I first came to know Georgia Stitt in 2007, when she released her debut album This Ordinary Thursday: The Songs Of Georgia Stitt.

She continued to be on my radar as someone to keep an eye on. I was DELIGHTED to have featured Georgia in 2012 just after she released her album My Lifelong Love, and now, I am THRILLED we finally get to catch up after more than a decade!

In this NEW interview, Georgia once again answered my call, but this time around she shares:

• One reason someone should get excited for Amplify 2025 Concert
• Why she started her organization Maestra Music
• How Maestra Music is breaking barriers in the theatre industry
• So much more

Connect with Georgia: Website, Facebook, Instagram, Maestra Music

AMPLIFY 2025 is an electrifying evening celebrating the brilliance of women and nonbinary musicians in the theater industry. Directed by Jessica Ryan (Between Riverside and Crazy Live Broadcast), hosted by Tony Award-nominee L Morgan Lee (A Strange Loop), co-hosted by Tony Award nominee and Maestra Advisory Board Member Kate Baldwin, the annual benefit concert closes out Women’s History Month on Monday, March 31, 2025 at 8:00 pm at Sony Hall in NYC! Click here for tickets!

1. On March 31, 2025 your organization, Maestra Music, will be hosting the 5th annual Amplify 2025, an electrifying evening celebrating the brilliance of women and nonbinary musicians in the theater industry. How will this year's concert be different from previous installments? I’ve loved every Amplify concert we’ve done — and this is the fifth one! — but I have to admit that this is the biggest and most exciting of them all.

Our team has lined up an incredible array of performers and songwriters, so I know the musical numbers are going to be very exciting. We try to balance the evening with some superstars and some up-and-comers, making sure everyone benefits from the “support, visibility, and community” that is fundamental to Maestra’s mission.

Jessica Ryan and her staff at All Together Now have created some amazing video elements. We have surprising moments from Jessica Vosk, Jordan Fisher, Julia Mattison, and more.

Our music director Julianne Merrill has put together a thrilling band of musicians who are also Maestra members. And this year we also hired all of our technicians from our own RISE Directory!

2. Before we got too much into this year's concert, let's go back to the beginning. Maestra Music began in early 2017 while you were the Music Director of the Off-Broadway revival of Sweet Charity. It developed because you had difficulty finding and hiring an all-female band, leading you to see that women musicians seemed to be invisible in the musical theater industry. After you recognized this problem, who was the first person you reached out to about this? Mary-Mitchell Campbell. (But she’s pretty much the first person I reach out to about everything.) People may know Mary-Mitchell Campbell as the Music Supervisor of many Broadway shows like DEATH BECOMES HER and SOME LIKE IT HOT and QUEEN OF VERSAILLES and the entire Encores series at City Center. I mean, when does she sleep?

But she’s also the Founder of her own nonprofit called Arts Ignite, and she and I are constantly strategizing about ways we can change the world together.

Georgia Stitt and Mary-Mitchell Campbell
Photo Courtesy of Georgia Stitt's Website

3. After your initial conversation with that person, how did you start bringing this conversation to a wider group of people? Strangely, in the beginning it’s more like the conversation came to me. My colleagues in the industry started sending me emails and texts saying “I hear you have a list of women musicians” or asking me to make recommendations for hiring.

There are people who are music contractors and agents, but that’s not a business I wanted to get into, so I asked my own web designers to build a simple directory with really specific functionality for finding musicians based on their skills and experiences.

I tell the story often that my first list had 22 names on it. Now we have over 2,600 people in the Maestra Directory! My collaborators, in addition to the Maestra and RISE staff, are the team at Roundhouse Designs — Ryan Foy and Nick Gaswirth — and our Directory Manager Kathleen Wrinn.

Several times a year we check in about feedback we get from our members and we make improvements. Now, of course, we have a weekly newsletter and active social media accounts and lots of marketing support, but it really did start with word of mouth and my desire to make sure that these musicians who wanted to work could be found.

4. What did it mean to you when other women and nonbinary musicians, who also felt invisible, started contacting you? In nonprofit we talk about impact — specifically, what is the impact of the work you’re doing, and how is it measurable? To me, our results are twofold. First of all, people who had built Maestra profiles were telling me they were getting jobs. In fact, one Maestra member told me that every job she’s gotten since she moved to NYC has been because of her profile in the Maestra Directory. And the second is that people were showing up because they wanted to be part of this community.

It was important that the women and nonbinary people who got involved had the opportunity to get to know each other, to make music together, to collaborate or talk shit or recommend each other. There is such strength in community, and I wanted everyone to feel the kind of sisterhood I felt with Mary-Mitchell. It’s very different to move through an industry when you believe that someone’s got your back.

Look — I never think someone should hire a woman or a nonbinary musician just because of gender. But my own personal experience is that for years I was pretty regularly the only woman on my music team no matter where I went — Off-Broadway, on Broadway, on Film and TV projects, in recording studios. Maybe I’d see women in the string section, but not the brass section, not playing the drums, not playing the bass. Not conducting.

So at Maestra, our team investigated why that might be true, and built programming to address the issues we uncovered. The data we collect every year is showing that women and nonbinary people who are entering the field today are not generally having the same experience I described. They are much more visible. Honestly, it fills me with pride for what our organization has been able to do in a really short amount of time.

5. How do you feel Maestra Music can break barriers in the musical theatre industry in a way that wouldn't be possible without your organization? There’s real power in community. Maestra is able to have conversations at much higher levels — with producers, with unions, with foundations, with regional theaters, with corporations — because of the size of the organization, the data we’re collecting, the network of partnerships we’re building, and the success stories we’re able to share.

I’m a big fan of leading with positivity and looking for alliances where groups of people can be more effective together than alone. Our RISE program has over 45 network partners! That’s intentional, because it’s a waste of resources to duplicate work that someone else has already done.

