Opera Singer. A coloratura soprano, she is remembered for her career in several major opera houses during the 1960s. Born Jane Angelovich, she was raised in the Connecticut suburbs of New York, studied voice at the Juilliard School with legendary baritone Giuseppe de Luca, and received further training in Venice, Italy under soprano Toti Dal Monte who advised her to Italianize her name. Gianna made her 1954 professional debut at Rome's Baths of Caracella in the role that would be her signature, the doomed Gilda of Giuseppe Verdi's "Rigoletto". Over the next years she appeared in Naples, Florence, Milan, Bologna, and elsewhere in such staples of the coloratura repertoire as the title leads of Donizetti's "Lucia di Lammermoor" and Leo Delibes' "Lakme", Amina from Vincenzo Bellini's "La Sonnambula", the doll Olympia in Jacques Offenbach's "The Tales of Hoffmann", Zerbinetta from Richard Strauss's "Ariadne auf Naxos", and the fearsome Queen of the Night in Mozart's "The Magic Flute". She was to sing at the Paris Opera and at the Glyndebourne Festival as Rosina from Rossini's "The Barber of Seville" and at the Edinburgh Festival as Norina in Donizetti's comedy "Don Pasquale" prior to her March 1959 American bow at San Francisco's Cosmopolitan Opera as Lucia. Gianna made her Metropolitan Opera debut on April 5, 1961 as Gilda in a cast that included Robert Merrill as her Court Jester father and was to remain with the company for eight seasons while also earning acclaim in New Orleans, Houston, and Philadelphia. Retiring at a young age, she became a respected voice teacher and held a professorship at Indiana University's Jacobs School of Music from 1970 until 1997. Upon her retirement to Professor Emerita status, she relocated to the Charlotte, North Carolina suburbs where she lived out her days and died in a nursing facility following a protracted illness. At her demise she could be heard on a number of complete opera recordings including preservations of "Rigoletto" and "The Barber of Seville" as well as a particularly distinguished 1959 interpretation of Puccini's "La Boheme" in which she was featured as Musetta.