LEWISTON — Beth Morrison figures her first big career moment came when she was a student at Edward Little High School, still singing and still naive enough to take it all for granted.

“I just thought this was the usual kind of thing,” Morrison said. Her choral teacher, Kathi Cutler, asked her to apply to the Boston University Tanglewood Institute. When the time came to audition, Morrison sang songs that Cutler helped pick. Band director John Neal accompanied her on the piano.

She got in.

“As I’ve gone on in my life, I’ve realized how special that was, that two teachers took such an interest in me to actually drive me down to Boston and support the audition by playing for me,” Morrison said.

Within a few years, Morrison would lead the prestigious school as its administrative director.

And today, the 1990 EL grad is a big name in New York’s opera community, producing shows at some of the city’s most renowned venues.

“I tell people I am from Maine,” said Morrison, who heads the nonprofit Beth Morrison Projects. “But I also think of myself as a New Yorker.”

It’s fitting.

The New Yorker magazine, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times have praised Morrison for her productions of contemporary opera. As producer, she finds the composers, the money and the production teams that craft each opera.

And she does it without a venue of her own.

“Obviously, having a space in New York is prohibitively expensive,” said Morrison, whose father is Chip Morrison, executive director of the Androscoggin County Chamber of Commerce. “I don’t come from money. I don’t have money, and I didn’t know anybody there who had money.”

So, she hatched a plan to put on shows in other venues. It worked. She has not only brought productions to such stages as the Brooklyn Academy of Music, she’s taken productions to China, Korea and Great Britain.

Her company is getting a share of the credit for the success. Part of it was a conscious effort aimed at branding herself and her work when she began the nonprofit in 2006. Anything less would get lost in New York’s whirl of art and media.

“It’s like a barrage of noise and stuff that’s happening all the time,” she said. “How you cut through that to make your mark is a really hard thing.”

She figured it would take four years for people to understand what she’s doing. Right on schedule, things eased.

“Two years ago is when it kind of broke out,” she told a Great Falls Forum audience at the Lewiston Public Library on Tuesday. “I started getting lots of press.”

The media latched on to her work in so-called “contemporary classical” or “indie classical” music. They heaped praise on composers such as David T. Little, Garrett Fisher and Missy Mazzoli.

“My heart has always been with the emerging composers and really getting the new voices out,” Morrison said. “I choose the projects that really resonate with me and that fit my aesthetic and that I feel I can do something interesting with.”

Her first production cost about $20,000 to mount. She’s planning one next year that has a budget of $210,000.

In all, she has 15 projects planned for the next two and a half years.

“It means that I’m working pretty much all the time, but the good news is I’m doing something I love,” she said.

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