Peter Sellars

Peter Sellars has gained international recognition for his groundbreaking and transformative interpretations of classics, advocacy of 20th century and contemporary music, and collaborative projects with an extraordinary range of creative and performing artists. He has staged operas at the Dutch National Opera, English National Opera, Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, Opéra national de Paris, Salzburg Festival and San Francisco Opera among others. Sellars 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 The Girls of the Golden West.  He guided the creation of premiere productions of Kaija Saariaho’s L’Amour de loin, Adriana Mater, and Only the Sound Remains, and has staged works by Olivier Messiaen, Gyorgy Ligeti, Paul Hindemith, Osvaldo Golijov, and Tan Dun. Recent projects include a staging of Schoenberg’s Erwartung for the San Francisco Symphony and new productions of Prokofiev’s The Gambler for the Salzburg Festival and Castor et Pollux for the Paris Opera. In 2025 Sellars staged the premieres of Matthew Aucoin’s Music for New Bodies at Lincoln Center and The Nine Jewelled Deer, by composer Sivan Eldar in Arles and Aix-en-Provence, followed by stagings of One Morning Turns into an Eternity, a Mahler/Schoenberg double bill for the Salzburg Festival and Saariaho’s Adriana Mater for the Rome Opera. Presentations at the Adelaide Festival and the Paris Opera of Sellars’ staging of Perle Noire: Meditations for Josephine, a collaboration with composer Tyshawn Sorey featuring singer Julia Bullock, are scheduled for 2026. 

Sellars has led several arts festivals, including the 1990 and 1993 Los Angeles Festivals and the 2002 Adelaide Arts Festival. In 2006 he was Artistic Director of New Crowned Hope, a festival in Vienna celebrating Mozart’s 250th birth anniversary for which he invited artists from different cultural background to work in the areas of music, theater, dance, film, fine art and architecture. He served as the Music Director of the 2016 Ojai Music Festival in California. Sellars is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA, a curator of the Telluride Film Festival and was a mentor for the Rolex Mentor and Protege Arts Initiative. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, Erasmus Prize for contributions to European culture, Gish Prize, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has been awarded the prestigious Polar Music Prize and been named Artist of the Year by Musical America. In 2021 Sellars was honored with the EBU-IMZ Lifetime Achievement Award for his body of opera video recordings.