Ethan Heard is a director, producer, and teacher who makes theater to build community and foster love. He co-founded Heartbeat Opera and led the company for its first eight seasons, growing it into “an enterprise that, while small and still young, has already contributed more to opera’s vitality than most major American companies" (NYTimes). He recently became the Associate Artistic Director of Signature Theatre in Arlington, VA, where he directed Pacific Overtures and Which Way to the Stage. With Heartbeat, his radical adaptation of Beethoven’s Fidelio (NYTimes Critic’s Pick), reenvisioned through the lens of Black Lives Matter, featured more than 100 incarcerated singers from six prison choirs and was profiled on NPR. Confronting other urgent issues such as Asian erasure (Butterfly) and climate collapse (Hot Mama: Singing Gays Saving Gaia), his operatic work is “incisive and inspired” (Opera News) and has been presented at BAM, The Met Museum, The Kennedy Center, The Broad Stage, and on NYC’s High Line. Other Heartbeat productions include: Breathing Free, Lady M, La Susanna, Dido & Aeneas, Kafka-Fragments, and seven drag extravaganzas. Other opera includes Truth & Reconciliation (Opera America), Desire|Divinity (Judson), Empty the House (Curtis), Sisyphus (Experiments in Opera), L’Orfeo (Yale), and Poppea (Princeton). He has also reimagined classic musicals and plays, casting Little Shop of Horrors’ Audrey II as a lip-syncing drag queen and Julius Caesar’s mob as social media users caught in a dangerous echo chamber. His interpretation of Sondheim (A Little Night Music, Into the Woods, Merrily We Roll Along, and Sunday in the Park with George) has been praised for its “emotional eloquence” (Boston Globe), and he has shepherded new works by Marisa Michelson, Mark Campbell, MJ Kaufman, Rene Orth, Mel Marvin, Jonathan Levi, and Daniel Schlosberg that explode traditional ideas of genre. Ethan is Co-Founder & Creative Director of Mind’s Eye Producing, and taught acting and directing at Yale for six years, where he earned his BA and MFA and began the beloved tradition of Yale School of Drag. ethanheard.com.