Simran Claire is a Punjabi-Canadian mezzo-soprano and creative based in Vancouver, BC. Her artistic practice is rooted at the intersection of innovation and tradition, with an emerging focus on multidisciplinary work. She is proud to represent her community in the white-dominated spaces of opera and art song.

This past February, Simran released Dadima (Pacific Opera Victoria), a short film exploring her identity, heritage and lineage using the framework of Schumann’s Frauenliebe und -leben. Her creative debut was praised as “utterly moving, disorientating in a beautiful way, like uncovering a cultural bias you didn’t know you had,” (Opera Canada). Dadima was created as a part of her work in Pacific Opera Victoria’s Civic Engagement Quartet.

Last season, Simran made her French debut as Gossip 3 and Dancer in John Corigliano’s The Ghosts of Versailles, performed in the historic Opéra Royal at the Château de Versailles and co-produced by the Glimmerglass Festival; the production was recorded and broadcast internationally on arte.tv. Back home in Vancouver, she performed Oberaufseherin in the Canadian premiere of Mieczysław Weinberg’s Pasażerka (UBC Opera). As a member of Vancouver Opera’s Pre-Professional Internship Program, she understudied the role of Bunny in the world premiere of Maxime Goulet’s The Flight of the Hummingbird.

Simran is a graduate of the University of British Columbia (BMus 2018, MMus 2020), where she performed roles including Nicklausse in Les Contes d’Hoffmann, Angelina in La cenerentola; she is a recipient of the music faculty’s highest graduating award, the UBC Medal for Music. She was a Young Artist at the Glimmerglass Festival in 2019, where she worked with director Francesca Zambello and sang in a concert curated and hosted by the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.