Times Correspondent
Judy Lisi, president and CEO of the David A. Straz Jr. Center for the Performing Arts, has run the sprawling entertainment center since 1992. She founded Opera Tampa in 1995 and the Patel Conservatory, where aspiring performers train, in 2004.
Lisi, a soprano, studied opera at the Juilliard School, taught by singers from the Metropolitan Opera, and she performed early in her career. She loved it, she said, but opera singers have to tour and she couldn’t do that with two young children at the time.