Executive Director
Kathleen Fay

KATHLEEN FAY has served as Executive Director of the Boston Early Music Festival since 1989, and as General Manager since 1987. For over three decades, she has been, and continues to be responsible for all administrative, development, financial, and artistic departments of the organization, as well as the management of biennial Festivals, the annual concert seasons in Boston and in New York City at the Morgan Library & Museum, the annual Chamber Opera Series, and the Festival’s Baroque Opera Recording Project—an initiative to record BEMF’s groundbreaking work in the field of Baroque opera, featuring a total of ten CDs to date on the CPO and Erato labels, five of which have been nominated for GRAMMY Awards for Best Opera Recording, and one awarded the GRAMMY.

Ms. Fay is a founding Trustee of the Catalogue for Philanthropy and serves on the boards of the Cambridge Society for Early Music, Exsultemus, and Constellation Center, a Cambridge-based initiative to build a performing arts center; she is also a member of the Advisory Board of Harvard University’s Early Music Society.

In November 2001, Ms. Fay was named Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture as a result of her significant contribution to furthering the arts in France and throughout the world. In June 2003, she received the distinguished Arion Award from the Cambridge Society of Early Music for her “outstanding contributions to musical culture.” And, in June 2011, the Board of Directors of Early Music America named the Boston Early Music Festival, Kathleen Fay, Executive Director, as the 2011 recipient of the distinguished Howard Mayer Brown Award, for lifetime achievement in the field of early music. In recognition of Kathy’s management of BEMF for the past 30 years, in February 2017, the BEMF Board of Directors established the Kathleen Fay Leadership Fund, to be managed in perpetuity as a permanent, revolving, contingency and opportunity-investment leadership resource.

Ms. Fay is a widely respected impresario and promoter of early music in North America and Europe. She holds graduate degrees in Piano Performance and Music Teaching from the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music.