Credit / Lucas Godlewski
JENNIFER WILLIAMS
Stage Director
Acclaimed by The San Francisco Chronicle as a director “of particular ingenuity,” Jennifer Williams has created innovative productions worldwide. Her incisive interpretations of both traditional and new repertoire along with boundary-breaking fusions of multimedia technology, immersive installations, devised theater, and site-specific performance have been described as “extraordinarily beautiful” and “consistently imaginative.”
Respected as a leader of integrity and passionate agent for promoting human rights and social justice through the arts, Williams is consistently invited to bring her work as a visionary and collaborator to internationally renowned institutions.
With an eye toward enlarging the scope of vocal performance, Williams has been awarded OPERA America’s Toulmin Discovery Grant for Women Composers as well as coveted grants from New Music USA’s Creator Fund, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, and Brooklyn Arts Council for her visionary work creating devised opera. With the partnerships of PROTESTRA and International Contemporary Ensemble, she devised Dis/Informand GROUNDS, immersive installations that challenged the very concept of opera and our perception of it.
A dynamic and sought-after speaker, she has been a workshop leader at Harvard University’s Mellon School of Theater and Performance Research and panelist at OPERA America’s New Works Forum. She has served as guest faculty at Manhattan School of Music and Rice University Shepherd School of Music and as a faculty drama coach for the Houston Grand Opera Studio.
Williams began her career as a director at the San Francisco Opera through the Merola Opera Program. Her apprenticeship as a Regiehospitantin at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, Komische Oper Berlin, Oper Frankfurt, and Staatsoper Stuttgart forged the foundation of her unusually broad operatic and theatrical experience.
As intellectually outstanding as she is original, Williams is a Fulbright Scholar and holds a Ph.D. from Cornell University, where she was a Sage Fellow, and an A.B. with honors from the University of Chicago. She is the author of the book, Archaeology of the Political Unconscious: Theater and Opera in East Berlin, 1967-1977, published by Routledge as part of the distinguished Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies series. She is a member of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society and American Guild of Musical Artists. She lives in Berlin.