From Opera to the MBA: Authenticity in Performance, Presence in Leadership

Roots in Community

The Cowichan Valley on Vancouver Island is a place where cedar forests meet the sea, and where community is stitched into everyday life. It was here that Bryn Posey’s story began. Her grandmother directed the church choir, her parents worked in local schools, and the Posey name was well known long before Bryn ever set foot on a stage. In a town of fewer than 5,000, recognition was automatic, but for her it was grounding. That same sense of belonging is what led her to Saint Mary’s School of Economics and Business Administration, where she is now pursuing her MBA.

Music as Her First Bridge

The first notes of her future came early. Her grandfather arranged voice lessons before she could even read, and by the time she was seven, Bryn was competing in the valley’s annual performing arts festival, her voice carrying across a familiar crowd of neighbors and family friends. The stage became less a spotlight than a meeting place.

Discipline soon followed. As a teenager, she boarded buses and ferries for ten hours each week to reach a one-hour lesson in Vancouver. The journey was grueling, but opera demanded stamina, and Bryn met it with resolve. When her training brought her to Denver and the Lamont Opera Theatre, the lessons of endurance deepened. Every performance became a bridge — not just between singer and accompanist, but between stage and audience, art and community.

Community revealed itself in quieter ways too. Working in a small-town bakery, Bryn came to see how something as simple as a loaf of bread could tie people together. Flour, sugar, and butter became instruments of connection, much like the notes she sang on stage.

Later, while assisting the marketing team at Denver’s music school, she felt a similar rhythm. Campaigns had their own cadence, strategies their own structure. “I fell in love with marketing,” she recalls. “Because I realized the real reason I truly love music is not necessarily the singing aspect. It’s the connection and storytelling, and I think that’s where the MBA came into play. An MBA gives me the opportunity to continue connecting with people, to keep learning, while also allowing me to continue my music.”

A Second Home in Moraga

By then, a new ambition had taken hold. Opera had given her presence, marketing had given her strategy, but she wanted something that could carry both forward. An MBA, she believed, could weave them together. The search was never about prestige alone. She wanted a program that felt communal, intimate, and familiar.

Saint Mary’s gave her that answer. “I saw the campus. I loved it. I met some people, and everyone was so friendly,” she says. “It felt like that small town again, even in the midst of the Bay Area, which is huge and fast. It really just felt like this was a place to create those long-lasting connections.”

Her MBA courses have already proven how valuable that choice was. “The work ethic that I developed in all of those years of opera, the driving five hours, the self-accountability I developed really just allows me to take that and run with it, with anything that I do,” she reflects. “In the MBA program it allows me to have the confidence to do things as minor as asking questions in class, and as major as stepping out of my comfort zone and talking with up and coming firms.”

Bridging Art and Business

Music remains her center, but business has become her next aria. Bryn continues to write and perform while also reimagining how opera itself might evolve — less bound by velvet curtains, more open, more accessible. “Once people feel welcome, they’ll come back,” she explains. “That’s true for music, and it’s true for business.”

From the Cowichan Valley to Denver to Moraga, her journey has been guided by the same refrain: the power of a bridge. Through song, through storytelling, and now through business at Saint Mary’s, Bryn Posey shows that the most lasting kind of leadership is not about standing apart, but about drawing people together.