Michelle Sullera who?

Ma. Michelle Sullera, the Filipino opera singer who will serenade you with Kundiman songs this Saturday, August 14, 8:30 p.m.  at Iglesia de San Agustin, Barcelona, Spain.

She has all the right to be a diva, later on you will find out why, but she’s not.

The Filipino opera singer who will give the very first Kundiman concert in Barcelona just arrived yesterday. We know that many, especially Filipinos in Barcelona,  have been wondering and have been asking us about the star artist of this Saturday’s concert but as much as we want to satisfy your curiosity by publishing an interview with Ms. Sullera, for the meantime, we can only give you an article written by the Manila Standard Today’s columnist Isah Red about Michelle Sullera, an Opera singer who is also a top caliber engineer:

The centennial celebration of my alma mater, the University of the Philippines, is unleashing many talents from the campus; the latest of them is Michelle Sullera.

No, not many are aware of whom she is, including myself.

Michelle, I have learned, was UP’s first female Chemical Engineering student who graduated summa cum laude in 2007. That is an achievement that definitely is nothing to be taken lightly, and anyone who had been to the UP knows that. In my time, engineering students had always been regarded as the university’s crème de la crème.

So, for Michelle to even mingle with the predominantly male population of the college was no mean feat.

Then she topped the board exam. No she wasn’t second or third. She was no. 1. Isn’t it too much?

And she wasn’t content with that. She went to the US where she worked and at the same time had matriculated at Stanford University in California for a master’s degree in Petroleum Engineering.

That wasn’t enough to make her happy. Two years later, she dropped everything, packed her bags and boarded a flight back to Manila.

She found herself back in the UP campus, a student in the College of Music. Recently, she graduated from the college…Michelle led the cast of Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, a production of the University of the Philippines College of Music Department of Voice, Music Theater, and Dance at the Isabelo de los Reyes Auditorium in UP. Michelle Sullera played Cio-Cio San, and previous to this one she also played Ms. Pinkerton in Menotti’s Old Maid and the Thief; and First Witch in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte. You may read the complete article

Ms. Sullera is currently working on a master’s degree in Opera Singing at the Korea National University of the Arts.