Janet Collins was born in Kent and studied at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, continuing at the Opera School of the Mannheim Musikhochschule and in mastercourses. Her first engagements took her to Bremen, where she sang Ottla and Milena in Stanley Walden’s Kafka opera Letter to My Father. She appeared also at the Mannheim National Theatre in, among others, Rihm’s Jakob Lenz, Killmayer’s Yolimba and as Erde in Das Rheingold. She joined the Münster Theatre in 1997 and has undertaken there the title-rôle in Bizet’s Carmen, and the parts of Erda and Flosshilde in Das Rheingold, Erda in Siegfried, and Schwertleite in Die Walküre. She made her Stuttgart début as Flosshilde in Götterdämmerung and sang in the première as First Norn.