Thor Steingraber is an American opera and theater director, and arts leader/manager.
Steingraber has held three leadership positions at American performing arts centers: Kimmel Center in Philadelphia, where he was senior vice president; the Los Angeles Music Center where he was Vice President of Programming; and the Valley Performing Arts Center (also known as the Soraya), located on the campus of California State University, Northridge, where he is currently the Executive Director.[1] While in Philadelphia, Kimmel Center and The Philadelphia Orchestra underwent a period of protracted negotiations during the Orchestra’s bankruptcy proceedings. Steingraber was instrumental in leading the Kimmel Center’s response during this transitional period. In Los Angeles, Steingraber oversaw the opening of Grand Park in downtown Los Angeles, an extension of the public/private partnership between The Music Center and Los Angeles County.
Steingraber has directed operas for many years, and his work has been seen in cities across America, from New York's Lincoln Center to the San Francisco Opera. He has also directed in Asia (the Hong Kong Arts Festival) and made his European debut in 2010 in Barcelona. He has directed 400 years of operatic repertoire in five languages, but is particularly known for his renderings of Mozart's operas (Santa Fe, Los Angeles,[2] Austin, Memphis, Indianapolis, Philadelphia, New York,[3] and Pittsburgh).
Steingraber's multi-disciplinary collaborations range from young painters at the Chicago arts magnet school to designers like Maurice Sendak and David Hockney. In recent years, Thor's work has turned to Wagner—in Los Angeles and San Francisco he directed Tristan und Isolde, and in Chicago, he was the Associate Director of Wagner's Ring Cycle, starring Plácido Domingo. He also works for Mr. Domingo at the Los Angeles Opera, the company that has been Steingraber's artistic home for fourteen years.
Since 2002, Steingraber has taught singers in universities and conservatories, including the Curtis Institute, Yale University School of Music and California State University where he was Distinguished Guest Artist in 2008. Steingraber teaches acting and scene-work, with an emphasis on character development employing a broad range of analytic processes.
Steingraber is a writer. His recent articles can be seen in The Boston Globe[4] and Inside Arts. He also wrote Canta Luna, a play about Spanish playwright Federico García Lorca who was executed in the early days of the Spanish Civil War. Canta Luna was produced at the Boston Court Theater in Pasadena, California in 2006.
In 2008 and 2009, Steingraber was in residence at Harvard Kennedy School, where he was a Mid Career Fellow for Arts, Culture and Media at the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations. He also received a Masters in Public Administration at Harvard's Kennedy School, focusing on the management of nonprofit organizations and the intersection of public policy and the arts. For his work at the Kennedy School, he was awarded the annual Littauer award.
His own management experiences began with founding an inner-city youth theater program in conjunction with the San Francisco YMCA. Later, he was Director of Production at the Utah Festival Opera. Since its inception, Thor was responsible for planning and implementing the growth of the Festival, including the development of a new 40000square feet production facility and the implementation of an OSHA safety program.