Lina Koutrakos is the winner of many MAC and a Bistro Awards for Best Director and Best Performer including this years Best Director award 2017.

Many of Lina's "clients" have been nominated and won many Backstage Bistros and MAC awards themselves and she has had the pleasure of directing many of the other wonderful Master Teacher/Directors in the NYC cabaret community: Eric Michael Gillette, Sally Mayes, Patrick DeGennaro, Rick Jensen...

As a master teacher, she heads up an ongoing Advanced Performance Workshop in Manhattan where she concentrates, but is not limited to, a more "pop/cabaret" student. (this includes the jazz singer, the musical theater singer and many more classically trained singers, who all want to “communicate” themselves more authentically) She was on the teaching staff at both the Eugene O'Neil Cabaret Symposium and the Yale Cabaret Conference for a combined 7 years. 

Koutrakos attributes her skills to having been both the booking agent at NYC's midtown cabaret club Don't Tell Mama's and at the Greenwich Village cabaret- Eighty Eight's and the waitress in both of those cabaret rooms affording her the opportunity to have seen thousands of shows. Being privy to all these shows Lina has the very exciting advantage of not only knowing what does work but perhaps much more valuable as a Master Teacher…. what doesn't! Exercising her award winning directorial muscles over the past decade she has a real good idea of the why's and how's of both. Lina Koutrakos was one of the co-founders of New York's Cabaret Intensive “Summer in the City” which ran for 10 years. Koutrakos has done both weekend intensives and Master Classes in Waterford, CT, The Berkshires, Binghamton, Santa Fe, Washington DC, Boston and Las Vegas. She was one of the original Master Teachers at the St. Louis Cabaret Conference and is heads up the Midwest Cabaret Conference in Chicago now in its 7th season. A specialized performance workshop on the island of Mykonos in Greece is scheduled for the 3rd summer this coming August. 

As a singer Koutrakos along with her band, has repeatedly sold out the legendary "Bottom Line" and sang to standing room only at Manhattans B.B Kings. She is a "regular" at the Iridium Jazz club and Joe's Pub at the Joseph Papp Public Theater. Her cabaret shows have taken her back and forth to Europe many times, and most of Manhattans premier cabaret clubs as well. Lina has been featured in The New York Times, Billboard Magazine and Mode Magazine in addition to receiving hundreds of rave, high profile reviews and interviews in many of New York City's major periodicals. She has released 5 CD's -both cabaret and rock and roll with award winning original (ASCAP awarded) original material. For more on Lina the performer, please visit her website: http://linasings.com/