Peter Sellars

A graduate of Harvard College, Peter Sellars studied in Japan, China and India before becoming artistic director of the Boston Shakespeare Company in Massachusetts. At age 26, he was selected to lead the American National Theater at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Since then, Sellars has worked at theater and opera companies all over the world, and has guided numerous arts festivals including: the 1990 and 1993 Los Angeles Festival, a large-scale, international, intercultural, and interdisciplinary initiative mobilizing the arts; the 2002 Adelaide Festival in Australia; and the 2003 Venice Biennale International Festival of Theater in Venice, Italy, the 2006 New Crowned Hope, a festival in Vienna celebrating the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth. He is a professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA. Among his numerous honors are the MacArthur Prize, the Erasmus Prize and Swedish Polar Music Prize.

In a career spanning four decades, Sellars has reshaped modern opera with his bold direction. A visionary force, Sellars is known for innovative re-interpretations of classic works. Whether it is Mozart, Shakespeare, Aeschylus, Sophocles, or the 16th-century Chinese playwright Tang Xianzu, Sellars is able to strike a universal chord with audiences, engaging contemporary social and political issues that resonate. He has established a reputation for bringing 20th-century operas to the stage, including works by Olivier Messaien, Paul Hindemith, and Gyorgy Ligeti, and for guiding the creation of new productions that have expanded the repertoire of modern opera.

With composer John Adams, a longtime collaborator, Sellars presented Nixon in China at the Houston Grand Opera in 1987, taking the production to numerous venues in the U.S. and around the world. A 1988 television production of the Sellars-directed opera for Great Performances on PBS earned an Emmy for Outstanding Classical Program in the Performing Arts. Other Adams/Sellars collaborations include The Death of Klinghoffer (1991) at the Opera National de la Monnaie, Brussels, Belgium; the nativity oratorio El Nino (2000) at the Theatre du Catelet; and Doctor Atomic (2005), about the development of the atomic bomb, at the San Francisco Opera.

Recent projects include Tan Dun’s composition Peony Pavilion; a Chicano version of Stravinsky’s The Story of a Soldier; the premiere production of Kaija Saariaho’s opera L’amour de loin; Antonin Artaud’s radio play coupled with the poetry of the late June Jordan, For an End to the Judgment of God/Kissing God Goodbye staged as a press conference on the war in Afghanistan; and a new production of the Euripides play The Children of Herakles, focusing on the contemporary immigration and refugee issues experience, which has been presented in eight countries. Working in association with composer Osvaldo Golijov and librettist David Henry Hwang, Sellars is the driving force behind the creation of Ainadamar, about the life of the great Spanish actress Margarita Xirgu and the death of Spanish poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca, which premiered in July at the Santa Fe Opera. In 2004, Sellars teamed up with video artist Bill Viola and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen on The Tristan Project at the Los Angeles Philharmonic. In 2011 he directed John Adam’s opera Nixon in China’s debut at the New York’s Metropolitan Opera, the production was broadcast to theaters around the world.