Artistic Director

Holly MacEwen Krafka, the founder of the New World Chorale, has been a conductor, educator, and performer in a wide range of musical activities for more than 25 years. A native of Wellesley, Massachusetts, she is a graduate of Gettysburg College and holds a master’s degree in choral conducting from Boston Conservatory. As a singer, Ms. Krafka was a member of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus for 20 years and performed with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under internationally renowned conductors including Leonard Bernstein, Sir Colin Davis, and Seiji Ozawa at Symphony Hall, Carnegie Hall, Tanglewood, Hong Kong, and Japan. Ms. Krafka’s children’s choirs have performed in venues ranging from Broadway shows at Boston’s Colonial Theater to the Konzerthaus in Vienna, Austria.

Ms. Krafka is a regular guest conductor with the Claflin Hill Symphony Orchestra in Milford, Massachusetts. She has led the orchestra and the New World Chorale in performances of the Mozart Requiem, Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy, Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms, Mendelssohn’s Elijah, Brahms’ Ein Deutsches Requiem, and the “Broadway in Concert” series: South Pacific in Concert (2007), The Pirates of Penzance (2008), and, most recently, The Music Man. Ms. Krafka also guest conducted Brahms’ Ein Deutsches Requiem performed by the Boston Landmarks Orchestra and the New World Chorale at the Hatch Shell in Boston in September 2009.

Ms. Krafka has been music director and vocal director in a number of local area churches and school systems; currently, she is Choral Director at Franklin High School in Franklin, Massachusetts. She resides in Milford, Massachusetts and has three musical sons: Luke (cello), Pete (string bass), and Nick (jazz trumpet).