One of America’s most creative and significant artists, Peter Sellars has dedicated his life to spreading artistic vision, believing that art is not just a medium for beauty or entertainment but that it truly can enact change.
A visionary force consistently challenging the boundaries of creativity, Sellars uses the stage as a platform for moral and social action and is committed to exploring the role of the performing arts in contemporary society.
In his keynote address to open the 2006 Theatre Forum Conference, Peter Sellars discusses Art as Moral Action.

Renowned theatre, opera and film director Peter Sellars is one of the most innovative and powerful forces in the performing arts and has directed more than one hundred productions across America and abroad. A visionary force, Sellars is known for innovative re-interpretations of classic works. Whether it is Mozart, Shakespeare, Aeschylus, Sophocles, or the 16th-century Chinese playwright Tang Xianzu, Sellars is able to strike a universal chord with audiences, engaging contemporary social and political issues.

Peter Sellars: A graduate of Harvard College, Peter Sellars studied in Japan, China and India before becoming artistic director of the Boston Shakespeare Company. At age 26, he was selected to lead the American National Theatre at the Kennedy Centre in Washington, D.C. Since then he has worked at theatre and opera companies all over the world, and has guided numerous arts festivals including: the 1990 and 1993 Los Angeles Festivals; the 2002 Adelaide Festival in Australia; and the 2003 Venice Biennale International Festival of Theatre in Italy. He is a professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA, a visiting lecturer at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, and a “Resident Curator” of the Telluride Film Festival. Among his numerous honours are the MacArthur Prize and the Erasmus Prize.

Sellars has established a reputation for bringing 20th-century operas to the stage, including works by Olivier Messaien, Paul Hindemith, György Ligeti, Kaija Saariaho, and for guiding the creation of new productions that have expanded the repertoire of modern opera. Sellars has been the driving force in the creation of many new works, with long-time collaborator John Adams, such as Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer, El Niño, and most recently Doctor Atomic, about Robert Oppenheimer the birth of the atomic age. Sellars created the Doctor Atomic libretto from a variety of historical sources including declassified government and military documents, personal letters, correspondence, and poetry.

Projects in recent years have included a Chicano version of Stravinsky's The Story of a Soldier; Antonin Artaud 's radio play coupled with the poetry of the late June Jordan, For an End to the Judgment of God/Kissing God Goodbye, staged as a press conference on the war in Afghanistan; a new production of the Euripides play The Children of Herakles, focusing on contemporary immigration and refugee issues and experience; and with video artist Bill Viola and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen Wagner's Tristan and Isolde.

Sellars is currently the artistic director of the New Crowned Hope Festival www.newcrownedhope.org, and has invited to Vienna contemporary international artists, from diverse cultural backgrounds, in the fields of music and opera, architecture, the visual arts and film to create new projects as part of the Vienna Mozart Year celebrating the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth.

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