Jennifer Griesbach, Opera Director

Stage director Jennifer Griesbach has a passion for a varied repertory encompassing old and new works. An associate of The Wooster Group, she is assistant director of Cavalli’s La Didone, which opened in Brussels in May and will travel to Lisbon and Luxembourg in the fall of 2008 and New York in spring 2009. She is also assistant director for a new work with the Wooster Group in development this season. In February, Jennifer returns to SUNY Stony Brook to direct a program of staged oratorios by Provenzale and Carissimi.

Jennifer has directed productions ranging from early operas (Monteverdi’s Orfeo and Poppea, as well as works by Cavalieri, Francesca Caccini and Cavalli), standard repertory (Handel, Mozart, Offenbach, Puccini) to contemporary works by Lee Hoiby, Domenick Argento, and David Del Tredici. She has created work for Seattle Baroque Orchestra, Boston Baroque, SUNY Stony Brook, UNC Chapel Hill, the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music, Garden State Opera, Citywide Youth Opera, LaGuardia High School for the Performing Arts, the Harvard Early Music Society, Opera Nuova and the Monadnock Music Festival and assisted on productions with Boston Lyric Opera, Indianapolis Opera, New Jersey Opera Theater, the Boston Early Music Festival, the Goettingen Handel Festival and the Bronx Opera Company. Jennifer studied acting with the SITI Company and at the Ward Acting Studio (NYC) and baroque gesture and movement in Toronto and Paris. She has a Ph.D. in music history from U.C. Berkeley and 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. She is a member of the Lincoln Center Director’s Lab (2008).