About this Artist

EDWARD BERKELEY is concurrently the Director of Undergraduate Opera Studies for The Juilliard School (since 1987), Artistic Director of New York's Willow Cabin Theater Company (since 1990) and Director of the Aspen Opera Theater Center at the Aspen Music Festival and School (since 1984). In New York, he has directed premieres of plays by Derek Walcott, Israel Horovitz, Terence McNally, Leonard Melfi, Louise Page, and Tennessee Williams, as well as N.Y. Shakespeare Festival productions including Pericles (Best Revival), The Tempest Macbeth and A Midsummer Night's Dream.

At Juilliard, he has directed Vanessa, The Mighty Casey, John Eccles' Semele, The Mother of Us All, Don Giovanni, and Trouble in Tahiti. For Willow Cabin he has directed Wilder, Wilder, Wilder (Tony and Drama Desk nominations), Anatomy of Sound (Drama Desk), Who will carry the word? (Dramalogue Director of the Year), and other new and classic works. In Aspen, Mr. Berkeley has directed classics plus new operas by Bright Sheng, Augusta Read Thomas, Michael Torke, Mark-Anthony Turnage, H.K. Gruber, and Bernard Rand. Additionally he is a returning director for the Houston Grand Opera (The Tender Land, The Song of Majnun, and many HGO Studio scenes programs). In New York he directed the premiere of Thomas Adès's Powder Her Face for Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival and The Kaiser from Atlantis (which traveled to Spoleto, Italy).

Mr. Berkeley directed at The New York Philharmonic (Beatrice and Benedict), at the Atlanta Symphony and the Ravinia Festival with John Adams' El Nino. He has also directed at the Library of Congress, Williamstown Theater Festival, and Old Globe Theater. He is presently on faculty for Circle in the Square Theater School and has been a guest Acting Consultant for Metropolitan Opera's Lindemann Young Artists' Program, and has also been a guest faculty member at Princeton University and Williams College and was most recently a Benedict Distinguished Professor at Carleton College.

Last summer he returned to Aspen to direct Rigoletto and The Turn of the Screw; this season he returns to the New York Philharmonic for Mendelssohn's A Midsummer Night's Dream, to the Ravinia and Aspen Festivals, and will direct A Winter's Tale for Willow Cabin and Madama Butterfly for Houston Grand Opera.