Elkhanah Pulitzer is an acclaimed American stage director whose visually arresting productions bring intellectual rigor, emotional immediacy, and a distinctly contemporary theatrical imagination to opera and live performance. Her work has been presented by the Metropolitan Opera, San Francisco Opera, Los Angeles Opera, Gran Teatre del Liceu, New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, and other major institutions across the United States and Europe. Equally compelling in grand opera, new work, orchestral performance, and intimate multisensory experience, Pulitzer creates productions that reveal the human stakes at the center of musical and theatrical performance.
Pulitzer creates from the inside out, allowing the essential DNA of each work to determine the visual and dramatic language that brings it to life. A modernist and a humanist, she is particularly drawn to the ways class, status, and power shape identity and human behavior, often foregrounding dynamic women navigating the forces surrounding them. She approaches theater as a mirror: a means of bringing performers and audiences into a deeper relationship with the work, with one another, and with the world beyond the stage. Her practice encompasses newly composed operas, canonical repertoire, Baroque oratorios, collaborations with orchestras, bespoke theatrical creations for concert artists, artistic consultancy, and curatorial leadership.
A defining achievement of Pulitzer’s career is her production of John Adams’s Antony and Cleopatra. The production received its world premiere at San Francisco Opera in 2022, traveled to Barcelona’s Gran Teatre del Liceu for its European premiere in 2023, and marked Pulitzer’s Metropolitan Opera debut in 2025. Opera News praised the production as “visually stunning” and “well-paced.”
Elkhanah Pulitzer’s production flips back and forth between Alexandria and Rome with action-movie ease.
Her relationship with Adams’s music continues in the 2026–27 season with a new production of Nixon in China at Washington National Opera, starring Thomas Hampson and Renée Fleming as Richard and Pat Nixon. In the spring, Pulitzer reimagines the opera with the Pacific Symphony and Pacific Chorale in a dramatically charged production custom-designed for concert hall performance, also bringing the opera for the first time to the Nixons’ home territory of Orange County.
The season reflects the remarkable breadth of Pulitzer’s artistic imagination. She collaborates with celebrated vocal ensemble Chanticleer on The Machaut Project: Devotion and Desire, creating an immersive theatrical world for the ensemble’s first production of this scope in almost three decades. At Boston Lyric Opera, she directs Ailyn Pérez in a visceral new staging of Osvaldo Golijov’s multicultural and multilingual song cycle Ayre. She also continues her visionary collaboration with cellist Alisa Weilerstein as director of FRAGMENTS, a six-part multisensory performance series for solo cello that has been presented internationally and completes its cycle of six premieres at Carnegie Hall in 2026–27.
Elkhanah Pulitzer’s superb direction, supported by the stunning projections and simple yet elegant staging and scenic design, transformed the stage into a heavenly realm of spiritual wonder.
In 2025–26, Pulitzer directed the world-premiere production of Sarah Kirkland Snider’s HILDEGARD in Los Angeles and New York. The New York Times called the opera “gorgeously mesmerizing,” and the Music Critics Association of North America named it Best New Opera of 2026. The Wall Street Journal observed that Pulitzer’s direction “segued smoothly from the real to the visionary,” while Arts Beat LA praised her “superb direction,” which “transformed the stage into a heavenly realm of spiritual wonder.” That same season, she directed Alban Berg’s Wozzeck at Berkeley’s West Edge Opera, hailed by the San Francisco Chronicle as “one of the best shows you’ll see this year.”
Pulitzer’s other notable productions include Lucia di Lammermoor and Judas Maccabaeus at Los Angeles Opera; Handel’s Julius Caesar at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis; and five European presentations of David Lang’s prisoner of the state, including at London’s Barbican and Rotterdam’s De Doelen, following the work’s premiere at the New York Philharmonic. Her projects beyond the traditional operatic stage include a live tour of Esperanza Spalding’s album 12 Little Spells and DIORAMA, an art installation at San Francisco’s I.O.U.
She has collaborated with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and San Francisco Symphony on John Adams’s Nixon in China and The Gospel According to the Other Mary, respectively, and with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival on Leonard Bernstein’s Mass.
Pulitzer directed Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman at San Francisco Opera and later served as Artistic Curator of SF Opera Lab, where she developed the mission, identity, and programming of the company’s experimental chamber-opera initiative. Her longstanding relationship with West Edge Opera has included, in addition to Wozzeck, productions of Alban Berg’s Lulu, Thomas Adès’s Powder Her Face, and Luca Francesconi’s Quartett. She has also collaborated on next-generation projects with Lyric Opera of Kansas City, Boston Lyric Opera, Opera Omaha, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, and the Canadian Opera Company.
Pulitzer received an OPERA America Success Award for her libretto Dream of the Pacific, composed by Stephen Mager and presented by Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, Washington National Opera, and other companies. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from UC Berkeley with a degree in Theatre Arts and holds an MFA in Directing from Columbia University, where she studied with groundbreaking American director Anne Bogart.
Emerging from a family tradition of art curation stretching back to the 1880s, Pulitzer also serves as vice president of the board of the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, an institution dedicated to experimentation in art curation, installation, and live programming.