Soprano Shelén Hughes is passionate about both music and social service. Raised in Cochabamba, Bolivia, she began her artistic journey as a Bolivian folklore singer and dancer. She is a graduate of The Juilliard School (ADOS) and the Manhattan School of Music (BM & MM).
 

Ms. Hughes is a winner of the George and Nora Foundation 2025 Competition, third place winner in the 2025 Gerda Lissner Opera Competition, a winner of the 2024 Opera Index Competition, first-place winner of the 2024 Gerda Lissner Zarzuela Competition and the 2024 Dorothy Lincoln Smith Vocal Competition (D.C. chapter). She was a finalist in the 2025 Renata Tebaldi Competition, a semi-finalist in the 2024 Geneva Voice Competition and the 2023 Alfredo Kraus Competition in Gran Canaria. She was also the Sankofa Award recipient of the 2023 SAS Competition and was featured as a soloist in the New York Festival of Song’s curated program Gracias a la Vida.
 

Previous roles include Pamina in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte (Teatro Nacional de Chile), Servilia in Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito (The Juilliard School), Private Sonia Gonzales in Huang Ruo’s An American Soldier (Perelman Performing Arts Center, NYC), Atalanta in Handel’s Atalanta (The Juilliard School), Inez in Mercadante’s I Due Figaro (Manhattan School of Music), Snegurochka in Rimsky-Korsakov’s Snegurochka (Manhattan School of Music), Micaëla in Bizet’s Carmen, and Magda in Puccini’s La Rondine. She made her Carnegie Hall debut in 2019 and her NYFOS debut in 2022. She was a young artist at the 2019 Gstaad Menuhin Festival and a 2022 Gerdine Young Artist at the Opera Theatre of St. Louis, where she performed Frasquita in Carmen and Ms. Kohl in the premiere of Awakenings.
Future engagements include her debut at Oper Frankfurt as Morgana in Handel’s Alcina.
 

Beyond the stage, Ms. Hughes is the founder of Voices for Bolivia, an international non-profit organization dedicated to providing relief for impoverished elderly through classical music.