concert works include Ethel Smyth Plays Golf in Limbo (Semperoper Dresden, Resonance Works Pittsburgh), If You Can Prove That I Should Set You Free (Albany Symphony), Jack's Vocabulary (Hartt SPASM), I Live Here (Galapagos Art Space), Canon I (Two Sides Sounding), and Fronds: The Wisdom of Fanny Fern (Walt Whitman Project). Rachel’s extensive catalogue of songs has been performed at Lincoln Center, Second Stage, National Opera Center, Symphony Space, New York Festival of Song, National Sawdust, Ars Nova, Joe's Pub, and cabarets and theatres nationwide. She has written specialty material for Broadway luminaries Zachary James, John-Andrew Morrison, Mary Testa, and Lauren Worsham. Rachel contributed to the new generation of The AIDS Quilt Songbook and the upcoming My Brother’s Keeper on NYFOS Records.

Rachel has held residencies at Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Yaddo, Brush Creek Arts, Millay Arts, and Soaring Gardens. She has received Anna Sosenko Assist Trust and multiple ASCAPlus awards as well as an OPERA America Female Composers Discovery Grant for Manor of Speaking…with Kevin Thomas Townley, Jr., the first wholly original work for Stephanie Blythe’s alter ego, Blythely Oratonio. Rachel is a proud alumna of New Dramatists Composer-Librettist Studio, The American Opera Project, and the John Duffy Institute for New Opera. She holds a double B.A. summa cum laude from Brandeis University and an MFA from New York University’s Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program. She serves on committees for the Dramatists Guild and National Opera Association, and she was part of the first Jewish Composers Working Group of Asylum Arts/The Neighborhood in 2023.

Rachel originally hails from St. Louis, Missouri, where she grew up singing in children’s choruses at the MUNY, St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, and Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, and she has called New York City home since the night of the 2003 blackout. She is neither Irving Berlin’s granddaughter nor Miss Universe Philippines 2017.