In 1974, she appeared as a dancer with Laura Dean and Dance Company in New York, Washington, D.C. and Connecticut[12] and two years later as a singer, actor and dancer for the world premiere of Philip Glass and Robert Wilson's Einstein on the Beach at the Avignon Festival, touring with the production to Hamburg, Paris, Belgrade, Venice, Brussels, Rotterdam and the Metropolitan Opera House where it was performed in November 1976.
The full version of A Quiet Place was presented at La Scala, followed by Washington Opera in 1984 retaining Holby as Assistant Director and Choreographer.
[18] Recently Holby directed the 2007 U.S. premiere of The True Last Words of Dutch Schultz by Eric Salzman and Valeria Vasilevski for the Center for Contemporary Opera at New York's Symphony Space.
She directed the premiere productions of Memoirs of Uliana Rooney (1996) by Vivian Fine at the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, Hildegurls: Electric Ordo Virtutum (1998) by Eve Beglarian, Kitty Brazelton, Lisa Bielawa and Elaine Kaplinsky at the Lincoln Center Festival (released on CD by Innova Recordings in 2009),[19] Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (2001) by Richard Peaslee (TADA!
[citation needed] In 2010 Holby collaborated with Brazelton and Plimpton again to premier Cat, a one-act opera-musical commissioned under the FOI at the Central Park Zoo.
[20] In 2016, Holby worked on The Three Astronauts, a space opera which she conceived in 2007 and was based on the children's picture book of the same name by Umberto Eco and Eugenio Carmi.
To produce the work, Holby collaborated with writers and composers from Russia and China, including Dmitry Glukhovsky, Liu Sola, Ye Xiaogang and Alexander Tchaykovskiy.