Park Avenue Armory Appoints Deborah Warner as Artistic Director

Park Avenue Armory has appointed Deborah Warner as its Anita K. Hersh Artistic Director. Since its founding as an arts center in 2006, with its Gilded Age interiors and vast Drill Hall, Park Avenue Armory has carved out a unique place in the cultural ecology of New York, enabling artists to create, students to explore, and audiences to experience unconventional, multidisciplinary works of art that cannot be realized in traditional theaters, concert halls, or museums. The landmarked reception rooms serve as unique venues for intimate recitals, music, and visual art installations. The 55,000-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall, with its patina of a “found space” and the scale and flexibility to shape the audience environment, has inspired artists to create ambitious, boundary-breaking, cross-disciplinary work, building upon the Armory’s reputation as an intrepid creative partner. Warner was appointed following an international search led by Arts Consulting Group, and she begins her role at the Park Avenue Armory in January 2026.

A world-renowned British director known for award-winning work in theater, opera, and unexpected stagings for more than four decades, Warner has extended the boundaries of performance across many disciplines. She launched her career in 1980 when she founded the Kick Theatre Company, staging works by Shakespeare, Brecht, and Büchner, which forged her reputation as a powerful reinventor of the classics. She then joined the Royal Shakespeare Company as Resident Director, becoming the first woman to win an Olivier Award for Best Director for her production of Titus Andronicus starring Brian Cox, and went on to serve as Associate Director at The National Theatre from 1989 to 1997. Beginning with the Royal Shakespeare’s Electra in 1988, Warner has directed Fiona Shaw in 18 productions, including the stage and BBC versions of Hedda Gabler, Richard II (with Fiona Shaw in the title role), the Tony-nominated and Drama Desk–winning Medea, the Drama Desk-nominated Happy Days, the film The Last September, and more. She has worked with many other notable artists, including Glenda Jackson (King Lear), Ralph Fiennes, Simon Russell Beale (Julius Caesar), and Bruno Ganz (Coriolanus), among others.

Warner is also renowned for her work in opera, which has included productions of Berg’s Wozzeck, Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, Beethoven’s Fidelio, and Britten’s The Turn of the Screw, performed at major opera houses around the world. In 2026, Warner will direct productions at The Metropolitan Opera, Teatro Real Madrid, Royal Ballet and Opera, Tiroler Festspiele Erl, and Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino. Recent productions include acclaimed revivals of The Turn of the Screw at Teatro dell’Opera di Roma and Winterreise at Athénée Théâtre Louis-Jouvet in Paris, both of which opened in the fall of 2025. Other notable works include several stagings of Britten operas—including Peter Grimes, Billy Budd, and Death in Venice; and the world premiere of Tansy Davies’ Between Worlds. Staged oratorios and song cycles directed by Warner have included St John Passion (ENO), Messiah (ENO), and Winterreise with tenor Ian Bostridge presented at the Ustinov Studio.

Warner has also conceived and directed site-specific staged works of poetry that have transformed unexpected locations into spaces of poetic encounters. Among the earliest such projects was The Waste Land, produced in 1995 in a once glorious Broadway theater turned porn house on the desolate stretch of 42nd Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenues, in which audiences witnessed a T.S. Eliot poem performed by Fiona Shaw, lit by a single light bulb on an empty stage. The work won two New York Drama Desk Awards and travelled to London, Brussels, Dublin, Paris, Toronto, and many other cities. Warner’s other staged performances and experiential installations in unconventional spaces include The St. Pancras Project (1995) in which audiences took an atmospheric walk through an abandoned Victorian gothic hotel; and the spare, theater installation The Tower Project (1999) that was staged in an abandoned office tower. She then subsequently developed The Angel Project (2000, 2003) as a solitary, physical and imaginative journey across multiple, mostly uninhabited, locations across a city; and Peace Camp (2012), created for the 2012 British Olympics in a coastal installation celebrating love, poetry, and landscape via glowing tent encampments simultaneously illuminated at some of the UK’s most beautiful and remote coastal locations. Most recently, Warner staged Arcadia (2021), a haunting work created for the construction site of Factory International’s Aviva Studios. This decades-long commitment to reimagining space—industrial, urban, architectural, or forgotten—makes Warner uniquely aligned with the scale, patina, and unconventional beauty of Park Avenue Armory.

Since the late 1990s, Warner has worked primarily independently. She served as Artistic Director of the Ustinov Studio from 2022 through 2024, part of the Theatre Royal Bath, where she bolstered the Studio’s stature as a home for high-quality, innovative performance. Under her artistic direction, the Ustinov Studio commissioned and presented works across theater, opera, music, and dance by artists including director Richard Jones, choreographer Kim Brandstrup, singers Christine Rice and Ian Bostridge, and dancers Matthew Ball and Alina Cojocaru.

“The powerful combination of artistic rigor and daring imagination have solidified Deborah Warner’s standing as one of the most innovative and influential directors working today. Throughout her career, she has demonstrated the highest level of excellence, with a proven track record of celebrated works in theater and many other genres, including opera, classical music, and adventurous hybrid productions. She has a trailblazing approach to bringing new meaning to Shakespeare and other beloved classics, such as her productions of Richard II and King Lear, a passion for outside-the-box thinking, and a fascination with the power of “found” spaces. All of this aligns precisely with the Armory’s own artistic vision, which demands high-quality, imaginative, and unconventional thinking to provide those memorable ‘only at the Armory’ experiences that continue to attract our audiences,” said Rebecca Robertson, Adam R. Flatto Founding President and Executive Producer of Park Avenue Armory.

“I have always been inspired by the artistic potential of the Armory, the epitome of an unconventional space, where artists are prompted to think boldly, innovate, and work at scale. It is a rare institution that welcomes ambition in this way, and I am tremendously excited to contribute to its extraordinary trajectory,” said Deborah Warner.

Warner was named a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list in 2006 and was made a Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government in 2013. She was the Cameron Mackintosh Visiting Professor of Contemporary Theatre at Oxford University in 2018, received an Honorary Fellowship of The Central School of Speech and Drama in 2017, and is an Associate Artist of The Barbican Theatre.