The curation team of Ópus Reykjavík develops the artistic programme—from selecting artists and shaping ideas to creating meaningful collaborations across disciplines, generations, and perspectives.
Curation team │ Ópus 1
Álfheiður Erla Guðmundsdóttir is an award-winning Icelandic soprano, visual artist, and artistic director of Ópus Reykjavík. Her work spans opera, concert performance, visual art, and contemporary interdisciplinary projects, with a particular interest in creating connections between music, visual art, and performance.
She has performed internationally at leading venues and opera houses including Staatsoper Unter den Linden in Berlin, Theater Basel, and Theater an der Wien, and has collaborated with artists across disciplines. She holds a Master of Music from Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler Berlin.
Íris Ásmundar is an Icelandic contemporary dance artist and performer based in Reykjavík. Her work explores dance and movement, focusing on performances that merge movement with visual art and deeper emotional concepts.
She has performed, choreographed, and collaborated internationally, most recently with Tanz Company Gervasi in Italy, Austria, and Mexico. Íris trained at Rambert School of Ballet and Contemporary Dance in London and holds a master’s degree in performance from the University of Salford.
Tuğçe Tez is an international arts professional and founder of TEZ ARTS, a London-based artist management and creative production company working with distinctive artistic voices across disciplines. With nearly two decades of experience in the international cultural sector, her work spans artist development, strategic direction, and the creation of projects across music and the wider arts.
For Ópus Reykjavík, Tuğçe leads international relations and partnerships, connecting artists, cultural institutions, and creative partners across borders. Working closely with Álfheiður Erla Guðmundsdóttir, she supports the long-term international development of Ópus Reykjavík and its ambition to foster meaningful artistic exchange between Iceland and the wider cultural landscape.
Maó Alheimsdóttir is an Icelandic author based in Reykjavík whose creative practice spans poetry, prose, and interdisciplinary performance. Through her work, she investigates the connection between human emotion and landscape, often combining sound, image, and text. Rooted in both her Polish heritage and Icelandic linguistic identity, her work bridges literary practice with community-building initiatives that foster multicultural creative voices.
She holds a Master's degree in Creative Writing from the University of Iceland, and during the summer, she works as a guide in the Icelandic highlands, a role that deeply nurtures her artistic practice.
Vala Sigþrúðar Jónsdóttir lives and makes art in Reykjavík. In recent years she has produced installations and sculptures that deal with the materiality of textiles and video, and the relationship these two mediums have with human environments and systems. She is occasionally a teacher and a critic, alongside exhibiting her work regularly both in and outside of Iceland.
Vala holds a BA from Gerrit Rietveld Academy, an MA and an M.art ed. from the Icelandic University of the Arts.
Collaborators are the artists and creative practitioners who work with Ópus Reykjavík on individual projects and programmes.
They come from different artistic fields,generations, and backgrounds, bringing their own ideas, experience, and ways of working to each project.
Collaborators │Ópus 1
María Elísabet Bragadóttir is a Reykjavík-based writer. She has published two short story collections, Herbergi í öðrum heimi (A Room in Another World) and Sápufuglinn (The Soap Bird). Both books have been translated into several languages, and the latter received a Special Mention at the European Union Prize for Literature. She also served as editor and co-author of Götuhorn – Skáldtextar innblásnir af íslenskri myndlist (Crossroads – An Anthology of Art-Inspired Writing). María Elísabet’s first novel is forthcoming from Benedikt Publishing in November 2026.
Anne Sofie von Otter is a Swedish mezzo-soprano with an international career spanning more than four decades. She has performed at leading opera houses and festivals including the Metropolitan Opera, Royal Opera House, Paris Opera, Vienna State Opera, and Salzburg Festival. Her repertoire ranges from Mozart, Handel, and Mahler to contemporary opera and new commissions, and she is equally renowned as a Lied and concert singer. A long-standing Deutsche Grammophon artist, she has an extensive, award-winning discography and has collaborated with musicians including Claudio Abbado, Carlos Kleiber, Elvis Costello, and Brad Mehldau.
