Alexis Davis-Hazell joined the UA Voice Faculty in the Fall of 2018.  The Philadelphia native brought her stage experience to the studio and the classroom in Phoenix, Arizona for fourteen years, serving on the voice faculties at Grand Canyon University and Chandler-Gilbert Community College. She has been recognized for her dedication in service to students and awarded for maintaining high rates of student retention in applied voice, class voice, and music humanities courses.

Dr. Davis-Hazell holds a Bachelor of Music (Hons.) degree in Vocal Performance from Temple University and graduate degrees—a Master of Music degree in Vocal Performance-Pedagogy, and Doctor of Musical Arts degree in Vocal Performance—from Arizona State University.  Cognate fields of study during her graduate work included vocal acoustics, voice disorders and rehabilitation, and Baroque era historical performance practice. Her continuing research is focused on the improvement of curricula for lyric diction pedagogy and Russian art song literature studies tailored to beginning Anglophone singers, based on an innovative application of clinical phonetics and second language acquisition theory.

From Mme. de Croissy of Poulenc’s Dialogue of the Carmelites and Dritte Dame of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, to Frugola of Puccini’s Il Tabarro and the High Priestess of Verdi’s Aida, American mezzo-soprano Alexis Davis-Hazell has earned accolades for the size and quality of her instrument, and the dramatic intensity she brings to supporting characters.  She has been an active performer and experienced teaching artist in the Southwest United States and on the international opera stage, having performed in upwards of seventy productions of forty-one different operas and musicals in six languages.

Dr. Davis-Hazell has participated in more than one hundred and twenty performances of The Gershwins’ masterwork Porgy and Bess since 2008 in a variety of capacities, including those produced on the eight-show per week musical theater-touring model. On tour, she performed at each level ranging from ensemble understudy to principal character. She has sung the roles of Maria, Lily and Strawberry Woman in houses throughout Germany, Russia, Poland, Greece, Latvia, Switzerland and North America. These include critically acclaimed performances and debuts at the Dresden SemperOper, Deutsche Oper am Rhein in Dusseldorf, Hamburgische Staatsoper, the Baden-Baden Festspielhaus, the Mikhailovsky Opera in St. Petersburg, the Moscow Philharmonic, the Polish National Opera of Warsaw, the Kuressaare Operadays Festival in Estonia, and the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City.  Along with the critically acclaimed production of Porgy and Bess, she also performed in Show Boat at San Francisco Opera – both directed by Francesca Zambello and Conducted by John de Main and shown in HD cinema release, while marketed internationally on DVD and shown nationally on PBS.

Alexis exercises her fluency in a diversity of repertoire as a musical director in theatre (I love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change and Monty Python’s Spamalot,) and jazz cabarets, as well as a concert soloist and performer of opera’s dramatic repertoire. While covering Amneris (Aida), Azucena (Il Trovatore), Santuzza (Cavalleria Rusticana), Suzuki (Madama Butterfly) and other principal roles for numerous productions at Arizona Opera, she maintains a regional performance schedule.  Organizations of note include the Southern Arizona Symphony, Symphony of the Southwest, the Arizona Pro Arte Orchestra, The West Valley Symphony and Utah Festival Opera, where she continues to perform a variety of opera roles. She has recently performed Giovanna in Verdi’s Rigoletto for Arizona Opera, and La Frugola (Il Tabarro) and La Badessa (Suor Angelica) for the Utah Festival Opera & Musical Theatre production of Puccini’s Il Trittico. Her concert soloist appearances since contributing to the GRAMMY™ award-winning album Gretchaninov: Passion Week with the Phoenix Chorale include, the Mark Hayes Te Deum with the Sing Phoenix! Festival, Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky with the Arizona State Symphony, Dvořak Stabat Mater with the Phoenix Symphony Chamber Ensemble and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with the Chandler Symphony and Scottsdale Philharmonic.

Dr. Davis-Hazell continues to actively serve the National Association of Teachers of Singing (NATS) as a representative on the national membership committee and regional nominating committees, in addition to being a Past-President and Advisor to the Phoenix metro area Executive Board. Alexis is also an artist entrepreneur and Creative Director of the innovative production company Jazzoperetry, Inc, co-founded with her husband, basso cantante singer and composer/arranger, Earl Hazell.