Youth Opera International is dedicated to promoting the theatre arts through the creation and performance of opera productions, seminars in teaching music and movement and the dissemination of related educational materials.  
       
  Sanford Jones is known internationally as a Montessori educator, lecturer and composer. He has made significant contributions to the Montessori movement, including the founding and directing of four schools on the East Coast. He was the founding president of the North American Montessori Teachers’ Association, and he is a former Executive Director of the Association Montessori Internationale-USA.
Mr. Jones, a native of Virginia, did his undergraduate work in music and history at Westminster Choir College, Rutgers University and Roanoke College. A piano and piano pedagogy student of Frances Clark, and a member of Westminster Choir under John Finley Williamson, he taught at Westminster and The New School for Music Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He is the composer of three widely-used songbooks for children and thirteen children’s operas.

 
 

       
  Judy Jones began her performing career while still in high school, dancing in the Dallas State Fair musicals for two seasons. She then attended the University of Utah as a ballet major. In New York, she danced for ten years in a number of Broadway musicals, including My Fair Lady, Hallelujah, Baby! and Do I Hear a Waltz? She was in the original cast of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and she appeared in the movie, The Producers.
Ms. Jones owned and directed two dance studios in New Jersey. Later she directed the Fine Arts Program for the Charles Towne Montessori School in Charleston, South Carolina and served as movement consultant/teacher for the Charles Ellis Montessori Academy in Savannah, Georgia. Judy is certified in the Laban/Bartenieff theory of movement and in Brain Gym Levels I and II of Educational Kinesiology. She holds a degree in Theatre from Armstrong Atlantic State University in Savannah.
 
  The Joneses will present their children’s operas at twelve Montessori schools throughout the USA this season.  
 
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