April Lynn James is a pioneering entrepreneur, speaker, author, and singer (soprano) passionate about the arts, wellness and spirituality who, for over a decade, has been inspiring others through her innovative creative projects. She founded The Maria Antonia Project, an opera company whose mission was to bring operas composed by women out of the archives and onto the stage. April plus Madison, her current project, is a Wonderland-inspired visual and literary arts enterprise fueled by the whimsical rhymes composed and declaimed by April’s guardian angel, Madison Hatta, Sonneteer.

A groundbreaking researcher in the area of Women in Music, her exhibitions In Her Own Hand: Operas Composed by Women 1625-1913 (Harvard Music Library) and Women Composing for Marian Anderson (Penn Libraries) were enthusiastically received, and she continues to be in demand as a speaker on this subject. April had the distinguished honor of studying abroad in Dresden, Germany courtesy of a DAAD Fellowship, where she researched her dissertation on the music and life of Maria Antonia, Electress of Saxony.

She is a baroque dance instructor, researcher and choreographer, and enjoys reconstructing Beauchamps-Feuillet notated dances as well as creating new ones in the 18th-century style.

April holds three degrees from Queens College of the City University of New York (BA, Communications; MA, Media Studies; BA, magna cum laude, Music), an MA and PhD in Music from Harvard University, and an MSLIS from Drexel University.