French Coach
Mary Blackwood Collier is professor of French language and literature at Westmont College, where she has taught for more than 25 years. A native of Santa Barbara, Ms. Collier graduated from Laguna Blanca School and the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she received a master's degree. She went on to receive a doctorate with highest honors in French literature from the Université de Paris, Sorbonne.
Ms. Collier has published the book La Carmen essentielle et sa réalisation au spectacle, a literary and musical analysis of Mérimée's and Bizet's Carmens and seven 20th-century interpretations of the character. She has also published a number of scholarly articles and presents papers regularly at international academic conferences.
Ms. Collier has had a lifelong relationship with the Music Academy. Her mother came to Santa Barbara from the Curtis Institute of Music to study with Lotte Lehmann, participating in the Academy's first class. Ms. Collier is an alumna of the Music Academy in two departments: piano and piano chamber music with Emanuel Bay, and song, oratorio, and opera repertoire with Martial Singher.
She served on the Music Academy coaching staff from 1976 to 1984, teaching French diction for singers, and returned to this post in 1996.