Peter Sellars is one of the most innovative and versatile artistic personalities of our time. He has staged operas at the Dutch National Opera, the English National Opera, the Lyric Opera of Chicago, the Paris Opéra, the San Francisco Opera and the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, among others. In 1992 he made his Salzburg Festival debut with Messiaen’s Saint François d’Assise, returning in 1997 for Le Grand Macabre, in 2017 for La clemenza di Tito and in 2019 for Idomeneo. In 2023 his staging for the Los Angeles Master Chorale of Heinrich Schütz’s Musikalische Exequien was performed in Salzburg under the title Music to Accompany a Departure.
Peter Sellars has collaborated on the creation of many works with composer John Adams, including Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer, El Niño, Doctor Atomic, A Flowering Tree, The Gospel According to the Other Mary and Girls of the Golden West. A great admirer of the compositions of Kaija Saariaho, he has guided the creation of productions of her work that have expanded the field of modern opera, including the world premiere of her first opera, L’Amour de loin, at the 2000 Salzburg Festival.
Peter Sellars’s recent productions include Perle Noire: Meditations for Joséphine — a piece about Josephine Baker with music by Tyshawn Sorey, staged at the Dutch National Opera, Saariaho’s Adriana Mater with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra under Esa-Pekka Salonen, Charpentier’s Médée at the Berlin State Opera, Beatrice di Tenda at the Paris Opéra and Schoenberg’s Erwartung with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra.
He has led several major arts festivals, including the 1990 and 1993 Los Angeles Festivals and the 2002 Adelaide Festival of Arts. In 2006 he was artistic director of New Crowned Hope, a month-long festival in Vienna for which he invited artists from diverse cultural backgrounds to create new work in the fields of music, theatre, dance, film, the visual arts and architecture for the celebration of the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth. He also served as music director of the 2016 Ojai Music Festival in California.
Peter Sellars is a distinguished professor in the Department of World Arts and Culture at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a resident curator of the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado. He was a mentor for the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, the Erasmus Prize for contributions to European culture and the Gish Prize. He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2014 he was awarded the prestigious Polar Music Prize and named Artist of the Year by Musical America. In 2021, he was honoured with the EBU-IMZ Outstanding Achievement Award for his series of opera video recordings.
