2024 Stage Directors & Conductor
Stage Directors & Conductor
Ned Canty
Stage Director, Love and Longing by the Lake
Ned Canty has directed at dozens of companies, including Glimmerglass, Wolf Trap, Opera Theatre of St. Louis, Santa Fe, and New York City Opera. The New York Times has described his stage direction as having “a startling combination of sensitivity and panache.” He joined Opera Memphis as general director in 2011, expanding the season and launching a series of commissions centered on Memphis stories. The signature program under his leadership is “30 Days of Opera,” which has brought free performances to over 430,000 Memphians in more than 200 locations since then. He received the Alliance for Non-Profit Excellence “Innovation Award” in 2016 and was Inside Memphis Business “CEO of the Year” in 2017. Before discovering opera, Canty worked as an actor, director, and stuntman at Hartford Stage Company, McCarter Theatre, and the New York Renaissance Festival, among others.
John Matsumoto Giampietro
Interim Director, Opera Conservatory
Stage Director, Alcina/ I Due Timidi
John Giampietro has directed numerous operas for the Opera Conservatory, including The Cunning Little Vixen, Hänsel und Gretel, Le nozze di Figaro, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Giampietro is a vocal arts acting faculty member and stage director at The Juilliard School where he teaches across all degree programs. Giampietro is a vocal arts acting faculty member and stage director at The Juilliard School where he teaches across all degree programs. He is also a faculty member of The Curtis Institute of Music where he teaches acting in the Vocal Studies and Opera Theater department.
His opera and theatre productions have been seen at Actors Theatre of Louisville, Urban Stages, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Vermont Shakespeare Festival, Curtis Institute of Music, The Flea Theater, Yale School of Music, and Shenandoah Conservatory among others.
He is an artist-member of Ensemble Studio Theatre (EST) in NYC, where he is a frequent director with the Obie award-winning playwriting group, Youngblood. At EST, John directed The New York Times acclaimed production of Year of the Rooster.
This year, Giampietro created a new version of Mozart’s Der Schauspieldirektor for The Juilliard School based on the impact of artificial intelligence in our lives. Other writing includes new English dialogue versions of Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor by Otto Nicolai and Mozart’s The Impresario and Die Zauberflöte. He has written three plays: The Immolation of Kathy Chang(e), M. of Versailles, and Strength of God and other grotesques, based on Sherwood Anderson’s novel Winesburg, Ohio.
Steven Osgood
General and Artistic Director
Conductor, Love and Longing by the Lake /Hansel and Gretel
Steven Osgood has been the general and artistic director of the Chautauqua Opera Company since 2016. Highlights of his tenure include 2019 and 2022’s Festival Weeks when visitors could experience all three of the season’s productions; engaging five composers-in-residence and four composer fellows; and establishing the popular Opera Invasion and Opera in the Schools initiatives. The 2024 season features the world premiere of two chamber operas, the genesis of which began in his first season leading the company.
Osgood has conducted the world premieres of over 30 operas, including Breaking the Waves at Opera Philadelphia, JFK at Fort Worth Opera, The Scarlet Ibis, Thumbprint, Blood Moon, and Sumeida’s Song for the PROTOTYPE festival, as well as Missy Mazzoli and Royce Vavrek’s Song from the Uproar with Beth Morrison Projects. He has been a conductor mentor twice for Washington National Opera’s American Opera Initiative, leading the premieres of six new operas. In 2022 he conducted the premiere of Ricky Ian Gordon and Lynn Nottage’s Intimate Apparel at Lincoln Center Theater. This production was filmed by PBS Great Performances.
From 2001 to 2008, Osgood was the artistic director of American opera projects (AOP). He founded the company’s Composers and the Voice Fellowship and remains the program’s artistic director. With AOP, he conducted the premieres of As One in its sold-out run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Paula Kimper’s Patience and Sarah at the 1998 Lincoln Center Festival.
Osgood made his conducting debut at the Metropolitan Opera in October 2023 leading two performances of Dead Man Walking. He has been a member of the music staff since 2006 and has been the cover conductor for dozens of productions, including La Traviata, Philip Glass’ Akhnaten and Satyagraha, and John Adams’ The Death of Klinghoffer and Nixon in China.
Jen Pitt
Stage Director, I Due Timidi
Born and raised in São Paulo, Brazil, Jen now lives in New York, where she makes devised performance work and directs classical and non-classical pieces through a movement-based process.
Jen strives to create environments that are boldly daring and wholly equitable. She seeks to make inquisitive work that is visually arresting and viscerally engaging by blending “low” and “high” brow references that question hierarchies of perception. Her work investigates themes around generational female trauma— suicide and addiction, ritual, and desire. She has worked with classic texts, new plays, and her own generative-devised pieces. She approaches each piece, whether classic or new, from a collaborative, movement-based practice.
Her work develops a strong, symbolic, visual language through juxtaposition. She is drawn to work that explores the potential for abstraction to meaningfully engage memory and identity by playing with gesture, metaphor, and scale. Jen earned her MFA in theatre directing from Columbia University, trained as a performer at Lecoq in France, and was a member of The Living Theatre from 2012-2015 under the leadership of Judith Malina. She currently works in Juilliard’s vocal arts department. Upcoming projects: Kate Soper’s “Here Be Sirens” at Mannes in February and a devised opera by into figgis-vizueta at Opera Saratoga in July.
Keturah Stickann
Stage Director, Hansel and Gretel
Keturah Stickann is excited to be back at Chautauqua after having directed The Mother of Us All, La traviata and L’Orfeo at the Amp in years past. Recent directing credits include a new production of Don Giovanni for Minnesota Opera, Salome for Madison Opera, The Merry Widow for The Jacobs School, her distillation of La Bohème: Rodolfo Remembers for Virginia Opera, The Barber of Seville and La Bohème in drive-in form for San Diego Opera, Carmen for the New Orleans Opera, the world premiere of If I Were You by Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer for the Merola Opera Program, Candide for Michigan Opera Theater, Turandot at Palm Beach Opera and San Diego Opera, L’Orfeo ed Euridice for Florida Grand Opera, and Norma for Opera Southwest.
She is a frequent collaborator of Leonard Foglia’s. Their projects include Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer’s It’s a Wonderful Life (associate director and choreographer) and Moby-Dick (associate director and movement director), Ricky Ian Gordon’s A Coffin in Egypt (assistant director and choreographer), Jose “Pepe” Martinez’ Cruzar La Cara De La Luna (associate director and choreographer), and Jennifer Higdon’s Cold Mountain (associate director).
