ISABEL MILENSKI

DIRECTOR
Isabela Milenski

Isabel Milenski has directed Peri’s Euridice and Virginia Woolf’s play Freshwater at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. With the Long Beach Opera (CA) she has staged Shostakovich’s Moscow, Cherry Town, Janáček’s Jenufa, Milhaud’s Trois Operas Minutes, Richard Strauss’s The Silent Woman, and Handel’s Semele. She made her New York debut directing The Marriage of Figaro at the Juilliard School, which she also staged for New York Lyric Opera at Carnegie Hall. Other local credits include Apollo and Daphne for Pocket Opera of New York and an off-Broadway musical, Woody Guthrie Dreams. In the Bay Area she staged a fiery adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey as a rock opera for Oakland’s (CA) famous foundry The Crucible. For Opera in Williamsburg (VA) she has directed Così fan tutte and upcoming, will direct La Cenerentola. Ms. Milenski is founder and Artistic Director of Floating Opera New York, where she produced and staged Pelléas et Mélisande and will produce John Cage’s Europeras 3 & 4 in 2017. Ms. Milenski will direct L’incoronazione di Poppea this summer in Italy with the Oberlin in Italy program. She has been on the faculties of the Manhattan School of Music’s Summer Voice Festival, where she directed Cavalli’s La Calisto and Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea, and at the Cincinnati Conservatory, where she directed Così fan tutte, Argento’s The Voyage of Edgar Allen Poe, and Britten’s The Turn of the Screw, recipient of a National Opera Association award. Other educational opera productions include Smetana’s The Bartered Bride, Kurt Weill’s Street Scene, and The Pirates of Penzance for Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids (MI). More teaching credits include stints at Penn State University, The Juilliard School, Beijing’s National Center for the Performing Arts, Hong Kong’s Academy for the Performing Arts, and, most recently, Tokyo’s Summer Opera Seminar. Ms. Milenski is the Artistic Director of Hofstra University’s Opera Theater program.