About Yuval Sharon

Yuval Sharon is an innovative director of opera with a vision for transforming opera from its status quo into an imaginative, non-elite form of art. He upends tradition by setting operas in non-spaces such as parking lots, amplifying the human voices, and sometimes performing classic operas in reverse order. Sharon is founder and co-Artistic Director of The Industry in Los Angeles and the Gary L. Wasserman Artistic Director of the Detroit Opera. 

Among his many honors, Sharon received the 2014 Götz Friedrich Prize in Germany for his production of John Adams’s Doctor Atomic, a MacArthur Fellowship in 2017, and Musical America's Director of the Year in 2023. He has been a Global Fellow at the University of Chicago’s Neubauer Collegium since 2023. Sharon has successfully defied expectations and expanded the horizons of opera in performances like Christopher Cerrone’s Invisible Cities, set in Union Station of Los Angeles; Hopscotch, an opera staged in 24 moving vehicles; and The Comet/Poppea, where a constantly rotating stage juxtaposed simultaneous performances of Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea and a new opera adaptation of W.E.B. DuBois’s The Comet by George Lewis and Douglas Kearney. He was the first American to direct at Richard Wagner's Bayreuth Festival with a production of Lohengrin in 2018. 

As he wrote in his first book, A New Philosophy of Opera (2024), “Let’s start thinking of opera as evolutionary rather than decaying. Let’s consider the experience of going to the opera as a way of thinking and feeling that will benefit us outside the theater. Let’s start viewing opera as an engine for empathy and awe, and decide to attend a performance with an explorer’s mindset. That means opening ourselves up to the unfamiliar. What would happen if we approached opera on those terms, actively developing our curiosity about things we can’t fathom but long to know?”