Director Sophie Hunter joins MA roster
We are delighted to welcome Sophie Hunter to the Maestro Arts roster. As a director, film maker and artist, Hunter’s work spans a broad range, from site-specific performance pieces to major operas, with cross-disciplinary collaborations central to her vision.
Hunter originally studied theatre at Ecole internationale de théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris. With her own theatre company she went on to win the Oxford Samuel Beckett Award in 2007. She made her directorial debut at the Barbican with The Terrific Electric and went on to serve as Associate Director on the award-winning Enron, which transferred to the West End and Broadway.
Her transition to directing opera has included high-profile productions such as Weill’s Die sieben Todsünden and Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle for Teatro Colón, Buenos Aires; Britten’s The Turn of the Screw for Aldeburgh Music; and a site-specific immersive production of Britten’s Phaedra for Happy Days Festival.
Interdisciplinary collaborations have included 69° South for Phantom Limb with the Kronos Quartet, at Brooklyn Academy of Music, and Lucretia, a multimedia installation with performance inspired by Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia, for Location One Gallery, New York.
In 2023, Sigur Rós invited Hunter to create a short film, Ylur, for their album Atta. Other film projects include an adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984, co-directing for the New European Ensemble (2021); and Goodnight Nobody, a television series about children’s author Margaret Wise Brown, alongside a documentary, currently in development.
In 2024, Hunter created the environment-focused performance and multimedia installation Salt of The Earth, which premiered in Venice and was then adapted for Climate Week in New York and at the United Nations Conference in Nice.
Current projects reflect the continued expansion of her cross-disciplinary work. These include Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites with architect Santiago Calatrava, and the interdisciplinary The Voyager Project, which tells the story of the Nasa Golden Record, a portrait of humanity sent to the stars in 1977, which is now the furthest human-made object spinning in space today.
