Mary Lucia Darst
Mary Lucia Thao Darst, DPhil, lives between Kentucky, USA, and Oxford, England. She holds a DPhil (PhD) in Music from the University of Oxford and is a member of St Hilda’s College.For her research on musical networks in the eighteenth century, she has won the Laura Bassi Scholarship prize.
A student of Suzanne Aspden, Mary Lucia’s other notable mentors include classical historian, poet, and librettist Charles Anthony “Tony” Silvestri (The Pastry Prince, Sleep) and Dr. Eric Foner (Columbia University). Mary Lucia is currently a writer for the Austrian Economics Center and for the digital publication Notes on Liberty.
Mary Lucia holds an MA from Columbia University in History and Literature. While at Columbia, she studied in France at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and at the École normale supérieure. She has a working knowledge of twelve languages.
She also has her own publication, Oxford Dawn, on Substack. For Oxford Dawn, she received a full scholarship to the CUNY-Newmark School of Journalism’s 2023 Entrepreneurial Journalism Creators Program. In addition to working as a researcher and writer, Mary Lucia is a filmmaker and an active classical musician and opera director. In 2023, she was Distinguished Fellow with the Richmond International Film Festival and the Richmond Arts Institute.
As a filmmaker, Mary Lucia worked for the Moving Picture Institute (MPI) as an intern (research capacity, Smock Media). She also worked as Production Coordinator for MPI’s short film Moving Violation.Since then, she has returned to MPI three separate times as a fellow for their screenwriting, cinematography, and editing workshops.
Mary Lucia's portfolio
Raised in a musical family, Mary Lucia studied the violin for ten years before officially switching to viola. She has served as Principal Viola for the Washburn University Orchestra, performed in viola masterclasses and chamber ensembles, and was a guest musician with the Piccadilly Symphony.
As an orchestral fellow, she served as Music Librarian for the International Conductors’ Festival and participated in outreach programs that brought classical music concerts to the central Kentucky area. In summer 2021, Mary Lucia was assistant director for the Berlin Opera Academy’s productions of Gianni Schicchi and Suor Angelica.
She is co-founder of ClefRights, a music publishing startup. ClefRights is a spin-off of Mythoi Music, the music publishing and film consultancy company Mary Lucia owns with her sister Natalie Darst Xia.
Mary Lucia has an avid interest in technology and technological development. In addition to exploring the history of technology, she has researched extensively on social and philosophical issues surrounding technology for think tanks.
Mary Lucia has studied German at the Goethe Institut, Italian at the Middlebury School of Languages, and both languages at the Oxford University Language Centre. An avid polyglot, Mary Lucia is fluent in French, German, Italian, Latin, and Greek. She studied Japanese, Mandarin, and Russian at the Oxford University Language Centre, Korean at the School of Oriental Studies (SOAS) in London, and Hungarian and Vietnamese privately. Currently, she is continuing her study of Japanese privately.
Mary Lucia is a member of the Royal Musical Association, Broadcast Music Incorporated (BMI), the American Musicological Society (AMS), the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies (ASECS), and the Society for Global Nineteenth Century Studies (SGNCS). She presented her research at the 2023 ASECS annual conference, and the SGNCS first international congress in Singapore.