Sandrayati is a Filipina-American singer-songwriter whose music moves between folk, ambient, and alternative. Raised between Java and Bali and now rooted in Reykjavík, she explores identity, embodiment, and belonging in her intimate, immersive songwriting. Following her Decca debut Safe Ground, produced by Ólafur Arnalds, Sandrayati has collaborated with Damien Rice, JFDR, and Shahzad Ismaily. Her second album, INHABIT (2025), produced with SOHN, and James Forde Stewart, explores the body’s seasons, and our connection to the natural world. Alongside the album, she created Inhabiting Bodies, an instrumental companion and immersive movement workshop series, and Inhabiting Words, an audio journal, poetically outlining to the writing process of INHABIT. Now writing new music that moves deeper into electronic, folk, and ambient landscapes, Sandrayati continues to create work that invites us into a deeper relationship with ourselves and the living world.
Sunniva Allanic (b. 2000, Cork, Ireland) is an artist and sculptor based in Reykjavík, Iceland. She earned her Diplôme National d'Art from the École des Beaux-Arts de Nantes Saint-Nazaire (2023) and her MFA from the Iceland University of the Arts (2025). Sunniva explores a deep-seated longing for the beings of previous homes, translating a missing feeling for the past into tangible, haunting presence.
Vala Sigþrúðar Jónsdóttir lives and makes art in Reykjavík. In recent years she has produced installations and sculptures that deal with the materiality of textiles and video, and the relationship these two mediums have with human environments and systems. The process of making thread is at the center of Vala’s practice and through processes of spinning, cultivating mycelium and weaving she addresses themes of regeneration, uncertainty, contamination, interaction, color and tension. She is occasionally a teacher and a critic, alongside exhibiting her work regularly both in and outside of Iceland.
Vala holds a BA from Gerrit Rietveld Academy, an MA and an M.art ed. from the Icelandic University of the Arts.
Ingibjörg Fríða Helgadóttir is an Icelandic singer, storyteller and performing artist creating vibrant experiences at the intersection of music, storytelling and theatre. Through voice, song and spoken word, she brings stories to life and sparks the imagination of audiences of all ages. As a professional vocalist working across musical genres, she performs regularly as a soloist and ensemble singer, including with the chamber choir Cantoque Ensemble. She is also the creator and voice behind RÚV’s popular podcasts Þjóðsögukistan and Í ljósi krakkasögunnar, and is passionate about making music and the arts playful, accessible and meaningful for all audiences.
Hailed as "mesmerising" (The Independent) and praised for her "technical mastery … and extraordinarily musical" performances (Morgunbladid) Icelandic-American cellist Geirþrúður Anna Guðmundsdóttir is carving a distinctive artistic voice, combining sensitivity with a bold and fiery stage presence. Recent highlights include performances in Carnegie Hall, the Southbank Centre, the Warsaw Philharmonic, Lincoln Center, and the Banff Centre, and she appeared as soloist a with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra and the Royal Academy of Music Symphony Orchestra, among others. Her performance in Reykjavík's Harpa Concert Hall of the six Bach Cello Suites, was hailed as "an awe-inspiring experience” (Frettabladid).
Katla Rúnarsdóttir (b. 1996) is a visual artist based in Reykjavík. She completed a Master’s degree in Ceramics at HDK-Valand in Gothenburg, Sweden, in 2024, and has worked primarily with clay since then. She uses clay as a medium to bring characters from her own inner world into the human realm. In her creative process, she allows the interplay between the clay and her fingers to take shape, without having a predetermined idea of the final outcome. Once a sculpture is finished—fired and glazed—it is given a human name and a brief character description.
Ólöf Kristín Ólafsdóttir (b. 1993) paints androgynous figures in oil. Their androgyny allows them to exist freely, unconstrained by gender roles. Through this work, Ólöf hopes to encourage viewers to view themselves and others outside of those boundaries.
The figures evoke a mythological era when gender was not as rigidly defined as it is today. This ancient mythological past—along with her grandmother’s stories about the hidden people inspired Ólöf to create her own original myths. Ólöf’s work has previously been exhibited in Los Angeles, Zurich, Reykjavík, Oslo, Brisbane, and Lille, France.