Peter Sellars
- For the British actor of a similar name, see Peter Sellers.
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Peter Sellars (born 1957) is a leading American theater director, renowned for his modern stagings of classical operas and plays. Sellars is professor of World Arts and Culture at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.
Sellars was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and attended Harvard University, graduating in 1981. As an undergraduate, he performed a puppet version of Wagner's Ring cycle. In his senior year, he staged a production of Handel's Orlando at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge which thanks to its highly original modern staging brought him to national attention. After graduating, he studied in Japan, China, and India.
In 1983 and 1984, Sellars served as director of the Boston Shakespeare Company. In 1983 he received a MacArthur Foundation award. In 1984, he was named director and manager of the American National Theater in Washington, D.C. at the age of 26, a post he held until 1986.
Sellars subsequently staged in Boston a series of Mozart's operas, Cosi Fan Tutte, The Marriage of Figaro, and Don Giovanni, in collaboration with Emmanuel Music and its Artistic Director, Craig Smith. The productions were met with great critical acclaim, were televised by PBS, and were later revived in Europe.
Sellars's first feature film, The Cabinet of Dr. Ramirez, was a silent color film starring Joan Cusack, Peter Gallagher, Ron Vawter, and Mikhail Baryshnikov. He was also featured in Jean-Luc Godard's film of King Lear.
Sellars has been invited to the Salzburg and Glyndebourne Festivals, where he has mounted productions of various 20th century operas, notably Olivier Messiaen's St. François d'Assise, Paul Hindemith's Mathis der Maler, György Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre, and, with choreographer Mark Morris, the premiere of John Coolidge Adams' and Alice Goodman's Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer. Other have projects in which he has been involved include stagings of Handel's oratorio Theodora, Stravinsky's The Story of a Soldier with the Los Angeles Philharmonic conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen
In 1998, Sellars was awarded the Erasmus Prize for his work combining European and American cultural traditions in opera and theatre.