Biography

Peter Sellars has gained international renown for his groundbreaking and transformative interpretations of classics, advocacy of 20th-century and contemporary music, and collaborative projects. His work illuminates the power of art as a means of moral expression and social action.

He has staged operas at the Dutch National Opera, English National Opera, Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Opéra National de Paris, and the Salzburg Festival, among others. He has also collaborated on the creation and production of many works with composers John Adams and Kaija Saariaho. He made his San Francisco Symphony debut in 2001, staging Adams’s El Niño, and is in the midst of a four-year partnership with the Symphony that began with Igor Stravinsky’s Oedipus rex last season and continues in June 2024 with Arnold Schoenberg’s Erwartung.

Recent productions include Tyshawn Sorey’s Monochromatic Light (Afterlife) for the Park Avenue Armory in New York, Heinrich Schütz’s Musikalische Exequien with the Los Angeles Master Chorale, a revival of Tristan und Isolde at the Paris Opera, and a staging of Sorey’s Perle Noire: Meditations for Josephine with SF Symphony Collaborative Partner Julia Bullock at the Dutch National Opera. Upcoming in 2023–24 are new productions of Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s Medee in Berlin and Vincenzo Bellini’s Beatrice di Tenda in Paris.

Mr. Sellars is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA and the founding director of the Boethius Institute at UCLA. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, the Erasmus Prize for contributions to European culture, and the Gish Prize, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

June 2023