We know what our mission is trying to accomplish, and we’re asking questions that it seems our industry hasn’t asked before. We also know how many tangential efforts are affected by the fact that we’re here doing this work, so like any good theatre collaborator, we say “yes and” and invite folks to join us.

6. Going back to this year's Amplify concert, how do you feel this year's performers personify Maestra's mission? They are excellent. They are powerful. They are diverse. They are passionate. They are not running scared from the changing climate of this world, but they are leaning in to support art and artists, possibly now more than ever before.

7. With so many events going on for Women's History Month, what is one reason you feel someone should be excited this concert? My big advice for people who are trying to figure out how to make a difference in the world is to put your money where your mouth is, no matter how much money you’ve got. That might show up in the form of donations — or even recurring monthly donations for the organizations you really believe in — or it might show up as buying tickets for the kinds of theater you want to see.

In theater, so many decisions are made because everyone is trying to predict what will make an audience buy tickets. So you buy the tickets, you spread the word of mouth, and you help build the reputation of the thing you care about. Honestly, it’s like voting: the power you have is that you’ve got to show up when it matters.

Also, March 31st is Trans Day of Visibility and we love the folks at TEMPO and are thrilled to be celebrating with them at Amplify!

Also… we’ve got Sara Bareilles. We've got HELL’S KITCHEN. We’ve got a lot of writers performing their own work, and we’ve got Kate Baldwin and L Morgan Lee hosting. It truly is going to be a kick-ass concert.

Georgia Stitt performing, Photo Credit: Monica Simoes

8. When Amplify 2025 is over, how will you celebrate all your hard work? I think Amplify IS the celebration. But… we do have some surprises that we are going to announce at the concert and I won’t spoil them, but to say that we have a very full year planned ahead! (Also, I have a little beach getaway scheduled in the future.)

9. How does your involvement in Maestra Music fill you up in a way your songwriting does not? It’s totally different. I can’t imagine one part of my life without the other. The older I get, the more I think it’s not really about the thing you make, it’s about the people you collaborate with while you’re making it.

Songwriting can be lonely, but theater-making is not. And Maestra has brought so many more people into my professional world. It’s just a collaboration on a much bigger scale.

10. What is something we didn't get to talk about with Maestra Music or yourself that you'd like my audience to know? We have over 145 classes available for viewing on our website as part of our Maestra Replay program. These are recorded workshops covering all sorts of topics from really broad strokes (like what is a creative process or how do you overcome performance anxiety) to really granular (like what are all the mutes a trombone player uses) to really starry (like how does Lynn Ahrens think about lyrics).

These classes are available for everyone, not just Maestra members, and I’m not sure people know they’re there! Please check them out here!

More Georgia Stitt Interviews:

2012 (Read Here): My Lifelong Love

Georgia Stitt, Photo Credit: Matthew Murphy

More on Georgia Stitt:

Georgia Stitt is an award-winning composer, lyricist, music producer, pianist, and activist. Her original musicals include Snow Child (commissioned by and premiered at Arena Stage, directed by Molly Smith), Big Red Sun (11^th Hour Theater in Philadelphia, NAMT 2010), and a children’s musical, Samantha Spade, Ace Detective (TADA Youth Theater), which won “Outstanding New Musical” from the National Youth Theatre in 2014 and is now licensed by Concord Theatricals. Other shows include The Danger Year, The Big Boom, The Water (winner of the 2008 ANMT Search for New Voices in American Musical Theater), Common Ground, and Mosaic.

Georgia has released four albums of her music: A Quiet Revolution (2020), My Lifelong Love (2014), This Ordinary Thursday (2007), and Alphabet City Cycle (featuring Tony-nominated actress Kate Baldwin, 2009). She is currently at work on a new album of theatrical art songs and an oratorio called The Circling Universe. Her choral piece with hope and virtue (using text from President Obama's 2009 inauguration speech) was featured on NPR, and both her orchestral piece, Waiting for Wings, co-written with husband Jason Robert Brown, and her piece for solo clarinet, Fanfare for the Ups and Downs, were commissioned and premiered by the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra. Georgia served for several years as the composer-in-residence at Pasadena Presbyterian Church, and she has written many pieces for choir, including A Better Resurrection, De Profundis, and The Promise of Light, which has often been performed by the LA Master Chorale.

Georgia is the Founder and President of Maestra Music, an organization that provides support, visibility, and community for women and nonbinary theater musicians, and through that work she has won an Obie Award and a Lilly Award and has been featured in Forbes, Billboard, Playbill, Opera News, and The New York Times. In collaboration with Lin-Manuel Miranda, she and her team at Maestra created the RISE Theatre Directory which seeks to build a more equitable and inclusive theater industry by centralizing DEIA tools and resources. Georgia is in leadership at The Dramatists Guild, The Recording Academy’s Songwriters & Composers Wing, and MUSE (Musicians United for Social Equity). She has produced albums and musical events for singers and has worked in the music department on projects including Broadway’s 2023 revival of Parade, NBC’s The Sound of Music (Live!), the film version of The Last Five Years (starring Anna Kendrick and Jeremy Jordan), Off-Broadway’s Sweet Charity (starring Sutton Foster), Disney/ABC’s Once Upon a Mattress (starring Tracey Ullman and Carol Burnett), and the recent Netflix film, 13: The Musical. In her eight years living in LA, Georgia worked for America’s Got Talent, Clash of the Choirs, and Grease: You’re the One That I Want, and she wrote songs for MTV’s The American Mall.

She currently teaches Musical Theater Writing at Princeton University, has previously taught at Pace University and USC, and is a frequent keynote speaker and master class instructor. Georgia lives in New York with her husband and their two wonderful daughters.