The Richard Tucker Music Foundation has announced that Nicholas Brownlee is the winner of the 2025 Richard Tucker Award.

The award comes with a $50,000 cash prize as well as the ongoing support of the Tucker family and foundation. It also comes with the hope that the award will be a well-timed catalyst to elevate Brownlee’s career to even greater heights.

Brownlee is a previous recipient of a 2017 Richard Tucker Career Grant and a 2016 Sara Tucker Study Grant.

In a statement Brownlee said, “The Tucker Foundation, and namely Richard Tucker, helped turn opera into a real, homegrown American thing. It makes me proud as an American how he helped change the way that American schooling became the best schooling for voice. Going through the Sara Tucker Study Grant, the Richard Tucker Career Grant, and now the big Richard Tucker Award, it’s hard to put into words how much each one of those stages has progressed my career. To be added to the list of previous award winners who have championed American opera singers is incredibly overwhelming, but it’s the biggest ‘attaboy’ that you could ever have — as an artist, you never really know the effect you’re making. You go out on stage every night, you give everything that you have, but you wonder, ‘Am I doing the right thing?’ And when you get an award like this, it says you’re on the right path and to keep going, that what you’re doing matters as it’s affecting and touching people. It makes me proud to carry the Tucker name.”

He concluded, “I also stand on the shoulders of every single educator and supporter of mine who saw talent in me when I didn’t see it in myself. Also, my wife, Jennifer, is my biggest supporter in the world. I am incredibly grateful.”

Over the years Brownlee has performed at the Bayerische Staatsoper, Oper Frankfurt, Opéra national de Paris, Oper Leipzig, Metropolitan Opera, and Bayreuther Festspiele. His repertoire includes the music of Puccini, Wagner, Verdi and many more.

He is a first prize winner of the Hans Gabor Belvedere Singing Competition, winner of the Zarzuela prize at Operalia, and a grand prize winner of The Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions.

Past winners of the Richard Tucker Award include Clay Hilley, Angel Blue, Jamie Barton, Stephanie Blythe, Lawrence Brownlee, Joyce DiDonato, Renée Fleming, Christine Goerke, Isabel Leonard, Lisette Oropesa, Matthew Polenzani, Nadine Sierra, and Deborah Voigt.