Artistic Director Yuval Sharon Will Depart Detroit Opera Following 2025-26 Season

Artistic Director Yuval Sharon will depart from the Detroit Opera at the end of the 2025-26 season, Detroit Free Press reports. Sharon has been with the company for six years. Detroit Opera music director Roberto Kalb is set to take on an expanded role in artistic planning and casting.

"In working with Yuval, we have committed in an unprecedented way to expanding the American operatic tradition while serving the needs of our local community," President and CEO Patty Isacson Sabee said. "While we are sad to part ways, we look forward to continuing this expansive, inclusive mission for years to come."

Read the original story on Detroit Free Press.

About Yuval Sharon

Yuval Sharon is the founder and co-Artistic Director of The Industry in Los Angeles and Artistic Director of Detroit Opera. Sharon made his debut with Detroit Opera in 2020 with Twilight: Gods, an innovative adaptation of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung staged in the Detroit Opera House Parking Center. Since then, he has directed a number of acclaimed productions there, including Ragnar Kjartansson’s 12-hour piece Bliss, staged in the historic Michigan Building Theatre; Puccini’s La bohème, presented in reverse order in the Detroit Opera House; John Cage’s Europeras 3&4, in the Gem Theatre; and The Valkyries—an adaptation of Act III of Die Walküre which used green screen technology and projection screens to bring Wagner’s proto-cinematic vision to life in real time.

Beyond his own productions, Sharon’s artistic guidance has transformed the company into a premier destination for progressive opera in the United States. Highlights from his tenure as Artistic Director include a major revival of Anthony Davis’s X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X and the company’s first international co-production, Osvaldo Golijov’s Ainadamar.

With The Industry, Sharon has directed and produced new operas in moving vehicles, operating train stations, Hollywood sound stages, and various “non-spaces.” From 2016–2019, Sharon was the first Artist-Collaborator at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, creating nine projects that included newly commissioned works, site-specific installations, and performances outside the hall. His residency culminated in a new production of Meredith Monk’s opera ATLAS, making him the first director Monk entrusted with her work.

The first American ever invited to direct at Bayreuth, Sharon distinguished himself with a boldly progressive Lohengrin in 2018. He is the recipient of the 2014 Götz Friedrich Prize in Germany for his production of John Adams’s Doctor Atomic. In 2017, Sharon was honored with a MacArthur Fellowship and a Foundation for Contemporary Art grant for theater. He was named Musical America’s Director of the Year in 2023. Sharon is the inaugural Global Solutions Visiting Fellow at the University of Chicago’s Neubauer Collegium, where he will lead the 2025 Berlin Family Lectures on the subject of John Cage; the series will culminate in a new production of Cage’s Europeras 5.

His first book, A New Philosophy of Opera, was published by Liveright in September 2024. In the 2024–25 season, Sharon premieres new productions of Victor Ullman’s The Kaiser of Atlantis at New World Symphony and Mozart’s Così fan tutte at Detroit Opera. He also brings his project The Comet / Poppea to the Curtis Institute of Music.