Welcome and thank you for visiting

 
 

I am a freelance director, writer and teacher, formerly staff director at Welsh National Opera (2001-2012). I work internationally as a stage director, associate and revival director of opera productions. As a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy in the UK, I also teach at UK conservatoires, lecture at University of Wales Trinity Saint David and am an Associate Researcher and member of CIRO (Cardiff Interdisciplinary Research in Opera and Drama) at Cardiff University. I completed my PhD thesis in 2020 on ‘Performing Realism’: A practice-led study of contemporary realism in opera staging. My research interests include realism, contemporary and cultural performance, translation studies, a/r/tography, liminality, and intersectionality.


I have directed critically acclaimed revivals of opera productions for Welsh National Opera, Royal Opera Covent Garden, Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, Scottish Opera, Netherlands Opera, Canadian Opera Company, Chicago Lyric Opera, Bayerisches Staatsoper, Opéra Comique, Le Capitôle Toulouse, Teater an der Wien and Palau de Les Arts Valencia.


I also work with orchestras semi-staging operas in concert venues, such as Sir George Benjamin and Martin Crimp’s Written On Skin with Mahler Chamber Orchestra for two European tours and Holland Festival; with Shanghai Symphony Orchestra for the Beijing Music Festival; with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra for the George Benjamin Festival; and with the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia.


Recent directing and practice-as-research projects include Written on Skin in Rome for Santa Cecilia and Helsinki for FRSO (available to watch for free on the link opposite) with a book chapter on lSemi-staging Written On Skin in the Routledge Companion to Music, Autoethnography and Reflexivity (2025) about my involvement with this opera since its International Opera Award-winning world premiere in Aix-en-Provence. I have also published on Staging Ariodante in Europe, Canada and the USA in Musical Spaces: Place, Performance, and Power (2021) with Taylor Francis.


I am an advocate for opera as a living and contemporary art form and directed the world premiere of the migration-themed operatic monodrama Bhekizizwe by Robert Fokkens, as a film and as a live touring production for Opera’r Ddraig. I also directed the UK premiere of As One by Laura Kaminsky, a chamber opera about a transgender protagonist, for Lontano Festival of American Music in London, and have authored a forthcoming a/r/tographic account of the creation of this production for a publication with Bloomsbury on multimodal translation in the arts.


Forthcoming projects in the 25/26 season include directing revivals of Richard Jones’s Olivier Award-winning productions of Hansel and Gretel, for the first time in Finnish, for Finnish National Opera and Ballet, and Festen by Mark Anthony Turnage and Lee Hall for FNOB. I also look forward to revival directing Samson et Dalila by Saint-Saëns at the Royal Opera, Covent Garden.


 

Name:

Occupation:

Director

Researcher

Teacher


This website is a record of of my work in opera





recent directing projects and research outputs:


Written on skin

accademia nazionale di santa cecilia

Rome (2025)


https://santacecilia.it/en/concerto/george-benjamin-written-on-skin/



Written on skin

FRSO Helsinki (2023)



https://areena.yle.fi/1-63606602




Bhekizizwe

Film world premiere (2021)

live tour of wales (2022)



https://bhekizizweopera.com/en/home/3039




as one

Uk premiere (2021)



https://www.lontano.co.uk/event3-5-6





 

biography