Peter Sellars

Peter Sellars
Peter Sellars at the Ojai Music Festival in California (2011)
Born	1957 (age 59–60) Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S
Nationality	U.S
Occupation	Theatre director, professor

Peter Sellars (born 1957) is an American theatre director, noted for his unique contemporary stagings of classical and contemporary operas and plays. Sellars is professor at UCLA, where he teaches Art as Social Action and Art as Moral Action.

Sellars was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and attended Phillips Academy and, subsequently, Harvard University, graduating in 1979. As an undergraduate, he performed a puppet version of Wagner's Ring cycle, and directed a minimalist production of Three Sisters, with mature birch trees on the stage apron at Loeb Drama Center and Chopin Nocturnes played on a concert grand piano seen through a suspended gauze box set.

Sellars's production of Antony and Cleopatra in the swimming pool of Harvard's Adams House brought press attention well beyond campus, as did the subsequent techno-industrial production of King Lear, which included a Lincoln Continental on stage and ambient musical moods by Robert Rutman's U.S. Steel Cello Ensemble. In his senior year, he staged a production of Nikolai Gogol's The Inspector-General at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

This was followed during the summer of 1980 by staging of Don Giovanni, cast, costumed, and presented to resemble a blaxploitation film, with Don Giovanni partying almost-naked (underwear only) and shooting heroin. The production was performed under the aegis of the Monadnock Music Festival in Manchester, New Hampshire. Opera News hailed it "an act of artistic vandalism". In the winter of 1980, a production of George Frideric Handel's Orlando, again at the American Repertory Theatre, brought him to national attention—perhaps because of the novel concept of setting it in outer space. Later, Sellars studied in Japan, China, and India.