Jennifer Griesbach, Opera Director

Jennifer Griesbach is a stage director of opera and operetta with a passion for baroque opera and an increasingly varied repertory encompassing old and new works. An associate of The Wooster Group, she assisted director Elizabeth LeCompte with the group’s theater piece based on Cavalli’s La Didone, which opened in Brussels in May 2007. Jennifer has directed productions ranging from the earliest operas (Monteverdi’s Orfeo and Poppea, as well as works by Cavalieri, Francesca Caccini and Cavalli) to Puccini's Suor Angelica, including operas by Handel, Gluck, Mozart, Offenbach and Lehar. The 2006-2007 season offered the opportunity to work with Pulitzer prize-winning composer David Del Tredici on a staging of his dramatic monologue Dracula, featuring soprano Melissa Fogarty and conducted by Mr. Del Tredici. The New York Times called the performance “playful” and praised Ms. Fogarty for “acting with delirious abandon.”

In 2007-2008, Jennifer will continue her association with The Wooster Group on La Didone and on a new work and she will direct Acis and Galatea (UNC Chapel Hill), Dido and Aeneas (SUNY Stony Brook), La Serva Padrona (Seattle Baroque) and a double bill of 20th century operas based on Chekhov stories (The Boor and The Scarf at SUNY Stony Brook). She will also assist Tim Ocel on La Bohème at Boston Lyric Opera and John Davies on The Magic Flute at Indianapolis Opera.

Jennifer has created work for SUNY Stony Brook, the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music, Garden State Opera, Citywide Youth Opera, LaGuardia High School for the Performing Arts, Boston Baroque, the Harvard Early Music Society, the New York Continuo Collective, Opera Nuova (Edmonton, Alberta), the Monadnock Music Festival, the San Francisco Early Music Society, the Amherst Early Music Festival, the Berkeley Early Music Festival, and Teatro Bacchino, the San Francisco Bay-based company she ran for many years with musical director David Morris. Jennifer has worked as an assistant director to directors Elizabeth LeCompte, David Grabarkewitz, Drew Minter, Ben Spierman and Catherine Turocy at The Wooster Group, New Jersey Opera Theater, the Boston Early Music Festival, the Goettingen Handel Festival, and the Bronx Opera Company. Jennifer studied baroque dance and gesture with Elaine Biagi Turner (Toronto), Cecilia Gracio Muora and Christine Bayle (Paris), acting and physical theatre with the SITI Company and at the Ward Acting Studio (NYC), and holds a Ph.D. in music history from U.C. Berkeley. She has taught workshops and masterclasses at Boston University, the New England Conservatory, Yale University, SUNY Stony Brook, and the Amherst and Vancouver Early Music Festivals and the New York Continuo Collective.