Isabel Milenski, Stage Director/Acting Coach

 

Ms. Milenski is known as one of the foremost directors of opera and dramatic teachers in New York and across the U.S. She made her Lincoln Center debut directing Juilliard's The Marriage of Figaro, and for the Getty Center in Los Angeles she has directed Peri’s Euridice, and Virginia Woolf's only play, Freshwater. For the Long Beach Opera in California, she has directed Shostakovich’s Moscow, Cherry Town, along with Janacek’s Jenufa, Milhaud's Trois Operas Minutes, Richard Strauss' The Silent Woman, along with Handel's Semele. Recently she has directed Handel's Apollo and Daphne at Pocket Opera of New York and the off-Broadway musical, Woody Guthrie Dreams. Ms. Milenski is head of Hofstra Opera Theater at Hofstra University as well as on faculty with Manhattan School of Music's Summer Voice Festival. She is the founder and Artistic Director of Opera Live New York, Vocal Arts Program which specializes in dramatic, musical and linguistic coaching in Italian, French and English for international singers.

 

Aside from her professional directing work, she has been working with singers at conservatories and young artist programs across the US. Beyond her teaching at Manhattan School of Music, she has taught and directed for the San Francisco Opera Center, Cincinnati Conservatory, Penn State University and The Juilliard School.

 

Productions she has produced and directed include Carmen for the San Francisco Opera Center, a double-bill of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas and Gluck's The Reformed Drunk, Gilbert and Sullivan's Princess Ida, Handel’s Alcina, Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Johann Strauss' Die Fledermaus, Monteverdi's L'incoronazione di Poppea. Other productions she has directed include a rock opera, The Fire Odyssey, an adaptation of Homer's Odyssey, 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.