Thor Steingraber

Thor Steingraber has been directing operas for fifteen years, and his work has been seen in cities across America, from New York’s Lincoln Center to the San Francisco Opera. He has directed 400 years of operatic repertoire in five languages, but is particularly known for his renderings of Mozart’s operas (Santa Fe, Los Angeles, Austin, Memphis, Indianapolis, Philadelphia, New York, and Pittsburgh).

Thor’s multi-disciplinary collaborations range from young painters at the Chicago city arts magnet school to designers like Maurice Sendak and David Hockney. In recent years, Thor’s work has turned to Wagner --in Los Angeles and San Francisco he directed Tristan und Isolde, and in Chicago, he was the Associate Director of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, starring Placido Domingo. He also works for Mr. Domingo at the Los Angeles Opera, the company that has been Thor’s artistic home for fourteen years.

Since 2002, Thor has been teaching singers in universities and conservatories, including the Yale University School of Music and California State University where he was Distinguished Guest Artist in 2008. Thor teaches acting and scene-work with a strong emphasis in character development utilizing broad-based historical and analytic inquiries.
Thor is also a playwright. He wrote Canta Luna, a play about Spanish playwright Federico Garcia Lorca who was executed in the early days of the Spanish Civil War. Canta Luna was produced at the Boston Court Theater in Pasadena, California in 2006.

Thor is an MPA candidate at Harvard’s Kennedy School, focusing on the management of nonprofit organizations and exploring issues surrounding arts policy. His own management experiences began with founding an inner-city youth theater program in conjunction with the San Francisco YMCA. Later, he was Director of Production at the Utah Festival Opera. Since its inception, Thor was responsible for planning and implementing the growth of the Festival, including the development of a 40,000 square foot production facility.