Masi grew up in central Pennsylvania, the daughter of a Ghanaian metallurgy professor and an American sociologist/writer. She did her academic work in music, theatre and cultural studies at Harvard (B.A.) and New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts (M.A.).
A voice instructor and coach with over a decade of teaching experience, Masi specializes in popular vocal styles, helping students navigate musical theatre belting and legit styles as well as jazz, rock, and other contemporary sounds. Her voice students perform on Broadway and in major regional theatres as well as experimental theatre, rock/pop venues, the Miss America Pageant, and middle school musical productions.
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Masi is the composer/lyricist for the original spy musical Sympathy Jones (with Brooke Pierce, bookwriter), which played to sold-out audiences at the 2007 New York Musical Theatre Festival (NYMF) starring Kate Shindle, who won a NYMF Outstanding Individual Performance Award for the her performance in the title role as an endearing, wannabe super secret agent with a serious belt.
Masi participated as a composer in the 2009 New Dramatists/Nautilus Music-Theater Composer-Librettist Studio, where she collaborated with playwrights Rob Handel, Jordan Harrison, Carson Kreitzer, Sung Rno, and Deborah Stein.
As a performer, Masi appeared in New York in lots of new musical theatre works as well as regional productions of Ragtime, Little Shop of Horrors, and Hair. She has performed as a soloist with the Kuumba Singers gospel choir in concert for Nelson Mandela, and with new music group Alarm Will Sound singing selections from June Jordan and John Adams’ songplay I Was Looking at the Ceiling and then I Saw The Sky. Her vocals and lyrics can be heard on the album Come 'N Play from House of Bamba, where she is a featured vocalist for the song "Evening."
Additional credits include five years as a staff songwriter and music director for Kidstock Theatre (Winchester, MA), where she wrote some sixty songs for children’s musicals; the score for the children’s musical adaptation of The Knight Who Was Afraid of the Dark, commissioned by the Pocket Full of Tales theatre company (Boston, L.A.); and the original musical Dances for a Journey, a tryptych about sisterhood and identity premiered at Harvard’s Agassiz Theatre. Masi was a co-founder (with writer/director Eamonn Farrell) of the Brooklyn-based Anonymous Ensemble, a performers’ lab for experimental voicework, movement and text generation exercises. She wrote music and lyrics for the Anonymous Ensemble productions Oracle, The Emperor’s New Vestments, Lysistrata, and The Best (with Eamonn Farrell and Jim Iseman), a long form experimental rock theatre piece presented at venues including the Brisbane Theatre Festival in Australia, and the Ohio Theatre in New York City.
Masi also worked for a number of years with the Raw Impressions Music Theatre variously as a composer, voice coach, performer, and Associate Artistic Director, where she assembled teams of artists and consulted on the collaborative process. Currently she serves an advisor for Ripfest Film Festival and movie musicals project and as Development Manager at the Lark Play Development Center. She studies voice with Joan Barber and flamenco singing with Alfonso Cid.
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