Degrees: BA, 1996, Evergreen State Coll

Bio:

Professor Isabel Milenski, Artistic Director of Hofstra Opera Theater, is an acting teacher and opera director. Most recently Ms. Milenski made her Lincoln Center debut directing Juilliard's The Marriage of Figaro.

Ms. Milenski’s career began staging the Long Beach Opera production of Iacopo Peri's Euridice with The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles to commemorate the birth of opera in 2000. She later returned to The Getty to stage Virginia Woolf's only play, Freshwater. For the Long Beach Opera she has directed Jenufa, Milhaud's Trois Operas Minutes, the west-coast premiere of Richard Strauss' comic masterwork Die Schweigsame Frau, along with Handel's Semele.

Ms. Milenski was awarded the Directorial Fellowship from San Francisco Opera's Merola program in 2003 where she has returned in consecutive years to teach and direct. In 2006 she directed Carmen with the Opera Center’s Adler Fellows at the Mondavi Center. Internationally she has conceived and directed a theater production of Carmen based on Merimee's novella at the Telemac Theatre in Nimes, France. In San Francisco she directed the world premiere of Gang Situ's The Grand Seducers, a cross-cultural opera for the Chinese Culture Center.

Aside from her professional directing work, she has been working with singers at conservatories and young artist programs for the ten years. She has taught and directed for The Juilliard School, Merola, San Francisco Opera Center, Cincinnati Conservatory, Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids and Penn State.

At Hofstra in 2009 she produced and directed Monteverdi's L'incoronazione di Poppea at Hofstra, and in 2010 she will produce and direct Johann Strauss' Die Fledermaus. Other productions she has directed include a rock opera, The Fire Odyssey, an adaptation of Homer's Odyssey at the Crucible's Fire Arts Festival in Oakland, California. She has also directed Cosi Fan Tutte and The Turn of the Screw at Cincinnati Conservatory, which won a National Opera Association award. In Cincinnati she also co-directed Argento's The Voyage of Edgar Allen Poe. Other productions include Smetana's The Bartered Bride, Kurt Weill's Street Scene and The Pirates of Penzance for Grand Valley State University, Grand Rapids. In New York, where she resides, along with directing, she has been coaching singers privately and teaching master classes for conservatories such as The Juilliard School.