Yuval Sharon is an American director and “opera’s disrupter in residence” (The New York Times) whose unconventional body of work is committed to expanding the artform. He founded the acclaimed experimental company The Industry in Los Angeles in 2010 and transformed the Detroit Opera as its Artistic Director starting in 2020. His first book, A New Philosophy of Opera, was published by Liveright in September 2024, and his second book, Anarchy at the Opera, is expected from University of Chicago Press in 2026. Sharon was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2017, the same year he received a Foundation for Contemporary Art grant for theater. He is also the recipient of the prestigious Götz Friedrich Prize in Germany for his 2014 production of John Adams’s Doctor Atomic and was named Musical America’s Director of the Year in 2023.
In the 2025–26 season, Sharon makes his Metropolitan Opera debut with a production of Tristan und Isolde, which anticipates his Ring cycle for the theater, beginning in the 2027–28 season.
With The Industry, Sharon has directed and produced new operas in moving vehicles, operating train stations, Hollywood sound stages, and other everyday “non-places.” His production of Christopher Cerrone’s Invisible Cities (2013) brought the company international recognition with its site-responsive staging inside Union Station and the use of wireless headphones to give audiences the freedom to move during the performance. Hopscotch (2015), an audacious experiment with audience and artists sharing cars moving through Los Angeles, remains the most representative work in Sharon’s output for his operatic ambitions. Other acclaimed projects for The Industry brought Sharon in collaboration with artists such as Raven Chacon, Du Yun, George Lewis, Pauline Oliveros, Anne LeBaron, Veronika Krausas, Douglas Kearney, Aja Couchois Duncan, Cannupa Hanska Luger, and Mimi Lien, among many others.
From 2016–2019, Sharon was offered a unique residency at the Los Angeles Philharmonic as their first Artist-Collaborator, creating nine projects that included newly commissioned works, site-specific installations, and performances outside the hall. Sharon worked with musicians like Gustavo Dudamel, visual artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, Chilean theater collective Teatrocinema, and composers such as Ellen Reid, Andrew Norman, and Annie Gosfield. His residency culminated in a landmark new production of Meredith Monk’s opera ATLAS, making him the first director Monk entrusted with her work.
Sharon's appointment as Artistic Director of Detroit Opera occurred at the height of the COVID pandemic, while the company was still called Michigan Opera Theatre. While most theaters were shut down, Sharon staged a “drive-in” adaptation of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung entitled Twilight: Gods in the Detroit Opera House parking garage, with the audiences safely moving through the scenes in their own vehicles and hearing the singers through their car’s FM radios and car speakers. Although a COVID-sparked innovation, Twilight: Gods was nevertheless a statement of artistic principles for his tenure at Detroit Opera, which he demonstrated through his other innovative and acclaimed productions in and around the opera house: Ragnar Kjartansson’s 12-hour performance piece Bliss, staged in the ruins of an old theater; Puccini’s La bohème, presented in reverse order from Act Four to Act One; a rare performance of John Cage’s Europeras 3&4; The Valkyries—an adaptation of Act III of Die Walküre which used real-time green screen technology; and an AI-themed production of Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte.
Beyond his own productions, Sharon’s artistic guidance has transformed Detroit Opera into a premiere destination for progressive opera in the United States. Highlights from his tenure as Artistic Director include a major revival of Anthony Davis’s X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X and the company’s first international co-production, Osvaldo Golijov’s Ainadamar. Both productions were co-productions with the Metropolitan Opera.
Despite his love of staging operas in parking lots, Sharon’s productions have also been seen in some of the most prestigious theaters in the world. The first American ever invited to direct at Bayreuth, Sharon distinguished himself with a progressive Lohengrin in 2018 that had its final bow in 2025. Other European credits include a controversial production of Magic Flute at the Staatsoper Berlin; The Cunning Little Vixen, the first fully staged opera at the Vienna Musikverein; Péter Eötvös’s Three Sisters at the Vienna Staatsoper, under the baton of the composer; and Olga Neuwirth’s Lost Highway at Oper Frankfurt. In America, he has directed at the Lyric Opera of Chicago (Proximity, a new work composed by Daniel Bernard Roumain, Caroline Shaw, and John Luther Adams); Santa Fe Opera (Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo orchestrated by Nico Muhly, and nominated as one of the five opera productions for an International Opera Award in 2023); Hollywood Bowl (The Valkyries with Gustavo Dudamel); Cleveland Orchestra (Cunning Little Vixen and Pélleas et Mélisande); and San Francisco Symphony at Carnegie Hall (John Cage Song Books with Michael Tilson Thomas, Jessye Norman, Meredith Monk, and Joan LaBarbara).
Sharon is the inaugural Global Solutions Visiting Fellow at the University of Chicago’s Neubauer Collegium.