Photo: Kevin Higa
Peter Sellars is a renowned theater, opera and festival director, and one of the most innovative and powerful forces in the performing arts in America and abroad. A true visionary, 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.
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 Festivals; the 2002 Adelaide Festival in Australia; and the 2003 Venice Biennale International Festival of Theater in Italy. He is a professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA; a “Resident Curator” of the Telluride Film Festival, and was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Sellars has established a reputation for bringing 20th-century and contemporary operas to the stage, including works by Olivier Messaien, Paul Hindemith, György Ligeti, Kaija Saariaho, and Osvaldo Golijov, and for guiding the creation of new productions that have expanded the repertoire of modern opera. Sellars has been the driving force in the creation of many new works with longtime collaborator John Adams, such as Nixon in China; The Death of Klinghoffer; El Niño, and most recently Doctor Atomic, about Robert Oppenheimer and the birth of the atomic age.
Projects in recent years have included a Chicano version of Stravinsky’s The Story of a Soldier; 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; a new production of the Euripides play The Children of Herakles, focusing on contemporary immigration and refugee issues and experience; and Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde with video artist Bill Viola and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen.
Most recently Sellars was the artistic director of the New Crowned Hope Festival in Vienna where he invited contemporary international artists from diverse cultural backgrounds in the fields of music and opera, architecture, the visual arts and film to create new projects as part of the Vienna Mozart Year celebrating the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth.
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Peter Sellars / John Adams |
Peter Sellars / John Adams |
Peter Sellars |
Peter Sellars |
Peter Sellars |
Peter Sellars |
Symposium C6 runs concurrent with 